Nick Cernis has a lengthy and highly infomative post at Put Things Off – The End of Free Content where he discusses the future of online content monetization. Or at least, what is going to happen as newspapers flop “like a wet pancake in the wind.”

The most interesting model for making money with your content is that of mixing it with your existing content:

I believe that paid content and free content can peacefully co-exist online — the answer isn’t to adopt an all or nothing business model. As such, I’m not proposing an end to all free content. Just some of it.

What about search engines?

Some people will be put off by protecting content because they’ll lose search traffic that they might have got. My advice is not to worry about it too much. Just provide a summary of your paid content openly in a dedicated page about that product.

Besides, search engines have been piggybacking your free content to make money for years.

What type of content sells best?

From my experience so far, the content that people will pay for falls into one of these categories:

* It solves a problem. (How-to guides, tutorials, screencasts, video info…)
* It entertains. (Music, poetry, short stories, novellas…)
* It provides current, valuable, inside information. (Reports, survey data, tips…)
* It helps people to make money. (Without being too trashy.)
* It makes people look better in the eyes of their peers or customers. (Project management web apps, for example.)

I’d like to add to this list, if I may be so bold.

People will pay for content if:

There is so much free content available on the internet that it seems impossible that anyone would pay for your stuff. To a large extent this is true, in that there is a lot of very accessible information. However, a lot of it is somewhat inaccessible. Or vague. Or less-than-trustworthy. Or so scattered that it takes forever to pull the nuggets of gold from the 10,000,000 search engine results.

As Seth Godin so wisely says, “People are searching for meaning” and it can be so very hard to find. The smart people are the ones that are building their business sites around that need. Or re-purposing their own content in order to make a product that sells. Leo Babauta wrapped up all of his productivity tips into a wildly successful e-book called Zen-to-Done. You can click that link, and follow the read crumbs to get all of the info contained in the e-book, or just shell out the $9 and buy it all aggregated together.

I did the same thing with my own 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context e-book. Except that it is free, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless it has had nearly 5,000 downloads and quite a few of those people have come back to me, asking if they could pay me to help them take the next steps toward implementing those habits. (Of course the answer is “Yes”).

There are a ot of bloggers doing this, and now Cernis brings up an emerging model that make work even better:

The new model: micropayments

The new model is simple. Continue to provide free content just as you are, but sell your more unique content for a small one-off fee or ‘micropayment’.

You choose what you sell, your audience still gets a stream of free stuff, plus they get to support you by buying paid content if it’s relevant to them. Hopefully, everyone wins.

With me so far? Read on to learn how to make it work.

Micropayment Q&A

Hang on! Does micropaid content as a business model work?

Sure! The truth is that it’s already catching on fast. Micropayment is the same concept that’s rapidly turning Apple’s App Store into a billion dollar business, and it’s been trickling down to other forms of content for a while.

A great case in point is Peepcode, which sells video and PDF tutorials for programmers at $9 a shot. They’ve chosen to only market paid content, but I think it’s a model that would work well with free content mixed in too.

This is a model that could save the newspaper business. Not the actual printing of newspapers mind you, I think that is dead. But most of the news ‘outlets’ could take a two-part strategy to get back in the black:

1. Get back to responsible journalism. Stop taking sides and present the news. Restoring credibility could go a long way toward bringing back customers.
2. Give away the basics on the website. Offer more in-depth coverage with context and meaning to paid subscribers, and offer to break those subscriptions into niches – sports, business, local, etc.

This same model could be applied to any business with a web presence, especially if they focused like a laser on the core topic of their business.

Imagine a car dealership that would visit their customers two months after they bought their cars and made a short video interview. Ask tough, honest, fair questions about the salesperson, the finance person, the service department. Let the customers answer honestly. Don’t edit anything.
Then put a brief summary of the comments on the dealership website and let potential customers pay $5.00 to watch all of the videos for a particular car. Or salesperson. Or the service department. Watch what happens to customer service reports and sales levels.

How could you apply this targeted marketing and micro-payment revenue stream to your business?

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