Blog Monetization Without Advertising

Is it possible to monetize your blog, website or digital presence without advertising? Certainly it is, but only in certain contexts. Consultants or businesses can focus their energies on providing thought leadership and educational posts with the thought that interested parties will reach out to them to hire if and when they need the help. The organic content leads to search engine results which leads to traffic which leads to leads, and so on.

Put yourself in the shoes of the professional blogger or writer who doesn’t make ends meet with consulting or free-lance services for a moment, though. They almost have to depend on either online sales of what they write, often in the form of e-books and paid email subscriptions, or some sort of advertising as revenue. Affiliate advertising is enormously popular among this set and has proven a lucrative career for many online entrepreneurs.

But as audiences become desensitized to advertising, perhaps even antithetical to it, and the all-important conversion and click-through rates dwindle, what can individuals do to continue to drive revenue?

These are the questions we asked ourselves at CafePress a few months ago. (Disclosure – I’m an executive at CafePress. This post is about something we’ve launched. It’s cool, though. Keep reading.) Certainly, CafePress offers an opportunity for anyone to monetize their content — image or written — by placing it on any number of products. You can upload a picture you took of your family, a pet or sunset and turn it into a mouse pad, shower curtain, canvas wall art, wall clock and more. You can pull that funny Tweet you posted yesterday and make it a bumper sticker, poster or T-shirt, too.

So as we asked that question — how can we make it easier for people to monetize their content without just asking them to slap an affiliate ad on their blog — we landed on what we think might be a pretty neat idea: The PressIt Button.

The PressIt button allows you to apply a class to any image you have on your website and make any text on your blog or website active to be placed on CafePress products. When you set an image to be “Press-able” a little, green “PressIt” button appears in the upper corner of the image. You click it and a carosel of products with that image appears. Your audience can then buy something with the image if they so choose.

Photographers and graphic artists now have an easy way to productize their content!

But the button also appears when anyone visiting your website highlights any text on your site. The button appears in the upper corner of the highlight. If clicked, the carosel loads with products containing that word or phrase on them.

Here’s a little introductory video to show you what it looks like.

The WordPress plugin is available here. The JavaScript and other information can be found at the PressIt info page. We’d love for you to give it a try, of course.

But now back to the meat of the discussion: How can bloggers and non-profits and other companies monetize their online content in creative ways? Not everyone will want or need print-on-demand solutions to allow their content to be productized. But not everyone is a consultant or free-lancer either. How are you monetizing your online presence?

As always, the comments are yours.