Twelve Business Models for Blog Technologies

Traditional Businesses Leveraging Blogs

NOTE: None of these first three typically represent an investment opportunity, but we provide them here as a foundation for some of the others below.

1. Individual virtual presence ? the use of a blog to enhance your visibility and professional reputation. Benefits include marketing, job search, and business development. Example: www.Teten.com/brain-food , which promotes Teten Recruiting and Nitron Advisors.

2. Corporate virtual presence ? the creation of blogs by employees to connect with customer, partners and others. Benefits include one-to-one-marketing, market feedback, and humanizing the firm. Example: Robert Scoble?s blog (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011)

3. Using blogs to improve existing processes ? Many companies are using blogs to replace email newsletters, mailing lists, discussion forums, and other existing communication tools. Example: SchwimmerLegal.com/blog, the blog for a law firm which attributes 20% of their revenues to clients who have come directly from their blog. David Teten?s independent research firm, Nitron Advisors, uses blogs as a marketing vehicle and as a rich mine of sources.

Selling Blog Technology

4. Technology sales focused on individuals ? generally, blog software and newsreaders. Revenue is based on a combination of one-time licensing and monthly fees. Examples: Six Apart (publishers of Movable Type), Radio Userland, NewsGator, AmphetaDesk.

5. Technology sales to the enterprise ? blogging tools with an emphasis on the corporate market. Examples: Socialtext, SilkBlogs, 21publish.

Media Businesses Using Blogs

6. Blog-based media ? publishers who use blogs as their technological infrastructure. Revenue is typically from advertising. Examples: About.com, Creative-Weblogging.com, Corante, Gawker Media, WeblogsInc.com.

7. Premium content ? the use of blogs to deliver subscription-based content. Examples: Justin Hitt (Iunctura.com), Graphic Communications World (Quoinpublishing.com), DaringFireball.net.

8. Online communities ? Blog-centric online communities are similar in business model to forum-centric communities. Revenue is typically made through a combination of advertising and fees for premium services. Examples: 20six, Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, hi5, Userland, Flickr.

Peripheral Services

9. Enabling advertising to blog audience ? tools that allow bloggers to receive a share of what advertisers pay for advertising on their site. Examples: Google AdWords/AdSense, BlogAds, PubSub, Feedburner, Waypath Blender. Also, many of the blog-based media listed above perform this same functionality by allowing individual bloggers to join the blog network. For example, Mark Cuban?s Blog Maverick is a member of the Weblogs, Inc. network.

10. Data about the blogosphere ? tools for making better use of the many blogs out there, including news readers, aggregators, search engines, and other data analysis tools. Revenue is based on a combination of advertising and fees for premium services. Examples: Technorati, BlogShares.com, BlogCensus.net, Blogdex.net, Bloglines, http://Blo.gs

11. Consulting ? working with organizations to make more effective use of blogs for both internal knowledge management and externally-facing communications. Examples: Stowe Boyd, Lee LeFever, Judith Meskill.

12. Education ? providing mass-market interactive training and published books and other materials for learning to make effective use of blogs. Examples: Scott Allen, Rebecca Blood, Biz Stone, John Batelle, Kynn Bartlett.

http://www.onlinebusinessnetworks.com/blog/2004/10/05/twelve-business-models-for-blog-technologies