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Early this month, I spoke to a group of travel media professionals who assembled in the lovely city of Vancouver, BC..  Their industry is going through some big changes: Traditional publishers are cutting back on freelance expenses or going out of business.  Lucrative writing assignments are harder to come by.  The travel journalists in the audience were looking for new ways to make a living with their blogs while still pursuing the work they love.

In last week’s issue, I talked about the opportunities available in advertising sponsorships, but few bloggers make a living from ads.  The bigger opportunity is to build service and licensing revenues around expertise.  The blog is really a showcase for other skills. Here are some ideas to share with the group for making money from their blogs:

Ancillary Products — Packaging is everything.  Travel bloggers who have exhaustive knowledge of Montréal restaurants, for example, may be able to create e-books or audio guides that can be sponsored by professional associations or tourism bureaus.  Multiple blog entries could be consolidated into a guide to Vancouver travel, then packaged as an e-book and sold to a local tourism office.  Bloggers with lots of business savvy could actually sell the ads themselves.  Producers of advertising-based city guides already pay for content, so why not approach them with a product that’s already packaged? Likewise, a video travelogue of ski resorts in central Québec could be sponsored by a regional association of ski areas. If presentation is entirely online, look into the option of generating a commission for each click-through from the video to an order page.

Books – Nearly 1 in 200 Americans has now published a book.  A new crop of Internet self-publishers is making this easy and relatively cheap.  Sites like Lulu, iUniverse, Blurb, AuthorHouse, CafePress  and  UBuildABook  can publish books for single-copy prices starting at less than five dollars. Books don’t need to be 70,000-word tomes, either.  They can be pocket guides.  What’s more, the self-publishing process at some of these sites is almost totally automated.  The author doesn’t even need to speak to a person.  Many self-publishers now have their own bookstores and agreements with online booksellers.

The margins on self-publishing are much better than those of traditional publishing. However, there are significant trade-offs.  T author is usually responsible for all marketing and publicity, some publishers require a minimum order volume and Amazon doesn’t carry many self-published titles.  Still, an entire industry of motivational speakers thrives on this model, so it can’t be all bad.

Custom publishing — If you’ve taken beautiful photographs of ski areas in Banff,  offer to sell them to a local tourist bureau or resort hotel to use in a promotional calendar.  Or offer to create a video travelogue of that same hotel that can be posted on a website or delivered via CD.  Even if your skill is strictly in prose, lots of businesses would gladly buy copy written from an expert with demonstrated ability than risk their hand in at the freelance market.  Travel companies aren’t publishers, so use your publishing skill to make their work easier.

Consulting — Blogs are a great way to strut your stuff.  If you’ve been to 25 Swiss ski resorts, why not promote yourself as the expert on creating a European hospitality experience?  Or maybe your experience visiting hundreds of great wine cellars can make you an expert consultant in that area for startup restaurants.  By search optimizing your site for these very specific skills, you can make the short list when businesses begin their search

The future of publishing will be less about institutional brands and more about personal brands.  Blogs are a great way to create and promote personal expertise.  It takes some work, and not everyone is comfortable with the idea of self-promotion.  But if you look at a blog as a window on bigger business opportunities, there really are lots of choices.