Building a Basic Blog

Building a Basic Blog – From Nothing to Profitable, is a twenty-one page e-book focusing on giving the broad strokes of what to consider when creating a blog. From hosting and domains to advertising and new sources. This book is aimed at those that are considering adding a blog to their business or marketing plan. If you have an idea, and don’t know how to proceed, Building a Basic Blog should help.

Social Media Promotion

Dedicated to promoting content, Social Media Promotion covers the various popular sites that people submit their content to, what type of users interact there, and what kind of traffic you can expect. It also makes sure to point out monetization strategies related to traffic coming from social media sites. This book comes in at nineteen pages and will help those that don’t understand Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other great sites.

Sacred Secrets of Blog Monetization

My favourite of the three e-books, Sacred Secrets of Blog Monetization – The Often Missing Information is a twenty-four page e-book that covers everything I’ve learned about monetization on the web.

If you want to make money from your blog, this is the e-book to read. It covers information that I have never seen other people push out publicly, as well as my own inspirational stories of selling advertising. I feel like this e-book alone is worth joining Branding David Members.

What is Branding David Members?

I wanted to be able to work with people, consult for them on various things, but my hourly rates were just too high for the type of clients that needed help, and so rather than lower my rates to work furiously for a number of great clients, and still be without a home, I decided to create a forum where I could consult with people in a public manner, and share tips, tricks and information with a close knit group of people.

There is also information that would be quickly diluted by the masses if thousands or tens of thousands of bloggers took advantage of it, and so limiting the community was a way to keep every tip and idea created within the community as powerful and useful as possible.

Branding David Members is a private forum of no more than 50 active participants that costs only $25 per month or $250 per year. For those registering for a year in advance, you also get an hour of my consulting time, where I will help you with your blogs, websites, or online marketing strategies. You will want to register soon though as on July 2nd, 2009, the price will go up, and only those that get in before then will be able to continue at their grandfathered rate.

This also means that by signing up, you’ll be one of the few that will have access to these great e-books.

Free E-Book

As I said in the start of this post, one of these three e-books will be made available free from a variety of different blogs, and is free for you to give away to your own readers, and that is my second e-book, Social Media Promotion (right click and select save as…).

While I, personally, consider this the weakest of the three books, I also know that it will be the most useful to newer bloggers that are looking to improve their traffic and monetization strategies.

Notes: For those on Mac’s, please install Adobe Acrobat Reader or download the lower-quality version as Preview had issues with the original version compiled. The Social Media Promotion e-book is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0

Kudos: A big thanks goes to Tom Leroux, Blue Rain Creative, and my friends and family.

It really flipped a switch for me because when I went to Podcasters Across Borders, I was basically lynched for wanting to hear about monetization, as it was a bad word at that event.

People were focused on podcasting because they were passionate and they didn’t want anything to get in the way of that, but what they don’t realize is: monetization is just a step in building a business.

No matter how the economy is, people should want to turn their passions into their business. Some of the wealthiest people in the world were able to make that leap, and why shouldn’t podcasters? Also, the tips, tricks and ideas from last year might not be the same today, as things are always changing online.

To say talk of monetization isn’t welcome is odd, and shortsighted to me. Sure, there will always be purists out there, but I say, “build a business from your passions” and as long as monetization isn’t welcome in the conversation stream, maybe ask about “building a business” around your podcast next PodCamp.

The introduction by an executive from CBC wasn’t interesting, and it was rather long winded, but it was nice to hear that CBC wants to find a way to do better in online video beyond just their YouTube channels.

They are concerned about copyrighted content and control over it.

Jordan Hoffner took the stage with a fairly strong presence and comes from the Google side of the YouTube/Google merger.

“You have to partner with the media companies.” – Jordan Hoffner

They provide fingerprints to YouTube and then if there is uploaded content that matches the video fingerprint, the content producer then gets to choose: leave it, get advertisements around it, or take it down?

With more and more content going up online, it creates a great revenue footprint for producers, and content owners. They were able to switch from being in a defensive mode, to being able to be proactive and give creators money while still keeping the videos available. Ninety percent of flagged videos are marked as “advertise on”, rather than being taken down or left alone.

They have added YouTube Insight which is like Google Analytics for YouTube that gives great data stats on the type of viewers that are using their videos.

The advertising opportunities for YouTube videos include video overlays, a “video within a video”, as well as display advertisements around videos. A new opportunity has grown as well in the click to buy market. Where you can sell DVD’s, songs, and other products as that industry and need grows.

YouTube is also creating new co-branded initiatives going forward. Like the People Magazine, Be a Red Carpet Reporter Contest where they can grow their brand more than just taking in revenue.

The latest thing YouTube is doing is the full length content. Higher quality player, 16×9 aspect ratio, and secure streaming. They have added in mid-rolls and pre-rolls to the longer format videos. They hope this is a big section of their business going forward.

Can multiple types of content, both random short videos, and full length television shows and movies, survive and co-exist in a profitable way on any single site? YouTube isn’t sure of that yet, but is trying to create a market in where it can.

Great question at the end about YouTube creating content for their site, and the answer was a simple: no. YouTube will not commission content as they would rather focus on search algorithms or promote intellectual property, rather than trying to create successful content themselves. It would also put them in an issue regarding the neutrality of the results on YouTube. They would rather just be a distribution platform.