There is an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times Style magazine about blogging and the monetisation of blogs. For an ordinary person, this involves building a strong personal brand and a following, and then getting paid for sponsored posts.
Once the reach and audience is there, beauty and fashion bloggers can command huge fees because brands in this industry have huge budgets for advertising and marketing. As such, bloggers spend years creating content for free ,having to maintain huge determination throughout, trusting that in the end, they will get where they want to be.
This monetisation of a blog through content creation, some of which becomes charged for, is what I passionately believe in for my clients, especially the more well-known ones.
You see, a celebrity is the ultimate digital influencer. As Simon Chambers, director of Storm models, tells the magazine, when discussing how models such as Cara Delevigne charge for social media posts: ‘There is a media space that belongs to a person – it’s an asset – and if a brand wants to access that then it has to treat it like buying media. The cost grows as a girl’s following grows.’
Yet many celebrities are simply so busy with their day jobs, or talented in different creative areas that don’t include digital know-how, they haven’t realised the potential there is here and even if they don’t, don’t know how to make the potential a reality.
Yet celebrity has so many clear advantages over the normal blogger and so doing this is much easier than for ‘normal’ folk. Firstly, there is no need to begin this process by building a following. Most celebrities already have a following. A celebrity has no need to try and become an influencer as they already are an influencer. People already listen to what they have to say. Being a celebrity puts rocket fuel into the process.
Well-known people are also desired by the mass, traditional media. An online blogger may have a huge global reach in terms of numbers, but most struggle to get airtime on conventional media channels such as television and radio, or get column inches in print media and their associated websites, because the ‘old skool’ editors of these publications have no idea who these people are.
These forms of media may be going through change but they still offer large audiences, are considered trusted credible resources and as such have huge appeal to brands.
Consistent blogging (which would usually be a managed blog for which the content is created by a team working for that celebrity) enables a celebrity to straddle both the new and old media and gain from everything BOTH have to offer.
By applying the same principles that any blogger does, mainly engaging their following with regular content and thus themselves becoming a publisher with a media space, they can command high fees from sponsored posts (and sponsored social media) in the same way any other online publisher can.
And at the same time, they can position themselves in traditional media, via publicity, either giving exclusive interviews or creating content of a sort that gets picked up and used by the mainstream press. All of which only serves to drive even more people back to the blog, meaning the celebrity further benefits from increasing numbers hitting their website, seeing its great personal showcase, and being able to drive visitors towards such things as bookings, products and ticket sales. Merchandise and product licensing joint ventures would then start to appear…..
Together, this perfect storm of new and traditional media coupled with a strong personal brand and a ready made following creates the ideal head of steam for well-known people to get, do and be even more than they are already.
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