For my latest blog post, I have decided to interview a street style photographer and blogger on the ways to monetize your personal blog. Dana Balch, a junior from Alpharetta majoring in Public Relations, has created Athens Street Style, a personal blog showcasing the fashion style of Athens residents and students. Since its launch in March 2012, her blog has had over 70,000 page views and 3,000 unique visitors. Dana was also featured in an MTV short called Localities where she was presented as "the expert of Athens' Fashion". Since then, several boutiques have reached out to be featured on her blog in exchange for promotional items.
Sarah: What was your goal when you started your personal blog?
Dana: As a PR student, I thought that I needed to get involved in this field but since I had a weird schedule I decided that I wanted to be my own boss and created something from scratch.
S: You now work with 3 or 4 people at all time, why did you decide to make a team?
D: Because I had this idea that having only one person's point of view wouldn't be representative of the Athens community. Also, when you have more photographers, you are able to create more content and faster.
S: Why not involve more people and make it like a small business?
D: If you involve too many people, the quality of the blog can easily be at risk. I mean think about having a lot of people accessing the blog and posting whatever they want..to me, it is more about quality than quantity.
S: Tell me about the times retailers and magazines approached you.
D: First the Red&Black reached out and did an article about the blog. Then we decided to go bigger and pitched Teen Vogue who featured one of the persons working on the blog on a spotlight section. Then came MTV with their shorts. After that, we did giveaway for Puddleduck paper company
S: Did it work well?
D: The giveaway wasn't a huge success because it surprisingly didn't bring a lot of contestants, mostly because I believe that it wasn't the right fit for our blog. Also, it is always somewhat difficult to coordinate when you're dealing with third-parties. We were also approached by a sunglasses company who offered to give us sunglasses to giveaway in exchange for writing an article. After debating it and seeing that Puddleduck wasn't that successful, we decided to turned the offer down as it really didn't align with our blog's style.
S: How often do you get requests?
D: I think about once a month. After working at one of the local downtown boutiques, I realized that a lot of them have not yet started to use social media as a way to publicize their businesses. Once they find out how much power it has, I'm sure they will be using it more often.
S: What's your goal until you graduate and after?
D: For now, I want to maintain our niche audience even though our scope has broaden. I may want to make myself a bit more visible even if our SEO has improved tremendously because of more specific descriptions and people come from Google a lot more than in the past. As for after graduation, I don't think I will want a predecessor but I will keep my page up.
Here is a link to Dana Balch's website and tumblr:
http://www.athensstreetstyle.com/
http://athentic.tumblr.com/
Well YouTube has found another way to make money off of people who also want to make money from YouTube! What a great win-win relationship. The way it works is a user needs to activate YouTubbe analytics and for each 10k views, the socialebrity will make around $30. Now multiply it by the number of videos and include the number of views each of them have..that's like more than a full time job salary over here for each video! These guys pretty much make more money doing the things they like and posting it on a site than most people make doing something they'd rather not. C-R-A-Z-Y!
But let's take a step back here, before they had all of this handed out to them, they had to creatively market their channels, making them marketers after all! They have had people following their channels like they are following a show on TV, making these viewers loyal customers.
