Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger has long been one of my favorites, and that’s because of the supportive and friendly spirit of its content and community, as well as Darren’s overall take on blogging as a professional business. A few recent ProBlogger articles have particularly drawn my attention. 

How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging is a good illustration of the it’s hard/takes time/quality content/quality promotion dynamic. It also delivers a fabulous primer on different kinds of online advertising strategies, such as CPC, CPM, commission, and sponsorships. And Rowse points out that using multiple advertising networks and types is a good way to maximize revenue. Of course, you need to drive a lot of traffic before you can expect to make anything close to $30k per year! 

And here’s helpful news for money-seeking blogs who use the popular Blogger platform: Google and Amazon Partner Up to Integrate Amazon Associates Program into Blogger Blogs. One of the more interesting things about this news is that Google-owned Blogger is now openly promoting a non-Google advertising product. And since many bloggers use both Google Adsense and the Amazon Affiliate program as a bedrock of their money-making strategy, the move makes a lot of sense. 

There are also a number of “indirect” ways to make money from blogging, including professional networking opportunities, promotion for consulting and online services, direct product sales, and more. Some of the most prolific and ambitious bloggers are writing books (both e-books as well as the dead wood variety) and promoting them to their readers. The latter – old fashioned books distributed via old school real world distribution – gets the spotlight on Mashable: From Blog to Book Deal: How 6 Authors Did It. Profiles include how Ben Huh of the I Can Has Cheezburger empire, Pamela Slim of Escape From Cubicle Nation, and Walker Lamond of Rules of My Unborn Son converted Internet celebrity into book deals.

Even though the blogging game is highly competitive, it’s also fun and challenging and changing all the time. Bloggers are forging new business models out of online publishing, with the result that the best of the best online writers and self-promoters are able to live la vida blogger full time.

For a lot more information about professional blogging in 2009, check out Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report.

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Let the bloggers have their voice:

* All Things Digital: YouTube already lets users watch a smattering of TV shows for free, with advertising. Now it envisions something similar to what Apple and Amazon already offer: First-run shows, without commercials, for $1.99 an episode, available the day after they air on broadcast or cable.

* Mashable: Certainly, this is a big issue. If, for the same price, I could own a show via iTunes as opposed to stream it via YouTube, I’d choose iTunes every time. On the other hand, if I could watch it on YouTube for less, I’d likely go there, as I only want to watch most shows once. Whether or not a middle ground can be reached will likely determine if this service will ever come to fruition.

* VentureBeat: Google already streams some TV content free on YouTube, but it doesn’t carry current shows the way the successful Hulu does. Lately, YouTube traffic has been flattening, while Hulu shot up 50 percent in October.

* bub.blicio.us: Now, the reason I will occasionally buy shows from iTunes is that I then have the freedom to watch them on my phone, my iPod, my TV, or my laptop. I can watch the show on an airplane because it’s local to my device. Personally, I hate the idea of paying $1.99 for streaming content. So until they figure things out, I’ll definitely stick to free Hulu for the television that I miss and downloading episodes from iTunes for television on the go.

* technovia: No doubt that Google’s cheerleaders will be racing to claim that this is a daring move, and certainly doesn’t try and impose any kind of artificial scarcity like that nasty old-fashioned Mr Murdoch is trying to do for news. After all, it’s hard to find TV shows for free on the Internet, right?

(this post originally appeared on Technorati)

Meanwhile, prolific and respected blogger Steven Hodson laments just today that “indie bloggers” do not have a bright future due to the saturated blogospheric marketplace, writing that, “As nice as it might be to dream of making a living as an independent blogger the chances of actually being able to pull it off are negligible.” Hodson notes that whereas at one time there were opportunities to dominate niches and sub-niches, those days are now over due in part to large group blogs that churn out posts day and night.

Does the next generation of blogging stars need to look to video blogging and technology such as skippable ads in order to scratch out a living? Or is it still possible to become a big time blogger the “old fashioned” way by writing high quality posts every day, linking out and networking, and building reputation and influence in one’s field?

