I see the two sides of the how-to-make-blogging-profitable coin as follows: Heads is the much-discussed challenge of monetisation (the word we all love to hate). You know – how can you take your passions and turn them into a career that will pay for your first home? Tails, however, is the seemingly forgotten but truly critical complementary quotient: return on investment (aka ROI). No, not ROI on the time and money you put into your own blog (although that effort and expense is to be applauded), but ROI on you as a writer. If you want to earn a living as a blogger, someone’s got to pay you money, right? Which means that someone will want assurances that any cash outlays aren’t just going to your Mai Tai retreat in Papeete.
Of course, the coin I’m contemplating is not one to be flipped. It’s on unwieldy par with the world’s biggest and heaviest lucre, so there would be no value in attempting to get such a numismatic behemoth into the air. In any case, both heads and tails are equally treasured.
What we’re left with is the unfortunately frequent use of the word ‘monetisation,’ especially in contrast to the utterances of ‘ROI.’ Instead of contemplating excessive riches, bloggers are busy flipping little-money pennies, wondering idly when and how to, for example, implement AdWords, start Facebook campaigns or accept sponsored posts. You’re forgetting or disregarding far more critical considerations.
What Marketers Want
In recent weeks, I’ve been reading and writing a lot about better blogging, especially in terms of quality and ethics. Feeding my curiosity has been an active and growing cabal of travel writers and marketers pursuing the (utopian?) idea of an empirical and holistic methodology for assessing the value of a blog or publication as a way of predicting potential ROI from a marketing campaign.
In other words, they’re trying to figure out how both writers and bloggers can provide the same kind of quantifiable metrics that magazines traditionally always have, and not just the unrevealing and increasingly discounted numbers of a blog’s unique visitors per month, subscribers, Facebook fans or Twitter followers. A generic Klout score may be an interesting benchmark, but what the industry really needs is a measure of a writer’s influence with, say, male, married, middle-aged southern Europeans earning more than US$100,000 annually and travelling to a foreign land for pleasure at least once a year.
That level of detail is not likely to be achieved anytime soon (if ever), but its value to the travel-marketing purse-holders is undeniable. It would also go a long way toward levelling the travel bloggers’ opportunity playing field, allowing project funding to find the kind of niche experts and targeted authoritative voices that will really make a difference to any commercial effort, even if the chosen writers aren’t social-media celebrities.
What This Means to Bloggers
As made clear above, key to all of this is travel marketers’ appetite for understanding a writer’s or a blog’s influence and engagement across selected demographics. Marketers want this because it’s what they’ve always been able to get.
Bloggers should therefore do their best to offer something approximating it. After all, you aren’t really doing anything all that different from writing for any other publication.
“They’re simply trying to emulate the long-established model of traditional publishers: producing reliable output that consumers can trust, which is funded by a reliable commercial strategy and successfully marketed to attract new readers,” shared Hit Riddle’s Matthew Barker, who has lots to say on the subject. “Newspapers and magazines are considered influential and authoritative because they had this figured out. Readers trusted their output and therefore bought more of it, so advertisers trusted them to provide ROI. Bloggers are now trying to do the same, albeit in a new landscape.”
Despite the obstacles, though, bloggers who wish to pursue their trade as a business need to research, understand and then make presentable a clear picture of how you are best qualified to take a client’s money and then deliver ROI.
So How Do Bloggers Do That?
* Play by the rules: Develop a marketing strategy that clearly emphasises your strengths. Better yet, develop that strategy as part of a business plan.
* Get a better measure of your audience – desired target, known target, demographics, reach, influence etc. If possible, demonstrate that your audience is not limited to the echo chamber of travel-blogger friends tweeting/sharing/liking/pinning/plussing one another’s work.
* Along the way, read and then decide whether to heed the advice of older-paradigm pro bloggers. They offer incredibly meaningful been-there-done-that observations and are excellent examples of entrepreneurs who completely embraced blogging as a business – the pure pursuit of money, traffic and peer recognition.
* However, do not simply copy established bloggers… or anyone else. By using the same WordPress themes and succumbing to trendy practices, too many blogs end up with the same basic design, content and cliches. Establish a unique identity and exert it.
* Of course, write as well as you can – think of producing quality, not quantity – and be a content leader not a derivative follower.
What else would you suggest? And what do you think about empirical and holistic influence criteria for blogs?
