In asking for business results from blog art, if we go with the metaphor of the sales funnel, quantity of traffic matters. If we go with the metaphor of audience, quality of traffic matters. Either way, traffic is the current standard by which online results are measured, especially as content creation moves to a pay for performance model.
In a former life, I was a poet. Publishers were kind enough to publish my work. Some gave me print copies of the publication, some paid me, and a county arts council even gave me an arts grant to support my creative work.
I believe in art for art's sake. When I was a poet with a salaried day job to support my creative endeavors, I readily urged companies to support the arts.
Now that I am the founder of a start-up company with the ambition of providing not only salaries, but health care and retirement benefits to my future salaried employees - in support of whatever creative endeavors they may have on the side - I'm envisioning a creative way for my company to support the arts: to pay artists to create content for one of my company's blogs, i.e. business news site Handshake 2.0.
My company would work in collaboration with artists: support of art and artists in return for business results.
Business results from art?! Blasphemy! Iconoclasm!
Maybe. But...
All companies need these business results in this order:
- Products and services
- Revenue from sales of products and services
- Clients and customers to whom to sell products and services
- A pool of likely or "qualified" clients and customers
- A lakeful of leads to likely clients and customers
- An oceanful of potential clients and customers
How could one of my poems - or an illustration, photograph, or cartoon by an artist and published on Handshake 2.0 - possibly contribute to achieving those results?
Print media publishers are asking the same question. A report from Booz & Co's strategy + business, recommends "compensation models that link incentives to metrics based on the audience size and level of engagement that the content attracts. The Internet offers a way to better align the compensation that journalists receive with the value they create for their readers."
Or that artists receive. Compensation for value created, i.e. compensation for business results. Rightly or wrongly, for now, business results are measured in site traffic.
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Photo credit: Megan McCoy, downtown Lynchburg, Virginia.
The photograph was purchased from Megan McCoy as a result of her reply to one of our content creator job postings on craigslist.
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