(this piece originally appeared on Technorati)

Last month, you may remember having heard about a special iPhone ad from Dockers. Its claim to fame was that it was the world’s first “shakable” ad. Called “Shakedown to Get Down,” the ad prompted users to shake the phone in order to set the on-screen freestyle dancer into motion. The dancer, of course, wore Dockers. It was certainly a clever attention-getter at the time, something that had everyone talking. But this ad wasn’t just a one-off experimental project – it was representative of the start of a new trend and one that’s going to change advertising as we know it.

Beyond the obvious cool factor, there’s something more, well, shakable about the implications and possibilities of what media and advertising and interactivity can do.

That shows how far contextual advertising still has to go, I guess!

As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall was a noble but failed experiment.

But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?

There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:

The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.

While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.

(read the rest of this piece at Web Worker Daily)

It’s interesting when you start looking behind the emerald green cloth that covers these blogging wizards. Just about every single of the most popular bloggers who say advertising on blogs is a mugs game don’t blog for their mortgage payments. They all have well paying day jobs that allow them the ability to pontificate to the rest of us against the evils of advertising, sponsored posts or paid reviews. They don’t have to worry about meeting that monthly hydro bill or have to deal with highway robbery of cell data plans.

Then there’s that standard bullshit argument that you can have an ad free blog because you can make money because of your blogging. The interesting thing is that this argument again comes from people who for the majority have real well paying day jobs or they are in the marketing industry where the whole idea is to get you looking for other ways; preferably something that they can offer you, to make money. In most cases if you have an already established reputation this might be the case but for 99% of the bloggers out there wanting to make this a career it’s a bullshit sales pitch.

I also love Rob Diana’s comment on the piece, made via Google + shared: “An excellent rant on blogging and making money. Hodson is ‘getting his cranky on’.”

Here’s a quick excerpt:

I think allowing users to vote on ads that they like and have them “bubble up” to the top, social news-style, might be a rather clever addition to the Digg platform. That said, we can imagine that some of Digg’s famously rowdy commenters would be incensed at the prospect of any advertising inserted into an area previously set aside for user generated story submissions.

How incensed is hard to say, but we can look at the reception that ad network Magpie received on Twitter to get an indication. To be fair, Magpie is an independent service – it has no formal affiliation with Twitter – that offers to sell “tweets” on Twitter user profiles. So its revenue model aims to cut microbloggers in on revenue, and not Twitter itself. The reaction thus far from the Twitter community has been pretty negative, and indeed signs are that Magpie is gaining very little traction.

Here are some of the more interesting stories that I’ve noticed over the last day or two.

Top 3 Twitterers of Each Country in the World based on Number of Followers (Updated)
As a stats junkie, bourgeoning Twitter addict, and believer in the global flattening effect brought on by technology, this story is particularly cool.

How cool?

Cool enough to note while looking at one screen that Carol of Taiwan has 2,201 followers, Baher Al Hakim of United Arab Emirates has 1,542, and noted author (and one of my all time favorites) Stephen Fry of the United Kingdom has 32,058.

Oh, and who’s #1? That would be a gentleman named Mr. Barack Obama of the United States, with 149,001 followers and counting.

The takeaway: Twitter is for real, global and worldwide.

Ways to Monetize Twitter and Repeat After Me: Revenue Generation
The “how’s Twitter gonna make money” meme has long been a good one to jawbone about. My long standing (and suffering) take: throw a 728×90 banner at the top of every single web-based Twitter profile page. It may not be a panacea, but I’d love to hear someone explain to me why that would be a bad idea!

In any event, the debate continues and is even intensifying as the economy gets wackier and the spotlight on Twitter brightens. Ideas for monetization really run the gamut, from “freemium” models to tweet-based ads to focusing on search. And Twitterati notes that Twitter’s job posting for a revenue-focused product manager may mean that we will learn more soon. So perhaps the long wait is nearly over!

