Money for nothing, and your blogging tools for free

Posted by stuart as , , , , , ,

(Was that guitar riff by Mark Knoppfler not one of the best ever? :-))

1. I follow a lot of bloggers in this money-making world, and look forward keenly to all your end-of-month profit and loss posts.
2. I’m quoting on a job at the moment to create a blog with inline MP3 streaming, and podcasting.
3. Ashleigh and I have been yacking a little of late about the idea of blog consulting to businesses. There’s been talk about setting up blogs and providing training for businesses in how to blog, and the benefits for said businesses of blogging.
4. The owners of sites like Digg and Technorati are making a shitload of money off the back of other people’s work.
5. Darren has an article over on Problogger about the new Job Board that he has set up, where he charges people US$50 per month to list a vacant blogging posititons.

So where am I going with this?
All the tools (except for domain names and hosting, although you can get that for free too!) that we use as bloggers are free. Even though we are all making sites from which we hope to generate income, we don’t even think about the fact that we rarely need to stick our hand in our pocket and pony up the reddies.

So how does this relate to the points above? I’ll show you (referencing each of the above):

1. When we write our end-of-month profit and loss posts, we aren’t writing things like “I paid $39 for a script to do this”, or “I paid $150 for a new blogging platform”, or “I paid $9.99 for that “recent comments” plugin for WordPress”- it’s all free! How much harder would we work if we’d actually paid for all the plugins we had installed on our blog, or had to pay a license to use WordPress? (Maybe this would slow down the flood of spam?). If we knew that there was real money on the line, I think we’d be a lot more dedicated.
2. With the job I’m quoting, I’ve spent ages looking for the right theme at themes.wordpress.org, and a plugin to do the podcasting and inline streaming at wp-plugins.net. Of course, these are all free. Why would I pay for plugins and themes when I can get them for free? This would impact on my bottom line. Of course, using the free WordPress for this project is a no-brainer!
3. As far as the blog consulting business idea, once again, as a consultant, one would have a suite of tools, such as the one I wrote about earlier this week, and guess what? They’re all free! I would imagine that a business idea like this would take on a whole new complex if we were paying for all the tools we use: It would make the work less profitable, hence the consultant would need to raise prices, which would probably take the idea out of the realm of fiscal realilty for a lot of small businesses.
4. Sites like Digg and Technorati make their money by re-packaging the content that others have written, and making it available to a wider audience. OF course, the blogger pays nothing for the privelidge, and the consumer gets access to all this information for free. So who pays? Advertisers.
5. Darren over at Problogger is always on the cutting edge. He has made some interesting points in his blog about charging people for the service of listing blogging job vacancies. He figures that if he charges a fee, people will automatically place an inherent value on the product. (I can vouch for this, when I try a new plugin for WordPress, if I can’t get it to work in about ten seconds, I bin it and go looking for another one with the same functionality. If I had paid for that original plugin, even just a couple of dollars, I would certainly work a lot harder to get it to work)

So what should we do about all this? Probably nothing. Maybe if we have a site which has become particularly succesful, we should set aside a percentage of the monthly earnings to donate to the authors of all the plugins and themes we use? Most of the authors have a paypal donate button on their sites, the $5 we slip them might encourage them to keep up the good (free) work.