Day: September 17, 2004

It seems unlikely that writing, hosting or contributing to a blog will make you rich. There are some limited revenue opportunities from advertising and no doubt we’ll eventually see a new generation of professional bloggers, but it’s not going to generate another gold rush.

However, there seem to be a growing number of indirect revenue opportunities, even for PR.

Steve Rubel’s firm Cooper Katz has picked up a new client as a direct result of his blogging efforts.

In a story in PR Week, it appears that PubSub were impressed with Rubel through his blog and a subsequent meeting with him at the BlogOn conference.

So congratulations to Steve.  A good news story, that illustrates that while the potential of direct cash for blogging is limited, there are definitely indirect business opportunities.

Footnote:

• Thanks to Keith O’Brien over at PR Week for the PubSub news.
• I see a new Blog awards competition has been launched. The BOBs (Best of Blogs) are being run by Deutsche Welle, a German broadcaster. (Thanks to Neville Hobson for the link)

RSS is a fantastic technology that has the potential to save a lot of time, particularly for PR people who need to monitor multiple news sources whether they are magazines, newspapers blogs or a combination.  However RSS is still in its early stages and it’s still not widely understood outside of technical and weblog circles. (In fact you could argue it’s not widely appreciated in the technical community at this point either).

Dee Rambeau has a weblog on business communication and he points to a very interesting piece from Robin Good on some sample applications for RSS.

Rok Hrastnik: The number one problem RSS publishers are facing is the lack of knowledge about RSS. What in your mind are the best ways to present RSS to your existing subscribers and get them to start using it, and of course “subscribe” to their feed?

I think that the best way to expose RSS to new users is by way of providing them with something that they have not seen before, that is highly useful for them, and that they could not do without.

So what you do is to create RSS newsfeeds on highly specialized topics and you promote and make these feeds accessible from as many news aggregators, distributors and syndicators as possible.

The more your RSS newsfeed is a specialized information channel on a specific topic the more readers can appreciate its uniqueness and value. The more this is just another channel for distributing your rants the more confusion and the less appreciation you will get.