I had the pleasure of appearing on the air with Chris Malta and Robin Cowie of the Entrepreneur Magazine eBiz Show the other day. We talked about how to monetize you blog. The show was broken up into three segments, which can be listened to here.

Segment 1 – Mp3 or read transcript.
Segment 2 – Mp3 or read transcript.
Segment 3 – Mp3 or read transcript.

Blogging is one of the biggest trends on the internet right now, but a blog can do more than give you an online voice. It can also generate significant revenue for your ebusiness. Joining us today is Jim Kukral, founder of BlogKits.com, to share different ways you can turn your blog into a serious income stream.

It was a huge honor to be on this show for so many reasons. First off, Chris Malta (CEO) and Robin Cowie (President) of Worldwide Brands are amazingly smart people who I admire. Secondly, I am an avid read of Entrepreneur magazine.

If you haven’t heard of WorldwideBrands.com, it’s The Internet’s recognized leader in EBiz Product Sourcing. They connect online sellers with highly qualified wholesale suppliers. They have a great product that I need to blog about soon as well.

Today over at my BlogKits blog I wrote about how 5 of today’s big top bloggers are leaving close to half a million bucks on the table by not monetizing their blogs. The piece was interesting because I enlisted the feedback from several expert online marketers who provided detailed advice and projections about the topic.

Even Seth Godin himself left a comment on the blog entry, check it out.

If Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Guy Kawasaki & Seth Godin monetized their blogs and let an online marketing expert professionally optimize them, they could collectively earn half a million dollars a year. Or at least that’s what BlogKits estimates, along with some other top online marketing/blogging experts. View all of that data below.

Oh yeah, I launched the BlogKits BIG Blog $$$ Survey today. If you have a blog, take a minute to add your thoughts?

Have a blog?
Please click to take short survey.

Got a call from a reporter earlier in the week who came across my BlogKits Blog Honor badges and wanted to talk about fake blogs, or flogs. The piece he put out ran in the Sacramento Bee, you can read it here. I come in at the end.

But that’s not going far enough for some in the blogosphere. Jim Kukral, a blogger and online journalist, has created graphical badges for bloggers to post on their sites, promising readers they aren’t stealthily selling their opinions to marketers.

“We have hundreds of people already using the badge voluntarily,” Kukral says. “It’s OK to try to make money with a blog, but not fool you. The whole reason blogs work is based on people being honest with each other.

“It’s like sitting in a room with your friend having a conversation. If your friend found out that you’re lying and were being paid by Sony to go to talk about the product, what’s your friend going to say to you? They’ll say, ‘Why are you pitching me things?’ You won’t have that friend long.”

Today’s show was just me, all alone. If you didn’t catch it live like the rest, you can listen to the archives here. Reminder, their won’t be a show next week due to the holidays, but I will pick it back up on Jan 02, 2007.

SHOW NOTES:

I spoke about my latest quick media hit website/story at www.fanprotest.com.

I also talked about my latest idea “Donut Juice” :) Hopefully Dunkin Donuts will be sending me a check soon.

The rest of the show was a stretch for time. We need more callers!

I fully expected a big-time PR agency like Edelman to bank hard into the turn and speed up when they got bumped with this entire Walmart fiasco.

To me, this wasn’t something you tried to let fade away as a tactic. But then again, what do I know? I’ve never run a madison avenue type PR firm. However, I know bloggers, and blogs, and I know how they think/work, and this was a blogging issue. So perhaps maybe I’m even more qualified than they are?

I contacted Richard Edelman shortly after the story broke to present an idea to him, which he replied and said he thought it was good and he forwarded it to Steve Rubel for consideration, but I never heard back about.

At the time I had just released my BlogKits Blog Honor Badges, built to help raise awareness for bloggers who want to be able to make money, but who won’t try to fool their readers in the process.

My idea: Let’s work on an official set of badges for PR firms, independent of the WOMMA, who by the way is now considering kicking Edelman out of.

If done right, this would have been, could have been, a classic lemons to lemonade story. Instead of hiding from the story, why not embrace it, take your lumps and do something to proactively make a change for the better? Something that proves you are repentent.

There’s always a way to make things better if you can think creatively. Would this have worked? Not sure, but done right it would have won back the bloggers. But maybe they simply don’t care about them?