As a business owner and entrepreneur you have learned the lessons and developed expertise that has made you successful. That expertise has value for your peers. Sharing your knowledge and passion can position you as a thought leader in your industry and create opportunities and win and secure new clients. This expertise can also be turned into content that can create a new and additional revenue stream that can be extremely lucrative.
A lot of companies “don’t get” corporate blogging and the value of content and those that do have found the benefits to far outweigh the investment. Corporate bloggers world wide every day are publishing great original content that in most cases they don’t earn a cent for and wonder if it is worth the effort.
One company that does get it is a software company 37signals who took its own experiences as a web startup and published them on their corporate blog and monetized that over 2 years into a $750,000 revenue stream by publishing and then repackaging it.
To provide some perspective they published a blog as part of their company called “Signal versus Noise” where a lot of their ideas originate driven by the creative process of writing an article which crystallizes their thinking.
How did they do it?
Step One:
They post articles which generate traffic. They make money off the traffic by running Deck ads in the sidebar. (They make a few thousand a month off “The Deck” ads.)
Step Two:
They bundled up the best blog posts about their software development philosophy and turned it into a PDF book called “Getting Real”. They sell the PDF for $19. (They have made a few hundred thousand dollars from the PDF)
Step Three:
They take the “Getting Real” PDF and turned it into a paperback at a print on demand publisher Lulu.com. They sell the paperback for $25 and they make a few thousand a month on royalties. (The paperback is currently ranked the 4th best seller on Lulu)
Step Four:
They took the content from “Getting Real” and produced a “Getting Real” conference series. They hold a few conferences a year and made about $50,000 per conference. 37signals has produced about 5 of these conferences.
So if you add this all up:
- $100,000 on The Deck ads
- $350,000 on the “Getting Real” PDF
- $65,000 on the “Getting Real” paperback
- $250,000 on the “Getting Real” conferences (before that they were called Building of Basecamp).
Total $765,000 over a few years off the same content repackaged in a variety of ways.
This content was simply about insight and ideas about how they run their business.
So there it is, over $750,000 from Blog entries, PDF, paperback, and conferences.
How could you adapt this model to your industry?
Image by thinkpanama