blogging – Page 3

Blog Monetization

The next session that I attended was Andrea Tomkins talking about how to make money through advertising on your blog. She started with ways that blogs can pay off without direct monetization, such as driving other sorts of business (just as this blog often drives first contacts for my consulting business) and leveraging free trips to conferences, but her main focus was on how she sells ads on her blog.

She believes that selling your own ad space results in higher quality advertising by allowing you to select the advertisers who you want on your site and control many of the design aspects. Plus, you get to keep all the cash. She believes in charging a flat monthly rate rather than by impressions or clicks, and to set the rates, she looked at the rates for local newspapers; however, newspapers are very broad-based whereas blog audiences are much more narrowly focused, meaning that the people reading your blog come from a specific demographic that certain advertisers would really like to have access to. Andrea’s blog is a “parenting lifestyle” blog – a.k.a. “mommyblogger” – and she has 1,300-1,400 daily views, many of whom are local to her Ottawa area.

She started out charging $50/month/ad, and bumped it for new clients as well as an annual increase until she reached a sweet spot in the pricing (which she didn’t disclose). She doesn’t sell anything less than a 3-month term, and some advertisers have signed up for a 12-month spot. Her first advertiser, who is still with her, is a local candy store that she and her family frequented weekly – she felt that if she loved it so much, then her readers would probably enjoy it as well. She approached the store directly to solicit the ad, although now many of her new advertisers come to her when they see her blog and how it might reach their potential audience.

She controls the overall ad design: the ad space is a 140×140 image with a link to their website, with the images being updated as often as the advertisers wish. New ads are added to the bottom of the list, so advertisers are incented to maintain their relationship with her in order to maintain their placement on the site.

She also writes a welcome post for each advertiser; she writes this as her authentic opinion, and doesn’t just publish some PR from the advertiser since she doesn’t want to alienate her readers. Each advertiser has the opportunity to host a giveaway or contest for each 3-month term, although she doesn’t want to turn her blog into a giveaway blog because that doesn’t match her blogging style. She also uses her social network to promote her advertisers in various ways, whether through personal recommendations, on her Facebook page or Twitter; because she only takes advertisers that she believes in, she can really give a personal recommendation for any of them.

Before you call a potential advertiser, she recommends understanding your traffic, figuring out an ad design and placement, and coming up with a rate sheet. Don’t inflate your traffic numbers: you’ll be found out and look like an idiot, and most advertisers are more interested in quality engagement than raw numbers anyway. Everyone pays the same rate on Andrea’s blog; she doesn’t charge more for “above the fold” ads or use a placement randomizer, so sometimes has some new advertisers (who are added to the bottom) complain about placement.

A rate sheet should be presented as a professionally-prepared piece of collateral coordinated with your business cards, blog style and other marketing pieces. It needs to include something about you, the deal you’re offering, your blog, your audience and traffic, and optionally some testimonials from other advertisers.

Handling your own ads does create work. You need to handle contacts regarding ads (she doesn’t publish her rates), invoice and accept payments, track which ads need to run when, set up contracts, and provide some reporting to the advertisers. Obviously, there has to be a better way to manage this without resorting to giving away some big percentage to an ad network. She also writes personal notes to advertisers about when their ad might have been noticed in something that Andrea did (like a TV appearance) or when she is speaking and hence might have their ads be more noticed. She does not publish ads in her feed, but publishes partial feeds so readers are driven to her site to read the full posts, and therefore see the ads. She has started sending out a newsletter and may be selling advertising separately for that.

This started a lot of ideas in my head about advertising. I used to have Google ads in my sidebar, which pretty much just paid my hosting fees, but I took them out when it started to feel a bit…petty. As long as I get a good part of my revenue from end-customer organizations to help them with their BPM implementations, it would be difficult to accept ads here and maintain the appearance of independence. Although I do work for vendors as an analyst and keep those parts of my business completely separate, with appropriate disclosure to clients, it is just as important to have the public appearance of impartiality as well as actually be impartial. An ongoing dilemma.

