I’ve been telling authors for years that they need to blog, blog blog. Many authors are hesitant to do it, for a wide variety of reasons. Now, there may be some motivation to get authors started: advertising dollars.
According to this article, released yesterday, WordPress (the platform on which we build most of our author websites and blogs) has teamed up with Federated Media to give users the ability to place ads on their blogs.
The partnership will allow advertisers to find blogs that speak directly to their target audience and customize their ads to appear on those blogs.
There are millions of WordPress-based websites and blogs out there, and this will allow brands to reach the billions of eyeballs that look at them. Obviously, it will also help the bloggers to generate some revenue from their websites.
How this process will work is still unclear. No details have been released yet on whether or not the bloggers can seek out advertisers, or how the funds will be distributed between the companies and the bloggers.
Also, it is possible to run ads on blogs now, although I suspect this agreement will make the process a lot easier for bloggers who don’t have an in-house sales team.
The opportunity to have revenue coming in from your blog (in addition to book sales, of course), can be a huge difference-maker for authors. It can justify the cost of getting the site built, and it can motivate the authors to blog regularly. After all, no one is going to want to advertise on a site that hasn’t been touched in months.
I think this will be especially helpful for non-fiction authors, who tend to speak to a very specific audience. If, for example, you write about parenting, then your blog would clearly be geared towards parents. Get enough visitors on a regular basis and companies like Pampers or Toys ‘R Us may see your blog as a great medium through which they can reach their target audience.
I’m still waiting to hear more details on this agreement, but I’m hopeful that this could end up as another source of income for authors. Face it … no one needs it more.