Chris Brogan, president of Human Business Works, coined the term outposts, which refers to “those social sites where you might consider maintaining an online presence, but where your participation will be split between interacting with people there and guiding them gently to your home base (whatever site you intend your online interactions to focus around).”
Outposts are spaces that you don’t manage or control where you go to maintain a presence or an embassy for your online community. If you have a Twitter profile, a Facebook fan page or a YouTube profile for your forums, these are your outposts.
While outposts will often serve to build interest and traffic, for the sake of completeness to your monetization strategy, you should remember that outposts can also be directly monetized.
That said, not all outposts are equal. Monetization isn’t allowed or appropriate on all of them. And even if it is, it may not be a good idea. You have to consider the particular platform, the tolerance for advertising on it and the type of audience that is engaging with you through that platform.
Depending on where you are engaging, different services exist for monetization. For Twitter, Sponsored Tweets and Adly offer sponsored status updates. MyLikes does the same, plus sponsored Facebook and Tumblr posts, as well as brand placement in YouTube videos. Speaking of YouTube, if you actively maintain a channel, you may be invited to the Partner Program, which monetizes your videos and gives you a cut. These are just popular examples; more options and platforms exist.
Of course, you can also sell your own advertisements directly, either by themselves or as part of larger campaigns. Pricing all depends on the number of people following or subscribing to you on that particular platform and how much traffic and interest that you can generate.
Beyond serving in the stream ads, you can also sell more traditional graphic advertisements and include some form of visual sponsorship through your background image on your profile, your avatar and other means. This is similar to background image advertisements, which are sometimes referred to as takeover ads, on music blogs promoting a particular new album. Obviously, to be able to charge much for that sort of thing and make it worthwhile, you must have a substantial following on the service in question.
As with all forms of advertising, it is important to maintain a balance and ensure you are sharing good content and relevant information and not just showing people ads, so you maintain and continue to grow the interest level on that platform.
When you monetize your outposts, you are usually generating revenue from updates and content that looks similar to the everyday content that you would regularly share. It may not be readily apparent that it is an advertisement. For this reason, disclosure is vital.
You must disclose as part of the content, in a visible way. In other words, when you send out a sponsored tweet, you have to disclose the fact that it is paid for within the tweet. Not on your profile or in a tweet before or after the sponsored tweet, but within the sponsored tweet itself. Many people do this by including “Sponsored:” at the start of the tweet or by using an #ad or #sponsored hashtag. A Facebook or Tumblr post would be disclosed in the same way – in the actual post.
For product placements on video, it is standard to disclose at the end of the video, as part of the end credits.
These are general use cases. The appropriate form of disclosure will vary by platform and you are legally responsible for making sure that you properly disclose any advertisements that may be confused with ordinary editorial content.
Since there are many potential platforms out there, it is difficult to speak too specifically. In this section, we covered some of the more popular social sites where outposts are built.
While monetizing your presence on third party platforms may not make sense for many people, in order to understand the full range of your revenue possibilities, it is important that we touched on it. With this information in mind, you can make the appropriate determination for your unique situation.