Featured Image: Flickr/JimReeves
Post Revisions:
- 1 August, 2012 @ 11:06 [Current Revision] by Ethan Gelber
- 19 July, 2012 @ 18:45 by John O'Nolan
- 17 July, 2012 @ 13:44 by Ethan Gelber
Getting audience metrics can be tricky (user surveys aren’t likely to be accurate on a lowish-traffic site), but if you’ve got a U.S. audience of reasonable size, you can take advantage of Quantcast.com’s “U.S. Demographics” widget.
On our “audience” page, we embed the Quantcast widget, which is updated every month or so. The widget displays a table that breaks our U.S. audience down by gender, age group, race, income level, education, etc., so that a PR firm or prospective advertiser can see instantly that that our audience is skewed toward readers of both sexes over the age of 24 who have attended grad school, have incomes of US $100,00+-, and don’t have kids at home. This kind of data is more credible than our simply saying “We aren’t a great site if you’re targeting young budget travelers, but we offer a great venue for your message if you’re trying to reach well-educated working adults who have plenty of discretionary income and can get away from home during the school year.”
Quantcast isn’t perfect (its “unique visitors” numbers are always quite a bit lower than the numbers that we see in Google Analytics, for example), but for free demographic data–if only for U.S. audiences–it’s the best resource that I know of. See:
http://www.quantcast.com/measurement
Yes, Durant, Quantcast is a great place to start.
It is mentioned, along with several other useful tools, in a preceding article: How to Be a Better (Quality) Blogger: http://travelllll.com/2012/07/03/be-a-better-blogger/.
Anyone else have good resources they would like to share?
Ethan, what I have felt is if one writes good, his blog will surely grow gradually. As they say at Google “Focus on User”. Next thing which is very important is analytics. hat user is searching, and how much much time did they spend on blog/ bounce rate are the things which seem very important to me.this this tells the requirement and interest of user.
Rudra
Hi Rudra,
Thanks for your thoughts. I completely agree that it is critical to write for your readers, but it is also very important to lead your readers. They tune in to your thoughts, because they trust you or are curious about where you will take them. If all you ever do is give them what they want, they will get bored.
Imagine a chef who only cooks artichoke because he has one tasty dish with it as an essential ingredient. People may rave about his artichoke concoction, but that’s not the only thing they want to it. They want him to take them on a culinary adventure, be part of an experience that includes amazing firsts, even if it involves a few failures.
Writers (and especially travel writers) have the same responsibility to their readers. Do what works, but also LEAD your readers to new ideas and experiences!
But coming back to the core of what I wrote: It’s one thing to think you know your reader and it’s another to demonstrate it. You need to be able to show to potential partners how and why you know your audience.
yes! I loved your chef analogy. How bang on! Consider that writing is, in fact, about storytelling. I want to tell the story that resonates and gets talked about. The story that touches a reader. While social media rules are important to follow, such as SEO, etc … even in the travel blogging world, ultimately you need compelling content that feels real – because it IS real.
Thanks for posting that, Durant. I’ll take a look as it should certainly be useful for our Pacific Coast Highway Travel site, where the vast majority of visitors are from the USA.
And there’s lots of very good advice in the article too. Don’t copy established bloggers, for example. Also, the need to know your audience. We were recently asked, for the first time, to provide a verifiable file or screenshot showing out visitor numbers, rather than – as had always happened before – just stating the figures.
Hi Mike, thanks for your thoughts. Interesting that you were asked to prove your numbers. It shows that marketers now need more than someone’s word. But I still believe that marketers’ thinking will continue to evolve to the point where numbers alone just don’t cut it. They’ll be part of a bigger and decisive *influence* picture. For example, a person with a following of only 50 people (in an identified target audience) who *always* buy what she suggests is likely to be far more valuable than someone who reaches thousands who don’t.
By the way, as mentioned in my comment to Durant, you can find a previous reference to Quantcast, as well as some other tools, in a preceding article: How to Be a Better (Quality) Blogger ( http://travelllll.com/2012/07/03/be-a-better-blogger/ ).
Thanks, Ethan. I’m sure you’re right about the way things are headed and I’ll certainly check out that link right now.
Mike
A couple of thoughts:
1) Marketers and PR people–or at least the intelligent onces–have been looking at the nature of audience, and not just at raw numbers, for quite a while. Stll, when all other things are equal, bigger is better: The blogger or other Web publisher with a monthly audience of 50,000 naturism enthusiasts is more likely to interest the owner of a nudist resort than the publisher with a monthly audience of only 500 naturism enthusiasts.
