Update 4th September: BT Ireland officially stating they are unsure what the issue is and will revert when they do know. Been almost a week now. I’ve asked will they compensate us for the month of September for these continued outages. They’ll get back to us on that too.
BT are blaming eircom or some BT staff are. Also affecting Perlico and UTV. Seems to happen mostly in the evenings the past few days. Something is certainly screwy.
There are hundreds if not thousands of stories about how blogs can make you thousands of dollars/euros/punts a month/year but there’s not so much out there on success stories from Ireland. I’m talking about honest ways of course. There’s always selling links and Pay Per Post if you want to go the online chugging route.
These are some direct and indirect ways to make money, please add more in the comments field.
Direct:
Google Ads:
Many blogs in Ireland are using Google ads to sell ads. They’re probably the easiest to set up but depending on the content of your site, the return can be pretty shite. Saying that, the more niche the content and the bigger the International readership, the more return you can get from these ads. A blog like mine with such a massive mix of topics and fluffy links means that Google Ads would have an identity crisis.
Others:
There are thousands of other ad systems out there that you can use for your blog too. Don’t just stop at Google ads. Read Michele Neylon’s Monetise.it for more information and tips. There are loads!
Photo owned by Dominic’s pics (cc)
Sell em yourself:
In Ireland companies like Trade Doubler and SalesOnline.ie don’t seem to work with blogs at all. There’s a valid enough reason too: Most blogs don’t do enough traffic so it’s hard to manage 100s of small tiny sites that they can put ads on. Maybe over time we’ll see our own bloggers ad network. My own form for those Irish bloggers wanting to do ads is sparesly enough populated too.
Feed ads:
You can put ads on your RSS feed too with the likes of Google Adsense for feeds or you can use an Amazon feed option so that you can put affiliate links in your RSS feeds.
Affiliates:
You can become an Amazon, eMusic etc. affiliate so that every time you mention an album, book, movie etc. a link is created to a sales page on Amazon or others. If someone buys an item then you get a percentage.
There are lots and lots and lots of options there. Please leave some feedback in the comments below and I’ll add more of your suggestions.
It doesn’t happen much with Irish blogs but it’s an option. I use this model for Gastronom.ie and Bleep.ie and it allows an advertiser/sponsor to create their own “sponsored” blog post. They contribute a blog post that has good content in exchange for a sum of money. The post itself is highlighted as a sponsored piece. The company can also sponsor certain categories of the blog too and their branding can appear in that section in the sidebars and header and footer. It’s something like TheRegister.co.uk does for the various sections of their site.
Paypal, Amazon and other services allow you to create a tipjar style option for your blog. If you’re not into making a lot of money but just enough for hosting, this is an option.
Why not make a note that your content can be distributed? I think a lot more blogs would find their content in newspapers and magazines (when not nicked) if they mentioned they had a syndication policy. A creative commons button means absolutely nothing to normal people. It’s not an organ donor card you know. There are plenty of bloggers out there that write great content that could well be syndicated if the person reading it realises this. Don’t be afraid to make this know. Have a Syndication Policy.
Something that should be done but not done yet as far as I can see. Although the Blog Awards is probably one such event but the money there goes to charity and it’s run to break even. 400+ people attended the Blog Awards in 2008. If your blog has a big enough local following and has some theme, then why not organise an event on that theme. Or perhaps an event for the niche you are in along with other blogs in that area. *cough* food blogger eatathon *cough*
If you build a niche or nichey(not a real word but then this is a blog!) website and work hard at it then there’s a possibility that you’ll be bought out by your rivals, a local publisher (I still think the Times or the Indo will start buying blogs) or a larger niche or not so niche content network. There are already some examples:
VIPGlamour.net was sold by John M. Ryan a few years back for an undisclosed sum. It had good traffic and was added to a stable of other sites. I guess the idea being that the more property you have, the better deal you can get from advertising networks or create your own ad network that sits on top of your various websites. See what I said above about ad buying/selling companies only wanting to deal in 10s or 100s of 1000s of pageviews per site.
ArseBlog is/was an Irish blog about Arsenal. It was sold to OleOle.com this year for an undisclosed sum and the Arseblogger still has full editorial control of the site and works fulltime for them now. Depending on your blog’s content, you might be able to do the same.
Of course if your blog is not on a domain you own, you’re going to run into a few issues with ownership.
Indirect
Book deals
Twenty Major, Grandad, Good Mood Food Blog, Kieran Murphy (one more link on this line and it’d be linkbait) and others have gotten book deals as a direct result of their blogs and the writing that they do. Publishers are always looking for new ideas and content for books and blogs are a nice way of seeing the ability of potential writers.
Consultancy
Rowan Manahan, Tom Raftery, myself and others have written about topics on their blogs which have resulted in approaches from people and companies asking us to do work for them or we have been referred on to companies by our regular readers. All depends on your niche again. Why not add a “Consultancy Services” page on your blog?
