Monetizing the Mommyblog: An ABDPBT Personal Finance Series

This is the third in a series of posts on the topic of monetizing mommy blogs featured on ABDPBT Personal Finance. The models I’ll be discussing have not yet been implemented on a large number of blogs, and thus the use of them is still pretty experimental. You can try these at home, but for the love of God, please BE CAREFUL.

As part of the keynote panel for Mom 2.0, Maggie Mason (Mighty Girl) offered an overview of her experiments in monetizing her blog through using sponsors for her Mighty Life List, as well as with creating content for third party microsites. A microsite, in case you’re not already familiar with the term, is a small blog set up by a company for the specific purpose of promoting a particular product or service. Microsites have been popping up more frequently in recent years, and have started to use well-known bloggers as highly specialized copywriters of sorts to promote their work. The idea with the Microsite Model is that you hire a well-known blogger to create high quality content centered on a consumer product, and then the blogger will direct their audience to the material on another site. As such, there is a monetization of the content column of the blog, but the location of material on a third party site allows the reader to still give his or her permission for the marketing (by being willing to click on a link).

The Microsite Model should not be confused with a garden-variety sponsored post, because the content is uniquely tailored to the interest of a blog’s specific readership, and it does not appear directly on the blogger’s main blog, so there is no need for FTC disclosure. The key to the success of the Microblog Model is that the content that is to be promoted on the main site is of a very high quality, with more effort being put in by the blogger than her or she would provide on a regular post. In this way, the blogger can ensure that the reader is getting something in exchange for their willingness to click on a link to an outside site. They are getting something in exchange for their time. For example, a link to Intel’s Microsite, My Life Scoop, appears on Mason’s homepage at Mighty Girl. Clicking on the link takes you to a host of other content written by bloggers (including fellow Federated Media bloggers Asha Dornfest (Parent Hacks), Lindsay Knerl (Wise Bread), David Morgan (Burdastyle), Samuel Axon (Mashable), and Sarah Parsons (Inhabitat)), as well as Mason’s own post, 4 Tips For Creating An Inspiring Office. These kinds of deals are put together for Mason and others by Federated Media, and arranging one for yourself might be a little trickier than it is for bloggers who are represented by an advertising network. However, if you have an established readership that is loyal, the Microsite Model might well be something you can arrange on your own, by approaching sponsors that fit the size and scope of your blog’s readership.

What Are You Buying?

The Microsite Model might be confused with some other models for bloggers making money online — most notably, it is different from just being hired to write for another site, and it is different from simply writing a sponsored post. Whereas a personal blogger might find that opportunities for paid blogging jobs are more accessible as a result of their popularity on their own blog, this kind of arrangement is more like having a guest star appear on Saturday Night Live (and only Saturday Night Live) where Saturday Night Live is being sponsored in its entirety, without other commercial interruptions, by Intel. (Why do I always go for the entertainment industry metaphors? I don’t know.) This is a contract deal — you do it for a little while, a certain number of posts, and that’s it: it’s not a long-term employment thing. But more importantly, this is different because the corporate entity is paying you more for the audience that comes with you and for the space in your content column that ensures that this happens. Whereas anyone with writing skill could potentially get a job as a professional blogger for a large media outlet, these kinds of microsite deals are only going to go to people who already have a community that is heavilly invested in their work, and is likely to follow the blogger wherever they go. The blogger who gets a deal to write for a microsite has to have loyal fans, because their appeal as a partner is largely that they will bring with them some die hard fans who will read whatever they write, wherever they go. Professional bloggers with side writing gigs might eventually earn that kind of clout, but they are not probably being paid in relationship to that, nor are they being asked to do writing that fits with the brand.

The Microblog Model appeals to advertisers because, unlike a sponsored post here or there, it provides them with a sustained opportunity of associating a face with their brands. At Mom 2.0, Maggie Mason said that more and more, advertising is becoming about providing additional information, and that no other medium allows you to put a face on a company like blogging or social media does. (Note: I’m a little skeptical of this claim, given celebrity endorsements and the like, but I do think it’s possible that she means putting a “regular person face” on a company in this particular way, even if I’ve been seeing other companies attempt to do this same thing in other media as well). For Mason, directing her readers to another site feels natural, even if it is advertising, because the information provided by the outside site is a “better product than what my readers are used to seeing” on her blog. They are also associated with brands that are likely to appeal to her readers, because so much care is taken to match her brand partnerships with the brand of the personal blog itself.

