Making money from free content

Making content monetisation easier

In the publishing world, there is a movement towards providing free content to readers, customers, audiences, fans and followers, call them whatever you like, which is here to stay whether publishers like it or not.

This scares publishers, understandably, because their content is what brings in the revenue and, to give it away for free would seem like madness. Some publishers provide their content for free in an 'open access' scenario where they actually want to get as many people it as possible so they can sell them other products or services. An increasing number of academic publishers are pursuing this model. But, for many publishers this not feasible, particularly if they publish books.

However, there is a substantial number of publishers, both large and small, that provide content for free and want to or need to make money out of this somehow. For large publishers of, say, newspapers like the Daily Telegraph, or The Sun, they make money from selling advertising on their websites and from commissions from manufacturers or retailers of products they review. Small publishers such as bloggers, need to make money in the same way from reviewing products on their blogs. They get commissions through affiliate schemes.

But, one of the realities is that signing up to affiliate schemes and creating custom links to the products reviewed in the blog or article can be time consuming. And, if you don't create a custom link so that the retailer or manufacturer receiving the lead from your website and the customer buys, they won't be able to pay you a commission. It's boring to do and can take ages to write one review.

However, there are some great solutions out there for affiliate marketing which take away all of the hassle of creating custom links so the publishers can get on with writing good content, publishing it and generating income. One such solution is provided by Skimlinks (Skimlinks ) which has a system which does all of the dull but important work for you so that you just focus on writing content and reaching out to your audience.

So, let's say a blogger is writing a review about a new laptop from Fujitsu, the Fujitsu Lifebook AH531 Laptop, which is on offer at eBuyer. All they have to is write the review  as a new post in their blog. Then, having simply installed  software into their blogging platform (e.g. Wordpress or Blogger), they post their review and the Skimlinks software automatically inserts custom links into their post and provides price comparisons into the post too so that readers know where they can get the best deal.

With this type of technology available to all types of publishers, suddenly, the scope for making money out of free content becomes that little bit easier. And, after all, writing great content and providing what your readers want is what really counts. Cutting out unproductive work is vital and Skimlinks is one way to make your work count.