Day One at the summit. Some thoughts. A fair amount of the discussion today focused on how to make money from blogs. As individuals. Chris Pirillo talked about his various sites and how he uses ads and generates a good amount of dough. No one here wants to talk about actual money. Seems they’ve all got contracts with Google that prevent them from disclosing what they make. Someone asked Chris if he could pay his mortgage with what he makes from ads. He said he could pay everyone’s mortgage. Meaning the mortgage of everyone in the room. About 120 folks. Either mortgages in Seattle are ridiculously low (which I doubt) or Chris is pulling in a serious amount of dough each month from his blogs. He’s got staff to pay. He did, however, refuse to pay any of our mortgages.
Marc Canter, a big guy with a big voice was talking about Marqui, a conference sponsor best known for the fact that they pay bloggers to blog.
Molly—not a halfschlag—Holzschlag spoke about how just posting isn’t enough to drive traffic to your site. Of course, you do have to post regularly, but you also need to have comments but you’ve got to moderate those and she says that Trackback is better than Permalink but you’ve got to watch out for the spammers. Ah, the blight of the online world. She has coauthored a book on using Movable Type blog software, among many other books on web design and HTML.
And I think today is her birthday. Happy Birthday, Molly!
Links to speakers’ slides can be found here.