Hi and welcome to my blog! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and do come back.

Lately I’ve been thinking alot about monetizing blogs.

There are obvious solutions to try and generate revenue from a blog such as Traffic Synergy and Google Ads.

But I honestly think that there is more valuable to be had than simple clickthrough earnings.

There are a few things that are important to consider

Are you even trying to generate revenue from your blog?
Some people just love writing whether it is coherent or not, they just like to write and have no intention of earning any money from there blogs. If this is you then you don’t really have to worry about implementation of various methods to earn money. Throw on some Google ads in strategic position and hope for the best.

Do you have a well established brand?
If you do then this is your biggest value proposition. Using SA Rocks as an example. It is a valuable brand that can aid a products public image merely by association. In this case it’s important to find sponsorships and build relationships with the advertisers on your site. They will gain value from brand association. Think outside of the box here, what you offer isn’t merely clicks or immediate feedback, it’s having their brand present on your site. This is value that deserves recognition and pay.

Your business only operates online
You probably need to monetize your blog quickly. But if you aren’t desperate and have other projects in the online sphere your blog might prove to be a valuable place to talk about your projects and rally support for them. This can indirectly translate in to profit or revenue. This can actually be interpreted as revenue generated from your blog.

Your business is online and in the “real world”
This is possibly where your blog-brand can extend your profits the most in my mind. It’s here where I think bloggers need to start extending themselves and pushing their brands in to real results. A great example of someone who puts himself out there and has seen the results is Mail & Guardian Blogger Michael Trapido. Traps is a fantastic mind with lots to say and a firm and educated opinion on a variety of topics. He blogs on Thought Leader and Sports Leader and has turned online blogging in to an offline growth of his core business. Fantastic news and the way that online personalities and specialists need to start migrating.

Another great example is the Girl With A One Track Mind blog. This used to be an anonymous blog that generated huge visits and pageviews. Then the author was outed by a journalist and Zoe Margolis was born. This has possibly been one of the best things that happened to her blog (see this interview by Paul Carr). She could become the face of her brand and take her thoughts in to the real world. This allowed her to generate more and different kinds of revenue from her blog.

You blog to build a reputation
This can be one of the most valuable blogging currencies. If you are careful and smart about your blog you can gain a very strong following and a very good reputation in a relatively short period of time. This can be converted in to many different revenue streams.

How do you or have you earned money from blogging? Let me know.

That is my question.

I remember 3 years ago when I started blogging. I was “inundated” with requests to join blogrolls, to link up, to get in touch, to cross-populate, blah, blah, blah.

Now, nothing. I don’t think I’ve had more than ten people ask me to link to them in my blogroll or that they’ve linked to me in theirs.

SA Rocks is another example. Go and check out the supporters list on the site.

So when was the last time you edited or added anyone to your blogroll? In fact, when was the last time you actually looked at someone’s blogroll?

I’ve been at Mail & Guardian Online now for just over two weeks. I’d love to say that the first two week have been quiet, tame and took the form of an introduction to the business, it hasn’t. Not conventionally at least.

On my first day working with Matt and Vince I was thrown in to the deep end and tasked with setting up Sports Leader. At that point I didn’t know my arse from my elbow let alone how to call up top sports personalities, intellectuals and commentators and ask them to join a platform that hadn’t even launched yet. It was tough. I got bat. The success rate is very low on cold calling the sporting elite let me tell you.

I made many phone calls and sent out many emails. Eventually it started to pay off. I managed to get hold of some fantastic sports people and through the help of Mr Trapido we have some fantastic rugby names on the site. There are more to come, many of whom you will know, recognise and want to hear from but more on that in another post. We have tried to be as diverse as possible when it comes to the sports that are represented on Sports Leader, the big ones obviously being Soccer (Football), Rugby and Cricket. However we are proud to say that we have many alternative and extreme sports appearing on Sports Leader.

Within two weeks (or just under) we managed to sign up close on 30 sporting personalities and fans.

Speaking of fans I feel I need to mention that there are some fans contributing to Sports Leader. This was a very calculated move on our behalf. No one owns sports, not even the sports people and no one can ever claim to. The people who have the strongest opinions and often suffer and celebrate more than their teams are the fans. How can you have a sporting platform without having the fans on board? You can’t and we don’t. What we have done is create an interesting juxtaposition of fanatical opinion from armchair commentators and practical insight from industry players and professionals, an important balance when it comes to sport.

So with this blog post I mark the completion of my first project at Mail & Guardian Online.

Comments are an integral part of blogs and the entire “web 2.0″ “movement” that is taking place. Yet I truly feel that the commenting system is flawed and leaves massive holes open for anyone wanting to abuse anyone else’s reputation online.

Think about it for a second. Many great bloggers tell beginners that it’s imperative to talk to other bloggers by commenting on their posts. This is how I started to make a name for myself and this is how many other bloggers have done so too.

But what if someone started commenting on blogs using your details. It’s not hard. You simply enter the required fields with someone else’s details.

Name - Robert Scoble
Email - rscoble@fastcompany.com
URL - http://scobleizer.com/

Done.

Now it looks like “>Robert Scoble himself has visited this blog and left a comment. Have a look below…he actually has…

You can even verify this with a bit of research. He has a valid email, posted on his blog, rscoble@fastcompany.com. The URL is correct and that is his name. So tell me, how do you prove that Scoble hasn’t posted on my blog? You can’t. There is actually no realy way (unless you contact that person directly) to determine the newsmakers from the fakers when it comes to comments.

I think that if someone really wanted to they could destroy an unwitting person’s reputation online. Especially someone in the “limelight”.

Watch out. It could be happening to you.

I have a feeling that I will be blogging more about this particular topic in the very near future.

I’m beginning to believe that I like to be restricted. And in fact I am begining to think that it’s not just me but a lot of people online, tweeting, blogging, evangelising, guru-ing and the rest also like a bit of a restrictive challenge.

I have a newfound theory that I actually like to get told what to do and how to do it within certain perameters. Yes you could say that I am actually searching for guidance to lead me to my expressive peak. But I could also argue that I like to be restricted.

Bloggers like limits, like challenges and inherently might like to be restricted. It’s a challenge and it’s a limitation that we think we can try to exploit. Let’s be honest, every twitterer loves the feeling of writing a full and comprehensive tweet in exactly 140 characters. I know I do. But what does that actually mean?

The explosion of Twitter (What is twitter?) has really made me think about what I do, what I like to do and how I like to do it. I used to write very expansive posts, in depth analysis on a wide variety of topics. With the advent of Twitter and its subsequent success I’ve realised that keeping it short works. This, whether coincidental or directly relative, is restricting my post lengths, my thoughts and the angle of my approach.

Maybe this movement towards tweets and restricted 140 character posts is a step back, a calm before the storm, the time where we all gain a little bit of restrictive perspective and realise that our verbose and pedantic ramblings aren’t always what we think they are - effective.

Maybe I need to go back to the basics and realise that most people in our country have never used the internet, let alone know what twitter is, 140 characters mean in the “bigger picture”, what a blog is or who’s poking who on which social network.

What I am getting at (cause I am now rambling) is that maybe restrictions are good because they allow us to expirement within the constraints of a predermined rule. One that we are then able to work within and break out of.

At some point we have all followed the Godins, Scobles, crunches, readwrites and the like. But they have no clue what our market is looking for. We are not restricting ourselves enough to one specific focus. This is just a fleeting thought, not a steadfast opinion that I have. But surely if we began to tailor-make our products, blog posts, startups, ideas, ideals and innovations to 140 characters (don’t be literal) then maybe we would see more success.