Blogs offer the ability to quickly generate new pages of content, which in turn help to increase your effectiveness in search engines. Hopefully every page of content you produce is of high-quality so that you can maximize your potential revenue stream from each one.
Lately I have come across a couple of people discussing the idea of having “sponsored entries” on their blogs. The type of “sponsored entries” can take on two different forms.
The original idea behind “sponsored entries” was that a company would approach a writer of a blog and ask them to write about their product. If they did so the company would offer some sort of compensation be it money, services, or the product itself.
This would work well for blogs that receive a large amount of traffic and are highly focused. For example, if Macromedia created a new web design application they could approach Zeldman and ask him to write an entry about it. Without a doubt some sales would be generated from the entry along with more interest within the design community.
Now if done right it is up to Zeldman to decide if he likes the product or not and his entry will reflect that. If the entry is just another suck up review his readers will more than likely see through it and his credibility as a reviewer is tarnished.
Also the entry should be labelled as an advertisement or some other term to reflect that it is sponsored. This ensures that your audience can continue to trust your site and may decide whether or not they wish to filter out such entries.
The credit for this idea goes to Keith who discussed it over email with me not too long ago. This is how it works.
Over the last couple of months you have been looking at your website's traffic stats and noticed that a large amount of traffic is going to one of your older entries. You find out that you are in the top 10 in the search engines for a particular term and therefore the reason for the traffic.
You wonder if there is an additional way to make money from this old entry beyond the methods you are already employing. Here is the second way you can do a sponsored entry.
Unlike the first method discussed above, this entry is already written and therefore has no bias or influence from an outside source. However, you realize that a company may be interested in advertising on that page due to it highly targetted traffic.
For example, as of this writing, my friend Mike Rundle is #1 in Google for the phrase BMW 2. Mike receives a fair amount of traffic from the search engines because of this term and would like to make some money from that traffic.
Mike can go to a BMW accessories website or store and ask them if they would be interested in placing an ad on the page (and only that page). He explains the highly targetted nature of the page and that it receives a good deal of traffic. He creates a set fee for the company that will allow their ad to stay up for a year of the lifetime of the page.
The reason I say that he allows the ad up their for a year or the lifetime of the page is because any advertiser is going to want a lot of pageviews. And since this is only one page very rarely will that page produce a million pageviews in one month, but over a long period of time will produce a significant amount of targetted pageviews that the advertiser should be more than willing to sponsor it.
Also if you are only offering the page for 1 month then you must make sure that the page remains highly ranked, or the advertiser would not be getting their money's worth. Just imagine creating 500 pages of content over a period of time to find out that 50 of the pages are of high quality that you are able to charge $1,000 for the sponsorship of that page.
Yeah, I think we have some potential here.
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I signed up for blogversations a couple of days ago, but have yet to hear anything from them. I highly doubt they will be successful as too many marketing departments are in the mindset still that they can control what the public says about their products or would at the very least like a guaranteed positive review of their product.
Scrivs (http://9rules.com/)
I agree with you 100% re: marketing departments believing they can control what people write. I think that's why I like your idea of sponsoring archived entries so much - as long as the entry gets consistent traffic and not just a spike of traffic when it is first written.
Derek Featherstone (http://www.boxofchocolates.ca)
#1
Interesting stuff -- especially sponsoring archived entries. That type of approach might go a long way to help alleviate the feelings of "Would they be writing this if it wasn't sponsored?"
Even more interesting -- this comes out this morning: Service Mixes Ads in Blog Chatter, which refers to this new service: Blogversations.
One of their examples even discusses the concept using a maker of fine automobiles. Spooky.
Derek Featherstone (http://www.boxofchocolates.ca)