Internet Explorer Theme Problems

Seems that there’s a problem with this theme on IE6 and IE7 – I only tested on IE8, my bad. I’ll get a fix in this weekend, either a new theme or a modified version of this one. Thanks for your patience!

Update: I’ve reinstalled my old theme for now, although now the header gradient doesn’t work — might be related to the new hosting. I’ll keep at it.

Column 2 Now on PressHarbor

I’ve been seeing some performance problems with this blog, and have moved it over to PressHarbor on the advice of my friend Joey, who uses it for his very popular blog that sees a lot more traffic that I do.

I’ve also changed the theme to a cleaner look that supports a few additional features that I was looking for.

If you’re reading this post, your DNS server has rerouted you properly.

If you read via RSS, nothing for you to do.

If you see anything weird, add a comment or email me.

Conference Season Begins

It’s been quiet for several months for conferences, but things are heating up again for the next four weeks. Here’s my upcoming schedule:

This week, I’m at PegaWorld in Philadelphia, including chairing a workshop on Wednesday morning on case management
The week of May 3rd, IBM Impact in Las Vegas
The week of May 10th, TIBCO’s TUCON in Las Vegas
The week of May 17th, SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando

If you’re attending any of these events, be sure to look me up. I’ll be blogging from all of them. You can find these, and many other BPM-related events, at the BPM Events calendar. If you have an event to add to the calendar, just let me know.

Disclosure: each of the vendors pays my travel expenses for me to attend their user conference. They do not, however, have any editorial control over what I write while at the conference.

Blogging and a Knowledge Scarcity Model Don’t Mix

I recently swapped around my office space, and found some old (paper) notebooks that I browsed through before shredding. One of them, from 2006, contained a page of notes that I jotted down about why consultants don’t blog:

Not enough time
Too few “outside” interests (aside from proprietary customer work), hence nothing interesting to blog about
Knowledge scarcity model

Taking these points one at a time, I consider the time that I put into blogging as part of my marketing budget (if I had such a thing), since most of my new business comes to me because someone reads my blog and thinks that I have something to add to their projects. I also consider it a valuable part of my business social networking, providing a way for me to connect with others to exchange opinions or just build those weak ties that come in handy when you least expect it. It’s also, in some cases, a public version of my note-taking – especially the conference posts – that I often refer back to when I know that I wrote about something, but can’t recall when or where. For all of these reasons, the time that I have spent blogging has paid for itself many times over in revenue, relationships and research.

On the second point, there’s always something that you can write about that has nothing to do with the proprietary work that you do for your customers, but would serve you in the ways that I mention above. Generic technology or management research or readings that you’ve done are always a good place to start; product reviews; links to and comments on interesting posts in your fields; even topics that aren’t directly related to your work but that you find interesting. If your customer has a great case study that they’d like to brag about, you can even include that. The important part is to write about what you’re passionate about, those little things that make you love your job.

The most common reason that I hear from consultants on why they don’t blog – and what clearly drives the mostly content-free blogs that we see from the big analyst firms – is that they’re afraid of people stealing their ideas, especially if they think that they can sell those ideas. To quote my friend Sacha:

If the thought of people stealing your ideas is what’s stopping you from thinking out loud on a blog, you’re not alone. It’s a valid fear. If you’re afraid of your ideas being stolen, your mindset is probably that of knowledge scarcity – that you should hoard knowledge because that’s what gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people.

Another mindset is that of knowledge abundance. There are plenty of ideas to go around, and sharing knowledge gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people, too.

She goes on to discuss the value of openly sharing ideas: practice in communicating those ideas, questions and challenges that help you refine those ideas, and the networking and reputation effects.

What I see happening with people who operate in a knowledge scarcity model is that they tend to blog about things on which they don’t place much value, since they don’t want to “give away” their really good stuff. However, this results in a negative feedback loop: your audience knows that you’re feeding them crap, and they tune out. In other words, if you think of knowledge as scarce, then your blog is not going to be very successful. It doesn’t mean that your business won’t be, but failure to share makes for an unpalatable blog.

