Friday, April 14, 2006

Twisted Knickers

Darren over at Problogger had another blogger ask him an interesting question about monetisation.
Danae owns a blog called Knickers. (Not necessarily worksafe as it is about lingerie). She wants to know how best to monetise it.

Here is her question from Darren's site:

Knickers is a product weblog that features beautiful lingerie with advice about what to wear, etc., and also has an ongoing interview series with lingerie designers and other professionals within the industry. I started Knickers because there was no resource like it on the web, no ‘lingerie heaven’ where women could go to find beautiful lingerie and learn about bra-sizing, and what suits their body type.

Knickers has been running for nine months now, and it’s getting to the point where the weblog needs to start monetizing properly, or it’s not going to be worth the amount of time I put into it. The main sources of revenue just now are Google ads and affiliate links, neither of which performing beautifully. I’m now seriously considering sponsorship for Knickers, but am concerned about the implications ‘will I lose credibility? Will I alienate other designers? Will new readers be confused as to whether I’m owned by the sponsor?’

I’ve looked around quite a bit for pro-blogging articles about sponsorship, but it’s usually only mentioned as one possible revenue stream, i.e. ‘or, you can get a sponsorship.’ I’d be really interested to hear from other bloggers who have done sponsorships, and to learn how they decided a price for the sponsorship, what their terms were, and how it’s working for them. I think an ideal sponsorship would be one that brings added value to the readers of the weblog, and would love to hear of creative ways bloggers have teamed up with sponsors to benefit their readers.

Thanks in advance for your insights!
There are a lot of very useful comments from other problogger readers. If you have a similar site then you may find some helpful tips here.

Or if you are able to add some advice or help Danae in ayway, I am sure that she would be grateful. Comment on Darrens post or directly on Danae's Knickers weblog.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:15 PM |