There are millions of blogs floating around cyberspace these days, some with followings of thousands, and many being read by only a handful. Most bloggers start off full of good intentions to update regularly and interact with there readers, but frequently these plans fall to the wayside.
But imagine if there was a way to encourage regular blogging, by being able to turn a regular profit from an online hobby? That’s what new Berlin startup ShowSpace offer its users – an easy, no-fuss way to monetize your blogs. By creating a simple platform to put products on users’ websites, ShowSpace allows niche blogs with topic-specific content to link to products related to what’s being discussed, via a clean, straightforward widget.
For a casual blogger, this might sound complex, but as founder Manuel Meurer told Silicon Allee, monetizing a blog isn’t as hard as it initially seems: “I made the concept as simple as possible, so that it’s accessible for everyone, even non-tech people to, use. You create a widget and install it in your WordPress. It’s really that simple.”
ShowSpace founder Manuel Meurer
ShowSpace revolves around what a blogger wants to write about – be it product reviews, selling merchandise, or simply sharing new purchases. Bloggers can put in a product, with the options to share the price or write a product description, or simply show the pictures of the products on the site.
Users of the ShowSpace widget can source the products from anywhere they are sold online, and by encouraging bloggers to write their own product descriptions, users avoid duplicate content. According to Manuel, this is one of ShowSpace’s advantages over its competitors: “It’s really good for SEO work, because it integrates into the blog and adds content without cluttering your website. A lot of other product widgets, like Amazon, are being loaded via javascript afterwards, so they don’t really count for the SEO and Google doesn’t see it. If you use ShowSpace, Google really ‘sees’ the content.”
While it may all sound easy and appealing to bloggers, how exactly do you make money from what is a casual hobby to many? With ShowSpace, they can link back to products after creating their own affiliate IDs on product websites (such as Amazon), or use services such as SkimLinks which takes care of all affiliate links once its been integrated with a website (for a percentage of your profits). As ShowSpace is also integrated with both these platforms, all users need to do is fill in their IDs, and all it automatically makes all links affiliated.
If handing over a percentage of your earnings doesn’t make you happy, there is also the option for more advanced bloggers to create affiliated links themselves.
As for the future, Manuel said that the ShowSpace team will continue building up th user base, with their clients mainly being fashion bloggers and product review sites: “I really want to target people who write about products, and show exactly those products. But we want to keep it as open as possible, and see as many people as possible using ShowSpace, no matter what they’re blogging about.”