2) Audience figures can be deceptive unless they’re viewed in context. A few years ago, a surprising number of PR people were salivating over Examiner.com’s audience numbers until they did the math and realized that, with 40,000 contributors, the audience for the average “Examiner” was tiny at best.
3) Mike Gerrard mentioned being asked for a verifiable file or screenshot. On our “Audience” page, we include a Google Analytics screen capture that shows our total visits, unique visitors, and page views over a 5-year period. Any prospective advertiser, PR host, etc. can quickly see if we’re a player in our niche without having to get into an exchange of e-mails.
Hi Durant,
1 — Goes without saying. But I don’t see a whole lot of situations in which ‘all other things are equal.’ And if I did, my advice to the publisher with an audience of 500 struggling for market share would be to differentiate.
2 — Precisely my point. Big numbers may seem nice, but have to be explained.
3 — A fine idea. Although, personally, I’d rather be able to engage in a conversation with a potential business partner (find a meaningful way to work together) than leave any decision entirely in their hands. Too often, they don’t know what they’re looking at.
“A fine idea. Although, personally, I’d rather be able to engage in a conversation with a potential business partner (find a meaningful way to work together) than leave any decision entirely in their hands. Too often, they don’t know what they’re looking at.”
A fine line indeed. You’re right, that many people have no idea what they’re looking at and need it explained to them. On the flip side, you’ll end up with more targeted/qualified leads (but fewer of them) by providing them more data to look at on their own. Finding the balance that gets you the most leads, without wasting your time talking to people who have zero chance of actually giving you money, has to be the goal. A/B test conversion rates of landing pages..
That’s definitely it, Drew. Figuring out how not to waste our own time is critical. But it also means that, over time, we learn how not to waste the time of purse-holders… and teach them how/why we’re helping them out too. If they won’t take the lead, then we’ll have to.
Yet another thing to consider: Sometimes, what seems obvious isn’t correct. For example, one might think that a blog about cruising would attract advertising dollars and cruise invitations from cruise lines. And maybe it would, in some instances. But a small-ship cruise line that specializes in adventure or expedition cruises, or a line like Travel Dynamics or Voyages to Antiquity that focuses on what might be termed “educational cruises for adults,” might be more interested in reaching travelers who are fascinated by adventure, Antarctica, ancient civilizations, etc. And the target audience for a European river-cruise line might be people who aren’t interested in cruising per se, but who are looking for a way to explore Europe in a group without traveling from city to city by bus and staying in a different hotel every night. As a Web publisher, you may need to tailor your message for each key marketing or PR prospect.
Finally, if you’re selling display ads, it helps if you can offer geotargeting, so that–for example–an airline offering flights between New York and New Zealand won’t be wasting impressions and money on readers in Winnipeg, Buenos Aires, or London. (This isn’t easy to do yourself, but it’s the kind of things that vertical ad networks and rep firms do all the time.)
Thus the importance of a marketing strategy. Make clear who you are, what you offer, why you are different and how you can be of (financial) value to a potential marketing or PR client.
Always learn from you Ethan, thanks for another thoughtful article.
“Make clear who you are, what you offer, why you are different and how you can be of (financial) value to a potential marketing or PR client.”
This is it, in a nutshell. I may print this off and tape it on my wall. As a creative person, I have to almost force my brain to think strategically! But it’s worth it, as I want my blog to be a success. Plus, my brain gets some exercise.
Cheers,
Mariellen
Thanks for the very kind words, Mariellen (and apologies for the slow reply). I hope your brain’s been getting a lot of healthy action!
Ethan, I absolutely loved this: “No, not ROI on the time and money you put into your own blog (although that effort and expense is to be applauded)…” – made my day and thank you, I agree it should be applauded :)
Humor aside I read this as the title caught my eye and I have moved into the monetization/marketing (new concept for me) stage in my website just recently so need advice from folks like you. I think I do a lot of things right, am a bit of a leader in general (meaning doing something fresh and new) in that my content and focus is unique. I write about living/moving abroad while weaving in the travel content, not solely the standard travel fare that most folks cover… and even my travel guides are formatted in a new way. Not trying to blow my own horn, just meaning I got a lot from your advice in that it helped affirm some things I may be doing right, while also giving me ideas on what I need to work on.
Durant commenting here is very apropo as he is one of those “older-paradigm pro bloggers” who have given much helpful advice to many of us who started in the past few years, myself included – it I’ve never said it before (think I have) thank you Durant.
And thank you Ethan :)