If you have a commercial website or a network of them, you probably spend a lot of time chasing up advertising on the internet. You may also use an agency or two which take 40-50pc of the income they generate.

Maybe it’s getting a bit harder out there now, with PageRank depressed and an almighty credit funk hanging in the air like a bad smell.

Here’s an alternative. Depending on the topic(s) of your site(s), try placing small display ads in the business section of your local newspaper or trade press.

Ask readers to consider internet advertising. You might remind them that it’s very competitive with comparable colour display stuff in magazines, or text lines in the small ads.

I stumbled on this field while following up our plans for a local West Country subNetwork. While assessing the potential for local ads, I saw how many national and international companies are present here in Devon. There are also lots of small businesses that trade internationally, often selling produce online, and also bags of computer and tech SMEs, some on the new technology park set up by the university.

It occurred to me that this was a treasure trove of potential advertisers for the Syntagma network, let alone a dedicated local one. As a source of text-link ads and 125s — which we haven’t picked up on yet, but intend to — it’s a veritable goldmine.

Advertisers don’t have to be based in the U.S. — a common assumption online, mainly because volume-wise it’s such an enormous market. But, for a middling sized digital network, there is literally huge potential in your local area.

I can happily pass on this piece of intelligence because there are no digital networks based in the West Country of England — that I know of.

Maybe they’ll all come jumping out of the undergrowth now.

I’m coming late to this meme which peaked yesterday. Basically, it’s another example of the cultural cringe and sense of inferiority still found in folk who make — or try to make — their livings online.

Jeremy Wright takes the prize as the best respondent with his highly-informative Ensight post on how much the unionization of a blog network would cost. #

On digital networks in particular, the problem arose when someone called them an “industry” — a certain J. Wright of Toronto in fact. But given the quality of his post, we’ll forgive him for that.

If blog networks really are an industry then clearly they must comply with industrial standards embedded in law. But not by any stretch of the imagination can they be put alongside General Motors, Rolls Royce or Microsoft. They are a sector at best — a branch of the Content Producers Guild, which is a bunch of disparate individuals in most cases, not public joint-stock companies.

Jeremy’s post, though, covered all the exits. As I’ve written here many times, there just isn’t enough money in online, original content creation to comply with every jurisdiction where you may have bloggers. At peak, Syntagma had writers in nine different countries. I have difficulty keeping up with our own laws, let alone the world’s legislative extravagances. Around 4000 new regulations for business were handed down from Cloud Nine (Parliament and Brussels) last year alone. Most just pile rigidities on top of complexity.

However, there are still some ragged-trousered half-bakes around who consider the Web as a substitute for the old Soviet Union. At Performancing, no less, someone’s even writing about “collectives”. Stick that red flag in the washing machine, you may need it before long.

The internet is about individuality, not collectivization. We have enough of that drab science in the real world, thank you very much.

I’m all for open source and charity. But they should never be forced down people’s throats or the best part of humanity will be choked off at birth.

The Syntagma Story continued.

The word you most hear in connection with blogging is “passion”. Write about what you’re passionate about, is the general counsel given to new bloggers. Is that good advice? It’s now so engrained in the folklore of professional blogging as to be almost unchallengable.

I’m going to be counter-intuitive about this because, as a network owner of nearly two years standing, I’ve learnt a thing or two about passion. I’ve also found that situations aren’t always what they seem.

If you’re passionate about something, say, cats or Minoan amphora, you really have to be more than just knowledgeable about them. You must also be a very good writer — someone who can express the full depth and breadth of your ideas and well-stocked mind and carry them intact into other people’s consciousness.

Alas, very few are. Most are people who fizz for a while, then burn out when their efforts come to nothing. I call them Catherine Wheels.

At the commercial network level, bloggers who apply for jobs do want to make money. Why else would they apply? On the other hand, they also want to write about what interests them, and are often encouraged to do that.

How many times have I heard, “I want to write about Etruscan architecture” or some such niche. “Do you want to make money?”, say I, in my usual mercenary way. “Well, I don’t want to sell my soul, if that’s what you mean”, they reply. “But,” say I, “do you want to make money?”

Of course, they do, but they don’t want to admit it as baldly as that.

Almost all newbie bloggers are schizoid by nature. They really, really, really want to earn money, but they also want to preserve “the integrity of their art”. I usually remind them that William Shakespeare was constantly being chased for debt and even defaulted on his tax payments.

Of course, you can use a blog as a stage to perform on — if you are your own product. Selling yourself is a good way to use weblog software. But most blog writers want to earn cash from the act of writing the blog itself, and that requires focus, not passion or self-indulgent choices of subject matter.