News About News, in 140 Characters
The ways in which Twitter is starting to shape and even drive news coverage around the world is another area of attention and focus. You can kind of feel the unease and discomfort in how the mainstream media is contending with these developments – along with the economic hardships that traditional media companies are facing – in blocks of copy such as this:

With staff changes and reductions across the media industry, even a blog post can be too time-consuming a way to announce who is in and out of a job. That is why a public relations employee turned to the instant-blogging platform Twitter to create The Media Is Dying, a Twitter feed that documents media hirings and firings in one-sentence bursts of text.

I find the use of the term “instant-blogging” very interesting here. Makes using Twitter sound so easy, doesn’t it, with a side of insignificant, perhaps? However, the truth is that while Twitter is easy to use, it’s also flexible in scope, and remains a simple yet powerful publishing/micrblogging platform.

That, my friends, is a far cry from insignificant.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately. In order to share links efficiently on Twitter, you need to use link (or URL) shortening tools, which quickly take URLs that typically have a large number of characters and translate them to a shorter form that can squeeze into Twitter’s 140 character-max requirement per “tweet.”

TinyURL.com has long been my favorite go to way to shorten URLs. For example, the post I wrote yesterday has the following URL:

http://onlinemediacultist.com/2008/12/16/louis-gray-google-could-provide-a-democratic-version-of-techmeme/

Plug it into TinyURL.com and you get the following:

http://tinyurl.com/5z9w8n

It’s a great little service, and no wonder the site proudly boasts that it has already shortened more than 100 million URLs.

Now, Twitter and shortened URLs have been on mind in relation to thinking about Twitter as a “full-fledged publishing platform” (which I explain my thinking on here). Part of the equation has to do with giving “microbloggers” on Twitter the ability to get statistics and, yes, make money.

Mark Vermut was kind enough to point out to me on Twitter recently that:

bit.ly cli.gs and twurl.nl all offer the ability to track clicks, referrers, other linkers and geography from links

Therefore we see that URL shortening services are beginning to fill the need for microbloggers to obtain analytics about the information and link sharing work that they’re putting in.

But what about the making money part?

Adjix has been on my radar for a little while, a service that runs this tagline: Short Links. Tiny Ads. Big Payoff.

Some initial experimentation shows that two of those three statements are correct.

Running the same URL from the example I used above, the nice thing is that we get an extremely tiny URL to run on places like Twitter:

http://ad.vu/nwr

And it’s also a plus that when you click through an Adjix URL, the ad that runs at the top of the page is very unobtrusive. However, you need to rock a lot of adjix ad views and/or clicks in order to make anything substantial:

Linkers earn $0.10/1000 unique link views (10 cents CPM per unique link impressions) and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. In other words, Linkers receive $0.0001/link impression and $0.20/ad click-through.

Yeah, in other words, not so much!

This week, I discovered Linkbee.com, which I’m messing around with at present. So far I’m pretty impressed, though the “money part” will not quite make your typical link sharer rich anytime soon either.

The interface is cheerful and clean, which always helps, and the performance time has been pretty fast thus far, which is crucial when you’re looking to shorten a quick URL and pop it into Twitter (Adjix by contrast can run quite slow). I also like that you can choose how your ad is displayed: interstitial, banner, or no ad at all. Interstitial views pay out at the highest rate ($1.00 CPM) while banner ads pay at $.50 CPM.

While those rates aren’t earth shattering, they’re not miniscule either, particularly when you consider that they’re not relying on a two click CPC model as Adjix is with their “higher” rate. In other words, Adjix gives you a $.10 CPM until the moment that you get someone to click your short Adjix URL and then click a text link that runs on top of the exit page. That’s a lot to ask for, so in my view Linkbee’s model is clearly superior thus far.

With information sharing such an important part of the social media and microblogging environments, I’m looking forward to seeing how URL shortening services continue to evolve.