Live from Blog World Expo 2010: Monetization Super Panel

This post are my notes from the live session at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. Please forgive me if I misspell anything or if some of the notes don’t make sense, as I am trying to gather as much information from each speaker as I can.

Quick Facts on the Session

Topic: Monetization Super Panel
About: In this two hour super-session, our monetization experts will critique blogs, offer the secrets of their success and take questions from attendees.
Speaker: Anita Campbell, Darren Rowse, John Chow, ShoeMoney

Live Notes

Let me start off by saying that this is an allstar panel of outstanding bloggers and marketers who make a full time income off of their blogs.

Shoemoney was first to present and he talked a lot about his personal experiences and how that has helped him develop rapport with his readers and build credibility.

One thing that I thought was really cool was he showed his revenue numbers from when he started his blog, until today. Currently he has made 1.8 million in gross revenue, and the year is not over. That also doesn’t include the products that he created like ShoeMoney System and ShoeMoney Tools.

John Chow talked about how he was able to grow his subscriber list through the various lead capture forms he has on his site. He shows examples of the sidebar capture form, the Ultimate Footer Ad, lightbox hover and at the end of his posts form. Utilizing multiple capture forms significantly increases you opt-in rate. He also states that even though the lightbox form is obtrusive to readers, it still works. He only shows it to the person the first time they come to his site. He strongly states that the money is in the list because you don’t have to rely on Google and you can contact your list whenever you want.

Anita was next up and discussed her experiences with advertisers and how you need to treat them like clients. You need to nuture the relationship, have good communication and figure out ways to improve the advertising they are doing on their site. She said she normally does 30 minute conference calls every other week to give them updates and improve their campaigns. She talks about the popular ad sizes that you should have on your blog (125×125, 460×68, 300×250, 160×600).

Darren Rowse showed a case study of his Digital Photography Blog which is about 3-4x larger than his ProBlogger.net website, which I didn’t realize. It is the largest photography blog on the net and one of the largest blogs in terms of subscribers and community members in the world. He has over 510,000+ subscribers, 33,000+ twitter followers, and hundreds of thousand active community members in his forums. He gives examples from his site how he has been able to monetize his website. Through things like product recaps and reviews he can put in amazon affiliate links to the products he recommends and reviews.