The proposed project has to be something that is likely to lead to the production of content that is of particular interest to the blog’s readers. For example, in August of 2009, Mason did a series of interviews of design bloggers for The Gap. The interviews appeared in her content column and among those interviewed were Jeremy Gutsche (Founder, Trend Hunter), Jean Aw (NotCot), Larry Angell (UnCrate); and Jill Fehrenbacher (Inhabitat). All of these people run design-related blogs, and are probably on the Google Reader list of many Mighty Girl readers. Interviews with them are likely to be of interest to the Mighty Girl reader, and the association with the Gap Born To Fit campaign is something that can easily fade into the background of a post. As for The Gap, they presumably got a decent return on their investment, since the interviews appeared on Mighty Girl, as well as all of the blogs of the interviewees. They were also able to promote the campaign and The Gap brand by using photographs of all of the bloggers interviewed in their online marketing.

Mason’s campaign with the Gap took place before the FDC regulations for blogging disclosure went into effect, and there was no requirement at the time that bloggers disclose when they are being compensated for their writing by a company. The campaign was described on Mighty Girl as follows:

Over the next few weeks, I’m doing a campaign for Gap that features profiles of other design bloggers. The interviews are an extension of Gap’s Born To . . . Campaign, which is about pursuing your passion. As you may have noticed, I’m into that. Find out more about the campaign on the Facebook page here. For completists, the whole set of interviews is over here.

While I think that telling your readers that you are participating in a campaign with The Gap should be enough to serve as disclosure of a (form of a) sponsored post, I’m not entirely sure this would be enough disclosure for a similar campaign today. I think that a similar campaign launched today would require a specific statement that said, “I am being paid by The Gap to do these interviews.” Her current sponsorship with Verizon Wireless is described in more explicit terms:

A huge thanks to Verizon Wireless for sponsoring my Mighty Life List and helping me achieve my dreams. They gave me a Palm Pre Plus, which I used to find my way to the dogsledding place because it has GPS, and we were totally lost. Our guide also used it to take the first photo of this post, which I frankly would not have believed was from a camera phone if I hadn’t been there. Well done, everyone.

More recent campaigns for Mason have included obtaining corporate sponsorship for her Mighty Life List (a list of activities she wants to accomplish over the course of her life), first by Intel and now by Verizon Wireless. In these Mighty Life List campaigns, Mason writes about what happens when she embarks on checking an item off her life list, and notes that the whole thing is paid for by the sponsor. It was not clear, based on Mason’s talk at Mom 2.0, whether or not these sponsorships are all the compensation she receives from the sponsors, and I think it is possible that, depending upon the size of the Life List item, there may be a dollar amount as well as a payment of the Life List item. For example, her trip to Greece with two friends was a much more expensive endeavor for Intel to sponsor than is, say, the French lessons Verizon Wireless recently began sponsoring. This is why, in some cases, I think there is probably some means of evening out the coverage, either by the payment of a flat fee or else a stipulation that the French lessons get only one post, and the Greece trip got four or five. (However, I was unable to reach Maggie Mason for clarification on that point.)

When a microsite deal works well, it can lead to the production of really original and interesting content. For example, Mason published the idea to create a laptop inside of a moleskine notebook at one point for a content campaign with WePC.com (even though I happen to know that Mason uses a Mac, at least for her laptop needs). She plugged the original idea with a link to her more fully fleshed out idea for a laptop design on the WePC microsite. And I would argue, incidentally, that it’s likely the recent launch of BookBook, a laptop cover by Twelve South was inspired by Mason’s idea, though of course I have no way of knowing for sure. I kind of doubt that either Mason or WePC are currently getting royalties from the sales of Book Book, but perhaps they should be. I bring this example up because it shows how there are circumstances where the collaboration of a blogger and a brand can produce real, original, and noteworthy ideas that are valuable in the blogosphere and the marketplace.

How do you get a deal like this?

Content campaigns and brand partnerships via microblogs are still relatively new to the blogosphere, and Mason uses her advertising network, Federated Media, to negotiate the deals for her. Regarding pricing, she stated at Mom 2.0 that she approaches these kinds of content campaigns as something that is going to be priced out at “much higher rates” than her regular advertising, which makes sense, given that you are being paid to serve as a specialized copywriter for a company, rather than just to display some advertising. But also, the content column is far more valuable placement for a company, even when it is just being used to promote a blog on a microsite, because there is an understood trust being extended there, by placement in the content column, that what is being presented is of high quality and is of great interest to regular readers of the blog. (I did try to contact Maggie Mason to see if I could get any kind of ballpark quotes for the going rate on a deal like this, but she was unfortunately unavailable for comment.)

Bloggers attempting this kind of model might want to approach an advertising network for help in putting together a deal, or begin with smaller companies that want to increase their online presence. During her Mom 2.0 keynote, Mason also suggested that bloggers who form advertising collectives with each other might have more luck in putting together a package that would attract advertisers. Either way, I think it’s clear that you have to have a strong audience and traffic numbers in order to be attractive to a brand, though there’s nobody in the world who knows better than you which brands are the right matches for your blog. If you approach the right brands with a strong presentation for why a microsite pairing with you is a good idea, who knows what kind of results you can achieve.

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