Jennifer Rice from Brand Mantra is exploring a new (for her) way of adding an income stream to her blog – by running ‘Webinars‘ on topics that she specializes in. She reveals her hopes for this new direction:
‘My master plan is to serve as a social-technology education platform for businesses. Included in social technologies are blogs, wikis, community forums, etc. I’ll be leading some of the seminars on big-picture issues, brand strategy implications, etc. and inviting specialists to co-host other sessions. At this point, future sessions will include Creating Community (co-hosted with Jake McKee, the Community Guy) and Business Blogging 101 (co-hosted with Jeremy Wright and Darren Barefoot from InsideBlogging).’
Jennifer is limiting seats in her webinars to between 15 and 30 and is charging between $150 to $300 per session which I think it pretty reasonable for someone of her caliber. I guess time will tell whether others think its a reasonable amount and if people are willing to pay for such a service – but I suspect its a model of adding an income stream to blogs that we’ll see more and more of in coming months.
I’ll be watching on with interest as to how it goes for Jennifer as I see some real possibilities with the model.
Read more at What’s Your Brand Mantra?: Brand Humanity Webinar Series
Hi Darren,
Jennifer is definitely on to a viable income stream here with her blog. I’m about to complete a successful small group blog coaching club that I conducted as a webinar/teleclass. Obviously your audience and topic will drive price but I can tell that she can make much more than what she’s charging.
I used Macromedia Breeze for my webinar it is a 6 week/1 day per/1 hour class ending next week.
Some people don’t recommend webinars because of the add complexity of user pc specs whereas teleclasses are pretty easy since everyone can pick up a phone and dial a number.
Webinar are more expensive to but I wanted to do something difference so with Breeze (better than Webx imo) we had audio, video, white boarding, document sharing…pretty robust system.
The income is a great way to stay afloat right now. Another way is to continually under promise and over deliver at work. If you make yourself indispensable, it is a lot harder for your boss to let you go!