how to make money with blogs

Filed in archive Venture Capital on July 29, 2003

As I'm still new to the blogging universe, I discover various forms how to approach this topic. The number of blogs in general is rising rapidly. But what are possible the business cases behind?

A) Blogs as Content Management Tools (CMS)

Blogs enable a site owner to publish with high quality at low cost. Popular blog tools i.e. Moveable Type responsible for the weblog you are reading, are free for private use. There is already an abundance of free ASP blog sites like blogger.com or European centered 20six.co.uk. Providing blogs as an ASP is a very competitive business and it's quite unclear if customer are willing to pay substantial amounts for the blog hosting.

However the main use case and source for possible revenues can be selling blog applications to corporations. Blogs can be used within companies to ease up communication and archiving. Project managers can effectively use blogs for announcing changes and keeping track of the communication between project members. Even departments could have some incentive to use blogs as a part of corporate intranet. So far so good, alas blogs do not offer a very different value proposition than already existing forums and professional corporate intranet applications. Indeed blogs are simpler and more straightforward but hardly such a big deal, customer will embrace it so much.

B) Using blogs as a marketing tool - micro journalism

• My favorite technology researcher is clearly Mike Masnick. He runs Techdirt and uses the site to sell reports or services as customized corporate intelligence. I would have been happy having having his team as researchers in my former company.


• Rafat Ali has managed to bring a rather difficult topic into a sponsored/ advertised newsletter at paidcontent.org.


• Glenn Fleishman uses corporate sponsorships as well to finance his site, which is a perfect source for WiFi news and at the same time a sponsor for his other projects.
  


• Another approach is the promoting of own consulting services like Martin does.
  

Blogs prove very usufel this way as they literally empower individuals with professional marketing.

C) You will have guessed this point.

Placing Ads from Google Adsense can cash in some advertisement money. Revenues depend on how many clicks your banners will see. The amounts are reasonable but revenues are difficult to expand.