La vida es sencilla y el dinero la complica.

miércoles

En el fondo, ¿para qué tienes un blog?

Al final el dinero siempre termina apareciendo por algún sitio.

Hoy hemos leído una entrevista en Wired con Harold Davis, blogger de éxito en USA que acaba de sacar un libro, Google Advertising Tools, en el que explica con pelos y señales cómo funciona el programa de palabras clave de Google para que los bloggeros puedan utilizarlo en su propio beneficio.

Davis le cuenta a la periodista cosas como éstas:

WN: What do you need to start a profitable blog?

Davis: You should have at least 100 pages of high-quality content in the can. Blogs are good because they keep content fresh, but that's just a small part of it. Good reference material really draws traffic. On a photography site I run, for example, one piece I wrote on how to convert raw digital photos draws more traffic than 99 percent of my other photo pages.

WN: What are some of the more lucrative areas for blogging?

Davis: Hot technology areas are always good to blog about. People always want to know what new gadget they should get, and those sites tend to have very monetizable content.

Probably blogs on legal issues would do well if they focused on areas that have to do with litigation. (Drugs and diseases that have resulted in huge liability suits are among the most expensive keywords.)

Another area that seems under-blogged is financial reporting. There isn't too much well-informed financial stuff that isn't under subscription. In my book, I also write about sex blogs. People make some decent money from them.

WN: How does keyword advertising work for bloggers?

Davis: Advertisers pay to place certain keywords. So, if I am writing about a Nikon camera, for example, that's a valuable keyword. A lot of advertisers are bidding on Google's AdSense program for the right to have ads appear near it.

WN: Does it work for any blog?

Davis: There's a big difference between running your own server-side blog and using a free service like Blogger.

If you host your own blog and have an AdSense account, you get paid by Google when people click on those ads on your web pages. You can make more money from keyword advertising if you host your blog on an outside server.

If you have a blog hosted by one of the blogging services, like Google's Blogger, up until recently you didn't get any revenue from keyword ads. Now, it's pretty typical for hosting companies to give a portion of the AdSense revenue to anyone who hosts a blog.


Nosotros leemos este tipo de cosas y nos replanteamos la naturaleza de los blogs, y nos replanteamos también las motivaciones y objetivos del respetable a la hora de sentarse delante de su ordenador. Por eso cada vez nos parece que tienen más sentido iniciativas como las de Ad-Free Blog.

¿No crees que sacando dinero de tu blog (blogs verticales tipo Weblogssl o aventuras como las de Engadget y demás nanopublishing aparte) se está desvirtuando la naturaleza misma de esta revolución on line?

Por cierto que sobre blogs y bloggers de éxito en USA la revista New York publica un interesante artículo que hemos visto vía Enrique Dans.

1 comentario:

NA+RA dijo...

Por supuesto hay alguna otra honrosa excepción aparte del nanopublishing.

Un estudiante del MIT, Ilya Vedrashko, que prepara su tesis doctoral sobre la publicidad en los juegos de ordenador y en las comunidades virtuales, tiene abiertos blogs en los que experimenta con herramientas básicas de publicidad y aprovecha para pagarse los estudios, un tipo de financiación que podríamos denominar, a fin de cuentas, como altruista.