The following post has been kindly submitted by a reader of ProBlogger – Bruce Allen. I’ll let him introduce himself – but I asked him to share a little about how he brings an income to his blog Boston Sports Media – you see made a comment on my blog a while back talking about how he raises and income on that blog via fundraising. I thought it’d make an interesting post – so here it is. Thanks Bruce:

My name is Bruce Allen, and I run several different blogs. The biggest one that I have is a niche site located at http://www.bostonsportsmedia.com. On the site, I examine the coverage by the local media of the professional sports teams in the city of Boston. The city is like no other in its passion for its teams and thirst for coverage. Because of this, there is a cut throat media atmosphere in the city, and my site breaks down the coverage, encapsulates all the local papers into one place, and offers commentary and opinion on the coverage. The site has gotten me some attention in the area, as I have made a few TV and radio appearances as a result of it.

I’ve had it up and running for three years now. It’s not really something I can sell products from, so I was stumped as to how I could make money from it. I decided in the end, one of the best ways to make money from the page was to do it the old fashioned way.

I asked for it. [Read more...]

Yesterday I reported that Bloglogic was up for sale – today I’m wondering how one would determine the worth or asking price of a blog (or network of them).

How much would you sell your blog for? How would you determine it’s selling price?

A few months ago I was offered $13,000 for Digital Photography Blog – I almost laughed when I got the email. If someone had offered me that much a year or so back I’d have jumped at it – but now I know it’ll make me that in a month or two just from its Adsense earnings. But it did make me wonder what I’d be willing to sell it for.

Last September I wrote about how I suspected Blog Farming (fattening blogs up for sale) would become more common – in December I wrote a post on some criteria for deciding ‘how much to sell your blog for’ but to be honest I’m still unsure how I’d do it if someone made a serious offer. Any thoughts on how you’d tackle setting a fair price for your blog?

After my post earlier in the week on making money by selling T-Shirts from your blog – a regular reader by the name of Chris (from Poker Geek and Jedi Scribe) sent me a message saying that he’d done ok out of T-Shirts himself and that they were definitely worth getting into as another income stream for your blog. Of course I wanted to know more and asked if he’d consider writing his tips up as a post. He kindly agreed so here is what he has to say on the topic of selling T-Shirts on your blog (by the way you can check out his latest T-Shirt here.

If your blog isn’t pulling in the hit count neccessary to make ad revenue that lucrative, it’s definitely a wise idea to consider something along the lines of t-shirt sales or other merchandise. Blogs that have smaller amounts of traffic (250-1000 hits a day) still can count on devoted readers who enjoy the content and won’t mind supporting the site for something in return

A few notes that I’ve learned: [Read more...]

This is a question that might start becoming more and more common if an article at the Wall Street Journal is any indication:

By Accident or Design, Selling T-Shirts Is Big Business on Web says that the online sales of T-shirts are booming.

‘All over the Web, bloggers, artists and entrepreneurs are unexpectedly finding that T-shirts are more reliable moneymakers than the original ideas that brought them to the Internet.

CollegeHumor.com, a site offering jokes and pictures from college campuses nationwide, sells T-shirts that say “My other shirt has its collar up,” “What Would Ashton Do,” and dozens of others. Its parent company, Connected Ventures LLC, says it takes in roughly $200,000 in monthly revenue from the shirts, about half of its total income. “A year from now things could be very different, but for now, T-shirts are a great way to monetize the Internet,” says Josh Abramson, one of the site’s founders.’

Tempted?

link via an IM conversation with Scrivs

Jeremy Wright has a good post answering the question – Why I Don’t Have a Donate Button? His answer:

‘Because: my users already donate to my well being by simply reading this blog and clicking on various ads. I already trade against my reader’s goodwill by displaying ads. To me, having a donate button on top of that is very … ucky. I’m already making money off of your attention, so making money off of your goodwill seems to be “double dipping” to me.’

Donate buttons are definitely a way of monetizing your blog that many bloggers utilize (to different levels of success – see Andrew Sullivan and Jason Kottke for two who have had some success with it). In my experience this approach only works in one of two situation (or a combination of both):

[Read more...]

Friday we mentioned that Jeremy Wright was Darren has also started an auction on ebay – but instead of starting at $100 he’s decided to kick the bidding off at $500. No bids so far – but I’m sure he’ll get there.

The publicity for these two alone will be worth the effort. Here’s what they should do – start bidding on each others auctions. Get it up really high – like $10,000 – it would cause a massive stir in the media. Then at the end when they both buy each others services for the same price – they don’t have to shell out any money but they surf on the fame of it all.

Blogger Jeremy C. Wright is in the news again – this time he’s auctioning his services as a blogger to the highest bidder! Yes you heard me right – Jeremy of Ensight is willing to blog for three months for the highest bidder – posting 5 to 10 times per week. The auction is at ebay and the bidding as of tonight is at $112.73.

He posts about it on his blog answering the question – Isn’t this all a little stupid? – Maybe. But, like all free market stuff, you never know if there’s a demand for something until you try. If there is a demand for this, there may be a demand for more blogger trials at more companies in which case – who knows – maybe I’ll end up brokering such deals for other bloggers with other companies.’

This isn’t the first time we’ve mentioned Jeremy on this blog – last time he was selling his blog in another attempt to earn money from his blogging.

So why is he auctioning himself? – ‘To be honest, I’m doing this to raise the profile of blogging, plain and simple. Plus, being a writer as well as a consultant in a past life, I know I can help companies figure out if blogging is the right space for them to be looking at.’

Interesting move – not only is he raising blogging’s profile but again he’s raising his own and hopefully will earn a few dollars on the side. $112.73 would be a bargain but with 7 days and 3 hours still to go in the auction I’m sure the price will rise – if not I know I’ll be putting in a bid!

Jeremy Wright’s employees are looking for tech bloggers willing to blog for a few dollars.



‘The company I do the majority of my writing for is looking to open half a dozen topical blogs. The content output expectations are fairly low. These are ‘entry level’ blogging positions. The positions are unpaid, but you get to put your ads on the pages. The site you’re blogging for gets 1M visitors per month, so you should be able to make a reasonable income via AdSense.’



Read more at Ensight Tech Bloggers Wanted – AdverBlogging