A Great Example of a Business Blog That Created Multiple Income Streams
Signal Versus Noise is one of the best business blogs to emulate. It’s written by the team of 37signals. 37signals sells small business software.
In a recent blog entry, Jason Fried, the company founder, talked about the multiple income streams created by their company blog. He wrote:
Money One: A lot of our ideas originate on this blog. We post articles which generate traffic. We make money off the traffic by running Deck ads in the sidebar. We make a few thousand a month off The Deck ads.
Money Two: We bundled up the best blog posts about our software development philosophy and turned it into a PDF book called Getting Real. We sell the PDF for $19. We’ve made a few hundred thousand dollars from the PDF.
Money Three: We take the Getting Real PDF and turn it into a paperback at Lulu.com. We sell the paperback for $25 and we make a few thousand a month on royalties. The paperback is currently ranked the 4th best seller on Lulu.
Money Four: We took the content from Getting Real and produced a Getting Real conference series. We held a few conferences a year and made about $50K per conference. We’ve produced about 5 of these conferences.
Also, he didn’t talk about this, but if there are two links on top of the blog. One points to a job board and the other to a gig board. Those are two other income streams that were made possible because of their popular blog.
What about traffic?
Some of you may be thinking. 37signals’ blog has a lot of traffic. That’s why they can have multiple income streams.
Yes, that’s true. You do need traffic or your blog income streams will produce very little income.
However, if you’re producing quality content and marketing your blog consistently, your traffic will grow. It may take a while (6 months to 2 years) to build your traffic to respectable levels but the rewards are definitely worth it. You’ll increase sales and be able to create other profitable income streams.
