VIDEO: Learn from Shoemoney, my daughter, Duane and Steve (oh, and me too!) how to monetize your blog
I’m in NYC for SMX East which starts tomorrow and I’m really looking forward it. But I’m also gearing up for Blog World Expo in a couple weeks. That’s because my daughter Chloe Spencer, the Neopets blogger, is going to be speaking there on a panel called “Are You Getting The Most Money Out Of Your Blog As You Can?” along with heavy hitters Dave Taylor, Tim Jones, and Chris Pirillo. The session is scheduled for Friday, October 16 at 11:30am.
Thinking about this panel reminded me of another panel that Chloe was a part of, also on the same topic, last year at DMA08. The session was called “Blog Monetization: From Soup to Nuts” and the heavy hitters that time were: Jeremy Schoemaker, Duane Forrester, Steve Spangler, and me. And thinking about that session reminded me that I had neglected to post the video of the session to this blog. Doh! So here it is…
The order of speakers was:
- me, founder of Netconcepts, co-author of The Art of SEO (coming out this month!)
- Chloe, teen blogger and AdSense entrepreneur, Huffington Post blogger/contributor
- Jeremy, a very successful Internet entrepreneur and Technorati top 100 blogger (Shoemoney.com is his blog)
- Duane, author of Making Money with Your Blog and the upcoming book Turn Clicks into Customers
- Steve, inventor, successful entrepreneur (founder of a science toy catalog company), science educator, keynote speaker, television personality, blogging CEO… Quite the Renaissance man!
The monetization approaches covered AdSense, affiliate, and much more. Lots of great tips, tricks, tactics, etc. If this video doesn’t help you make more money, I’ll give you a full refund! 
A blog can be an asset that benefits you personally. It can supplement your income, provide for your retirement, build up the kids’ college fund, or whatever. So I encourage you to study this video, because this could be your ticket — your ticket out of the rat race and into the world of passive income.
Here is my Powerpoint and Chloe’s.
Now go make some money! Or more specifically, go build yourself a passive income stream!
The Intersection of Social Media and SEO
I just got off the panel on The Future of Search at Search Engine Strategies San Jose. There was a bit of discussion about social media and whether SEO will still be relevant if users are spending their online time inside of social networks like Facebook and YouTube. The consensus from the panel was that SEO will still be alive and well, and that social networks offer just another venue within which searchers can conduct their queries. That makes the large social networks like Facebook into search engines. YouTube is now the #2 search engine, after all (there are more search queries on YouTube than Yahoo). Yesterday’s Mashable article, The New Search War: Google vs Facebook highlights the threat to Google that Facebook poses. It’s an interesting read. The point in all this: optimizing for better visibility in search engines, whether Google or Facebook, isn’t going away.
Not only does social media provide another venue for searching, it serves as an invaluable tool to the SEO practitioner, specifically for link baiting. It’s link building on steroids. The value lies specifically in the social news and social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, etc.). If you make it to the front page of Digg, the visibility you get in front of the “linkerati” (e.g. bloggers and journalists) is invaluable. I describe a process for seeding link bait into social media in my Search Engine Land article The Social Media Underground. A word of caution: be respectful of the social community. Don’t submit junk, don’t spam your friends with vote requests, and don’t bait-and-switch.
A few months back at the eMetrics Summit, I was interviewed by Web Marketing Today about this whole process, and some other things. Here is the video: