How To Make Money Session at BloggerCon IV - I'm There

The BloggerCon IV schedule has been announced. There are some interesting topics listed, but one caught my eye: How to Make Money led by John Palfrey. He’s written his introductory post which is worth a read. In it he states:

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution.

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I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”

Source: John Palfrey, “The ‘How to Make Money” Session at Bloggercon”

Naturally, I’m planning to attend this session. If anyone’s tried to figure out how to make money from blogging it’s certainly me - I’m building an entire company that helps bloggers make money.

At the same time, though, I’m somewhat conflicted. I seem to recall some time ago, at a previous BloggerCon, that Dave Winer openly told someone (Chris Nolan I believe), that she didn’t want to make money from her blog, she wanted to make it from the various things that come from having a blog (consulting, gigs, jobs - hey, aren’t those all the same?).  But I could be wrong.

It also strikes me as odd that, considering there are people trying to develop solutions in this arena (many more than just me)  that their knowledge and a dialogue with those audiences might be extremely relevent.  Aren’t the folks that go to BloggerCon largely the people at the top of the game (present company excluded) or otherwise already monetizing in some way?

Just a bit confusing - but I’m glad to see it regardless.