The First session I attended at Affiliate Summit featured Steve Hall, Murray Newlands, Ian Fernando, and my benefactor- John Chow. This session had these heavy hitting bloggers talking about how they make money with their blogs.
I am a bit partial to John Chow's model as I pretty much learned everything I know about blogging from him (he also payed for my Gold Pass to the conference). John reiterated his old mantra of "the money is in the list." John figures each person on his email list is worth $10. He gets 200-300 subscribers a day. Do the math!
Steve Hall has another approach. He sells ads on his B2B site- "old school" style. He actually has ad sales people selling space for him and he has advertisers approach him. He also does sponsored posts. Branded content or content that has been written by brands (ie companies that wish to sell something) is also a growing source of content on his site.
Ian's model is a bit different- he leverages his content with affiliate links and PPA programs. He wants his users to have a connection between his content and the ads/affiliate links on his site.
The main thrust of the session was to keep the monetization in context with the content. Whether it is ads, affiliate links or email capture, the monetized portion of the site should not distract from the content. It's the old journalistic dogma of "the medium is the message/the medium is the massage" at work. It's just a new way of presenting it.