Take books as an example. Books are one of my own passions. I’ve tried writing about them online and selling them on affiliate terms with Amazon and others. It just doesn’t work. Local stores will undercut you on the bestsellers — supermarkets now offer huge discounts — and long tail stuff is too thin a gruel to live on.

Just reading a book to review takes a minimum of three hours. How many can you do in a working day? Not more than one realistically. So passion is not enough.

Unfocused bloggers need to ask themselves three questions :

1. Do I want to spend a lot of time writing about my fave subject irrespective of whether it makes money or not?

If the answer is Yes, then they don’t belong in the commercial sector.

2. Can I become a thought leader in a monetizable and lucrative niche?

Assuming the answer is No, go to question 3 — because a network can’t gamble on someone turning into an Om Malik or Michael Arrington :

3. How can I make money from the work I intend to put into writing online?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is the point at which a rookie become marketable and usable for a commercial network.

Although we’ve had many site failures at Syntagma Media — and author failures too — we have turned round a lot of failing sites — and authors — by changing the emphasis, usually in the direction of big-ticket products and services, or high-end reportage and commentary.

Like everything else, it’s about professionalism and focus. The passionate, unfocused blogger is not a useful factor in a successful operation. Mainstream media use authoritative and reassuring voices in their presentation. That’s not accidental.

Passion would be so out of place.

With internet advertising increasing rapidly, the need for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big Ad Lite service has become obvious, especially to users of weblog technology. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. [...]

Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

The Syntagma Story (continued)

Straws in the wind are important signals for digital farmers. They tell them crucially which way the wind is blowing, its strength, and something about the season/cycle.

There are now a lot of straws in the wind for digital networks (or, for purists, blog networks). BlogNetworkWatch no longer covers blog networks. It’s become a sort of mini Blog Herald. Many networks have shut up shop or are quietly getting on with their business underneath the radar.

So what is the state of the digital network business in these apparently doldrum conditions? As I’ve been writing here for a time, waiting for a knock on the door from the Business Development Officer of Yahoo/AOL/Google, whatever, is a sterile career move, and always was.

When Jason Calacanis announced Weblogs Inc was doing $1m a year on Adsense, followed quickly by its sale to AOL for $25m and a seat on the board, networks of content providers became the new Klondike. Lots of people moved in, including Weblog Empire (Duncan Riley) and b5media (Jeremy Wright and other names from the starry firmament). I worked for both before moving quickly on to form Syntagma Media.

Even then there were two ways you could play a digital network :

1. Build infrastucture and content platforms quickly so it stands out against the competition. Go for size and scale before anything else. Then, with a bit of luck, the BDO will come knocking on your humble door. Bingo! Blogging bliss.

2. Optimize the network for income — remember WIN was making $1m a year from Adsense alone before it sold out.

Here at Syntagma we followed Route 1, aiming always to reinvest income in exchange for size (55 sites and rising), and pushing the envelope into new fields, like network magazines and large retail portals. The business plan also included a move into IP-TV in 2008.

However, a major rethink has been forced on us through a number of events. Not the least is a lucrative publishing offer landing on my lap and, yes, straws in the wind. There are no big buyers of digital networks out there now, and even those that are sold have to settle for a bit upfront followed by a share in the income thereafter — in effect turning the owner into a salaryman of the buyer.

The really interesting point though, is that once you go from Route 1 and start exploring Route 2, something highly beneficial emerges. When you stop pouring all of your treasure into endless expansion, you discover that you can start paying yourself a handsome income just by running the network as a normal business, capping the size and scale, and going for quality and depth, rather than extension and constant revolution.

A network like Syntagma can easily pay its owner a six-figure salary (and rising) from a steady-as-she-goes policy of improvement and quality delivery. That assumes the business is around two-years old (we’re two in October) and has a bunch of mature inventory.

In the end, what you get out of a project is more important than prestige, size, or future bonanzas, real or imagined — try explaining it to your bank manager.

So that’s the subtle shift I’ve made in the running of Syntagma. From a network that, at its peak, employed 15 authors, with five vacancies outstanding, to a trim 30 to 40 sites with maybe six high-quality freelances working. We are now a medium-sized digital publisher aiming for depth and quality. One that pays its owner a decent salary, allowing him to spend time on the book deals.

I’m guessing that many network owners have already come to the same conclusion. It’s not astro science after all. If Route 1 seems like a distant dream, even a total mirage, then Route 2 holds some surprises in store. It’s the old bootstrapper’s adage that, the lower your costs, the less you have to turnover to get into the comfort zone. Syntagma is now officially a Route 2 business. Our motto is :

Mind you, if any BDOs are in the area, do drop into Syntagma Towers for a cup of tea. (The champagne has already been auctioned off).