Fulltime jobs
It’s happened and it will happen again. Prospective employers can get a much better insight into who you are from your blog. If you’re blogging about a topic on your blog and are an expert at it, don’t be surprised if you get a call from a company for a chat. It might start off with some consulting work and might eventually turn into a fulltime job.
Photo owned by ╠╣ỴÏΞЯ ΔC╬ịVΞ (cc)
Do you have any suggestions?
Mad Men is finally coming to these shores. Currently on season 2 in the States, this is a must-see TV series from some of the Sopranos staffers. It is the most visually stunning TV series I’ve ever watched. There are some scenes in it that will make you go “oooh” if you enjoy luscious design, typography and cinematography.
It will also make you want to smoke. A lot. And drink a lot. The sets, the costumes and superb writing. It’s got it all.
RTÉ 2 tonight – 11:30pm
James has a laugh and has created the FluffyLinkulator. A rapid inclusion service for your website. It works too! Kinda honoured he used that name.
Una talks about a new Cork music docu.
Bad cops bad cops, whatya gonna do. Garda van in Oz.
My friend Terry and his missus are traveling the globe for the next few months. Follow their adventures here. Really gonna miss them but great to read about where Ter has puked already.
Cool Sites. Another web enterprise from Michele. Nice one.
David Armano points out there’s already fan fiction Mad Men sites and Twitter accounts out there and how this is a good thing and the show producers should back the fuck off, basically.
The Voice Stick. Nice idea even if it is a concept piece right now.
Via Jonathan Hopkins – Hedluv
Saul Bass. Best known for his collaborative work with Hitchcock, Preminger and Scorsese, Bass on Titles presents a comprehensive, well-rounded retrospective of his film title sequence design.
Brendan has a great post about the way some people online treat newcomers to online communities:
Over the past while I have witnessed several individuals and companies being dressed down by leading members of Ireland’s online community. These are individuals and companies that have broken the rules of the community.
He goes on:
The misdemeanour could range from the way they set up their blog, taking advertising on their personal website, to sending unsolicited emails to large numbers of people. Individuals are named and shamed, and often rightly so.
He points out that businesses are probably afraid to come online and interact when they see that kind of aggression. Very wild west! Where are the Pinkertons? 🙂
I’ve given out when people set their blog up on blogspot, which I call catpissspot. I’ve given out when people dress lies up as advertising and I’m constantly giving out about businesses spamming people. It’s frequently pointed out to me that I’m very ratty on this blog. Certainly when it comes to spamming, I wouldn’t shed a single tear when a business infringes on my privacy and blames it on a simple mistake and then gets hammered. If we had a competent Data Privacy Commissioner I think this would happen less. It’s like the excuse those headcases give when they microwave their dogs. They didn’t know. They were never informed. That was never written down. No get out of jail card there from me. Anyway, back to the point.
Photo owned by faeryboots (cc)
I’ve previously mentioned the art of being subtle and of observing and I left a comment advocating the same on Brendan’s blog post. The trouble is that it seems companies now hire consultants to quickly tell them what the rules and nuances of this online game are and the companies jump straight in with their rulebook learned off by heart. They still need to observe. What’s with the rush?
What do you think? Should we attempt to turn the other cheek and not get so enraged? Leave a comment over there. Brendan is the chair of the IIA Social Media Working Group and I’m sure would enjoy as much constructive feedback and different viewpoints as possible.
A must watch for anyone that sucks at Powerpoint or Keynote but has to use it (probably everyone):
I find this a highly interesting area:
For an anti-smoking campaign they had ashtray flavoured taste strips
Image nicked from Robin, taken by Donncha.
Go TechLudd in the People’s Republic. I hope we see many more. Disappointing that there wasn’t a large turnout but it is holiday season. Well done to Anton for organising this. And thanks. It was great to get to see people from Dublin, Limerick, Cork and elsewhere. Also nice to see people I hadn’t seen in hours, days, weeks and years!
In the room were three, count em! THREE stars of Techcrunch.com. Can you guess who they were? Robin is destined to be a fourth for definite. SnapScribe should be able to get there too. Great idea and great tech.
We need more events like TechLudd with the demos, drinks and networking. Got some good feedback from people who hadn’t been to tech events in Cork before. They’ll be back and will be bringing others.
Bernie gives his take.
Donncha gives his and has amazing photos of the 2009 home of the Blog Awards. Jaysus it looks great.
Robin talks about his thoughts here.
A few people told me that they got a spam email from Scott in BrandEvents.ie today. And not for the first time. What’s worse is these gobshites put all the addresses in the CC field so everyone can see who got the email. The A-C email contains 1300 emails alone it seems.
So people have made a complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner who’ll no doubt give Brand Events a hug or something. Not like they will do anything more than give them a warning.
Ciaran blogged about it here. He has already asked to be removed from the list and his request appears to have been ignored. They also told him that no Scott works there. So they’re using a fake persona to send emails? That seems dodgy to me. I wonder can they be done under the new EU Consumer Protection laws for fakery? Might be work informing the National Consumer Agency.
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