I tend to operate in a knowledge abundance model: there are a lot of people out there with great ideas too, so let’s share them and make something even better. More importantly, however, my knowledge isn’t some limited bit of intellectual property that I invented in the past and have to horde only for my paying customers: I generate new knowledge every day, every time that I talk to someone or read something interesting or have a new experience. In other words, although I might be judged on the basis of what I’ve done in the past, the real value that I bring is the ability to create new knowledge going forward.

Five Years of Column 2

As of today, I’ve been writing this blog for five years. My first post was on BPTrends’ 2005 BPM Suites Report, and I’m still pretty focused on BPM, although have branched out to cover a wider variety of Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration topics as well. In the beginning, it was just labeled as my business blog and hosted on a subdomain under my corporate domain, although within the first month, I talked about how I’m a “column 2” sort of girl, and a month later, rebranded as Column 2.

Since then, I’ve written about 2,000 posts: that’s more than one per day on average, although that includes about 550 posts consisting of links and my comments on those links, auto-generated from whatever I save on Delicious that day. Not considering those posts, I’ve still managed to post more than once per weekday on average: a count that is badly skewed by my live-blogging at conferences, where I post several times per day. I’ve had over 2,000 comments on posts, or about one per post: not a great level of conversation overall, although we’ve had some lively discussions. In total, I’ve written over 600,000 words.

I average 400-500 unique visitors (600-700 page views) per weekday, with peaks of two or three times for events such as the Oracle BEA strategy briefing and IBM layoffs. Posts can remain popular over time: the Oracle BEA post totaled 4,500 page views (although not on the same day). I also have another 1,800 readers who are subscribed to the RSS feed, likely not visiting the site directly since I publish full feeds. That doesn’t make Column 2 exactly a prime internet destination, but most people are a bit surprised that I have 2,200+ daily readers on a relatively niche topic.

My presence on Twitter (which has just passed the 3-year mark) may have slowed my blogging a bit, but a broad spectrum of social media participation is a must for independent consultants these days. In fact, Twitter has probably increased my blog readership since FeedBurner auto-tweets each blog post when it publishes: Twitter is my second-largest referrer site, after Google.

I don’t get paid to blog, except for the small fee that Intelligent Enterprise pays me when they republish some of my posts, and the bit from the Google ads on the site that just covers my hosting fees. Vendors who invite me to their conferences (and pay my expenses while I’m there) obviously get more coverage while I’m blogging at the conference, as do vendors who are my clients since I’m more familiar with their products, but the opinions written here are my own, and no one has any editorial review or control over my content. In fact, it’s pretty common for me to see the PR/AR/marketing people at a vendor conference checking their mobile devices to see what I just wrote about their company, since they don’t see it in advance.

Blogging has given me the best soapbox ever on which to stand and voice my opinions: as an extroverted introvert, it’s the perfect blend of public discourse and private contemplation for me. As an independent working mostly from my home office, blogging provides me with a way to engage with BPM vendors and practitioners that would just not be possible face-to-face. I am asked to speak at conferences and review products because of what I write here; in fact, most of my professional engagements start with someone saying “I read your blog, and I’m interested in working with you”. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet many of my readers and fellow bloggers at conferences; these are opportunities that I would have missed were it not for blogging. My blog also serves as an online portfolio and history of my ideas, so that I can show, for example, that I was talking about social BPM and process wikis in 2006, a few years ahead of those who claim to have first written about it.

Writing a blog is not for everyone – in fact, some days it’s not even for me 🙂 – but blogs have become an essential part of online reading for any business or technology professional, rather than just seen as rants from the fringe. And although I sometimes resort to a bit of ranting, I like to believe that I’m adding value to your research on a variety of enterprise technology topics.

No longer lost in translation

Thanks to Zoli, the 25% of my readers whose first language is probably not English (as indicated by the browser language setting) can now view this site in 50 other languages, thanks to a new widget in the sidebar.

If you read this through Google Reader, then you can set it to auto-translate there, instead: I do that for the few non-English BPM blogs that I follow, and it works like a charm.

Social media for community projects

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite Toronto: Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.