How to monetize the audience of our blog in the offline world
Today I read an article about the fact that only 5% of bloggers "charge" per article (between € 0.5 to € 1), you can see the article here: Salaried Bloggers and also another one about the payment per post: Is pay per post ethical?
Both methods of monetization have their controversies among people:
Salaried blogger
The first monetization method talks about how little the blogger is paid per article and criticizes the fact that many times they do not seek to contribute anything to the visitor but rather It only seeks to rank for the "keyword of the moment" and provide a poor experience that leads to an adsense banner in one click.
Pay by Post
If we have a certain "fame" in the blogosphere, we may have received "pay per post" offers, generally these are companies that launch a new product / service and seek to create "buzz" in the community of their potential consumers.
The problem with this type of monetization is usually that the blogger's "opinion" of the product is unbiased.Generally, companies do not accept criticism of the product and only seek to speak well of it, which seems very natural to me, there has never been an advertisement on TV that speaks ill of the product it promotes.
Depending on what type of audience the blog has, the paid post can go from unnoticed to create total ruin for the blogger's reputation.
It scares me to have to write 10 articles a day to make some money at the end of the month, I don't want to burn my reputation and my traffic is not massive… what can I do to monetize my audience?
If we have quality content, real knowledge on our topic, and an audience (even a small one), the answer is simple: «Create your own product»
I see that the mistake that many bloggers make is trying to make their sources of income be digital 100% (ebooks, videoconferences, etc)… however something very lucrative can be to use our audience and online reputation to make products / services offline.
I put the following example: We have a blog that talks about programming, we did a series of posts that were quite successful with our audience on "How to use the Twitter API with PHP" and our readers sent us a lot of positive feedback and more specific questions.
If our audience is local, we are presented with a very good opportunity to put together a specific course / talk on the subject where we teach how to use the Twitter API with a couple of examples, from the most basic to one of medium difficulty.
We can charge € 100 (if we are in Spain) or 200 pesos (I think it is a good price in Argentina), this is cheap for a course of that style ... something specific and brief that teaches something useful
Now suppose we get 10 people from our audience interested in the course who are from our city.
100 x 10 = € 1000 or 200 x 10 = 2000 pesos
Not bad for a series of posts!
I know that reality is not as simple as theory and that we can find a thousand obstacles and "buts" to the matter, the only thing I invite is not to get discouraged when we see that it is difficult to make money with a blog.
If we look for offline ways to assert our reputation and online audience for sure there are many more ways to make some honest money offering quality to our audience.
What I proposed in this article is nothing more than an idea that can be applied in a thousand ways (advice, talks, courses, books, etc.), it depends on your style, subject and audience to see which one is the most suitable for you.
