Sean D'Souza: Blogging - for the audience or the money?

Opinion

What should you do with your blog?

Some people say you should monetise your blog from the very start. Others say you would be better putting off the money and building an audience. So where do you start?

Let's split this into two distinct parts.

1) Is trust the primary factor?

2) Is monetisation something you should postpone?

Trust

The trust story is pretty simple. You start a website or blog and you put up great content. You create a personality. People start visiting your blog and soon enough you're starting to build an audience. All built on trust. That's how the story goes, anyway.

So it may be a good idea to tell you our "trust story" at this point.

We run our website at Psychotactics.com. And today we have loads of traffic and customers all over the world. But when we started our website we had nothing.

So I did what any sane person would do.

I created a factor of trust.

I started a website and created content that wasn't so much portfolio based, but rather information based. People came. They saw. And they signed up for the free newsletter.

Ten years on we're doing exactly the same thing. You may have heard of me, but the average casual person on the web has never heard of Psychotactics. And no matter how big and amazing you get, there's always a huge audience that doesn't know you at all. So the next 10, 20, 50 years will be spent in creating that factor of trust.

But how long do you fund that "non-profit" venture?

Some people will say you should take the time. Some people say you should postpone monetisation till later.

Should you postpone monetisation?

The answer is no.

There are several problems with non-monetisation.

First, there's no pre-written moment when you should monetise.

Even if you've built a great blog, and have outstanding support from your visitors, there's no real moment when you can mark in the sand as a "monetisation moment".

Most people monetise with whatever's convenient. So let's say someone else is selling a product/service or doing some launch and offers a generous affiliate fee, then you'll feel this pang to monetise. Or you'll do something like putting in some pay-per-click ads on your site.

The biggest problem with the monetisation debate isn't whether to monetise or not, but "how" to monetise. And most of us are at a loss to to work this one out.

Second, without monetisation you don't build sales skills.

There's a massive difference between writing articles and selling product. And without monetisation you don't learn how to sell products/services effectively.

If you monetise earlier, you're selling to a much smaller audience and you can afford to learn on the job and make mistakes. But the third reason is the easily the biggest reason you should monetise.

Many of your clients will not be around in future if you don't monetise.

When you sell a product, even if it's a low-cost product, someone is electing to buy that product.

Many of our clients who bought products/services from us in 2002 are still around today. The reason is simple. When the client is hungry for a product/service, if you don't have something in place, the client doesn't wait for you to "build your audience". They just go some other place where they can buy. It's easier to dismiss something that's free. And when the customers pay their hard earned money, they tend to consume the product/service and then if they like it, they go back for more of the same. This builds an ongoing chain of revenue, as well as respect for you. And yet many folks will tell you to build an audience first.

Building an audience is a back-breaking job. The average person builds a blog or website and hopes that traffic will come.

It doesn't. It never has. It never will. You have to find some wave and ride it to shore. Paddling your own way is close to impossible. If you wait forever to build that audience and then start the revenue system, you'd be hungry for a while. And that's soul-destroying.

You may never get to monetising anything at all. And if you ask me, that's a big risk to take.

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer. He is the author of The Brain Audit - Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't).

www.psychotactics.com