The Sway – what Jason thought

Hannah blogged a few weeks ago about the fact the CJ sponsored the Sway. For those of you who don’t know, this is an event which is organised by the Skimlinks crew and is a meet up for anyone interested in blogging as a business and making money from social media. I attended the event with Florian and also spoke.

Hannah made me include this

The event was really well attended and had lots of great content (as you would expect ) but the thing which really came across from the many bloggers who contributed was the struggle between maintaining their editorial integrity and earning revenue from their sites. Underlying this was the fact that to bring value to readers involves a lot of work to keep content fresh which means that for it to be viable the efforts need to  be commercialised.

Sian Meades of Domestic Slutteraly actually based her ‘sway debate’ on this topic. The room was very split on the issue but there were a large number of bloggers who very much wanted to take the leap of faith to make their blog a full time job. With this in mind some suggestions were put forward by a number of people on ways to keep the user on the page and get them transacting. Using voucher codes was one of the suggestions due to the fact that offer-related terms make up such a large percentage of all searchers meaning that having offers on your site will increase traffic and conversion.

I obviously used the opportunity for a quick plug and let everyone in the room know that CJ have a voucher feed (sorry I couldn’t help myself!)

It will be interesting to see how this pans out over time. It is always nice to see emerging businesses becoming mature businesses – there a usually are few which crack the monetisation conundrum and lead the way.

As well as being interesting the event was also good fun and it was great to be involved.

So thanks for organising and well done. We look forward to the next one.