OFFICIAL BLOGHER '10 LIVEBLOG: Professional: The Mega "Mindful Monetization" Session!

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AMY: Welcome to the mindful monetization panel. I’m Amy, I blog at ResourcefulMommy.com. I operate the marketing network, Global Influence Network and I created Twitter Parties two years ago. Megan is next to me, she writes beautiful posts on VelveteenMind. Runs the literary magazine Story Bleep and has used her own version of monetization to become a sought after voice in consulting. We also have Micaela right next to Megan, Micaela blogs about green living from the home front with a healthy dose of reality. She’s also the author of a book about green home living. On the end we have Marta. She is the owner of both Truth in Aging and Truth in Slimming.
We’re going to get started with some questions we prepared and then open it up t you and your questions. I have a question to start. How far along in your blogging career did you make the decision to monetize?

MICAELA: It took me a while, I was kind of slow at it. I started doing project reviews maybe a year in, and I’ve been blogging for four years and it wasn’t until a year ago I started doing sponsors or advertising.

MEGAN: My first BlogHer was in 2008. The December before that I’d gotten fancy and put affiliate ads on my site. I thought, I’m going to be rich! And then by January I’d made a nickel. And then come February I saw people in comments saying Hey, I wanted to let you know I bought that DVD set you were talking about and I saw your ad for those shoes and bought them, too. And I thought, wow, I’m going to make a crapload of money because people are buying these things in real life. At BlogHer I said, I’m making money for people in real-life stores because my readers like what I’m saying, and I’m not making money from this. And someone on a panel said, you know you can contact those people directly. I did not know that.

AMY: Marta was also saying she discovered advertising wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

MARTA: My main web site reviews beauty products, so when I started out people were saying where can we buy this? I realized that when we recommend something and say we like it, it’s a rigorous process to get there and that’s compelling and people want to buy it. So I became an Amazon affiliate with about half the traffic I have now and we were selling four or five hundred items a month on Amazon. People go from my site to Amazon and buy something, and I get an affiliate fee, which is like seven percent. I was onto something, but I hadn’t found the best way to maximize it. I joined another company that provides an ecommerce platform for bloggers. They took a lot of my concerns about shopping carts, etc., they were able to handle that for me and we share the net profits.

AMY: Megan, you spoke a little about your storytelling selling products for other people offline, but not affiliate anything. I think it’s really creative how you turned that into a monetization.

MEGAN: Yeah, I don’t do reviews and I don’t do give-aways. I don’t know. I can explain easily – I published one post last month. Holla! It’s July, it’s summer, whatever. People leave, they’ll come back. I realized that I couldn’t do reviews and give-aways because I don’t publish that month. At best I publish once a week. So I realized that I needed to work with very few sponsors and I needed it to come from me first so what works for me is for my audience, they’re looking for stories. I want to be able to monetize but my audience needs to come first. If I’m going to expose you to the way I pay my bills you still need to get a good story. I’m going to tell you a story I’d tell anyway and I align it with the company’s needs, so my readers get the great post they’re looking for and I’m also able to fit a brand’s needs and align it really seamlessly. It’s very different if you’re publishing infrequently on a personal blog, it’s got to be audience first and that means stories. On my blogs, people are not clicking up those ads in the side bar. They’re not going