Paid Content Is A Good Thing. Apparently.

A week or so ago I posted about free content being a good thing. But today I’m posting about an opposing view.

As many of us visit or subscribe to the same blogs you may well have caught sight of the new Brian Clarke (of copyblogger fame) site teachingsells.com? But if you haven’t, I recommend that you simply subscribe to the site and get a copy of the free pdf document. I didn’t bother until one of my favourite bloggers, Aaron Wall, gave it the nod today. It’s well worth the 15-20 minute first read.

There’s some obvious link bait headlining and content in it (suppose I’ve fallen for it of course by blogging about it!) but there is also some great thought provoking content too. Brian suggests that his reason for blogging is as an attraction strategy – I like that phrase and it’s why I started blogging about search marketing myself last year. As an aside, my own initial aims for publishing this blog (it used to be www.anotherjunction.com) were to:

• attract the attention of other blogging affiliates and search marketers
• join the community – to both share and learn useful information
• promote our search marketing company
• and a bit of me too, I blog

It isn’t my intention to make marginally significant money from this blog. Though as Brian says in his pitch:

To make money online, you?re always selling something?even if it?s just space on the
page.

That’s certainly true of course and what we’re all about on our commercial sites. Typically, on a site or page that includes content but no affiliate links I’d obviously consider monetising the page with adsense. Brian suggests that this method is flawed and is promoting his own view that you should charge for your content. I’m not in total agreement with his comment:

The people who do manage to make money with niche content and AdSense have to
be quite ruthless about getting people to click away as soon and as often as possible.
Beyond aggressive positioning of ad units that obscure the actual content, there is no
motivation to make the content engaging or even useful.

If you’re using adsense for commercial gain you do need people to click away but I’d argue that there is motivation to still publish content that is engaging or useful. But hands-up, on reflection I could do better on the engaging content front!

Don’t forget that Brian is concentrating on content that he believes can be paid for. He isn’t concentrating on earning money from things like credit cards, DVD rentals or mobile phones. My understanding that his proposed new platform is focusing on charging for information or intellectual knowledge. Free content or paid content aside, you still need eyes on pages …or at least eyes on your content. The latter is what Brian seems to be aiming at when he says:

When you have something to sell, you have leverage. You don?t necessarily need
traffic, because you can borrow someone else?s audience as long as you can offer that
publisher a compelling deal.

Knowledge is power perhaps.

Take a look at teachingsells and feel free to comment.