Demand & Supply – Understanding Blogging Economy

Currently Blogging is one of the greatest Internet Marketing Model. While many people use blogging for personal purposes, some use it as an Internet Marketing tool. The few people who use blogging as Internet Marketing tool are the ones who want to earn money, reputation and fame. But only a very few percentage of them succeed.

One of the reason of success of these successful bloggers (whom we call pro bloggers) is the understanding of Blogging Economy. The understand how to utilize their resources, where to invest and how to balance Demand and Supply. Demand and Supply is core of any kind of Economy. The relationship between demand and Supply underlines the forces behind the allocation of your blogging resources in the most efficient ways. It also decides the price (may not be a monetary value) of your content in the Blogging Community.

Before we proceed any further let us define Demand and Supply.

Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by consumer. The quantity demanded is the amount of a product people are willing to buy at a certain price.

Supply represents how much the market/producer can offer. The quantity supplied refers to the amount of a certain good producers are willing to supply when receiving a certain price.

How does Demand and Supply work for Blogging?

In blogging, a blogger is not always selling. So two cases arises, one when a blogger is selling his content (posting article/post) for free and other when a blogger is selling a product or service for a price.

CASE I: Blogger provides free information through an article/blog post

Here the commodity (information) is free to everyone, so money is not a factor. When something is free, it means the supply is theoretically infinite. The demand of the content decrease and so does its value. Now to increase the value of your content, we need to increase the demand. And since our commodity is free, its not that simple. There are two different ways to increase the demand.

• First is decreasing the supply. But practically it is not possible to just decrease the supply. In case of a blog post once posted is available to everyone. One way to decrease the supply will be to password protect the whole/part of post. You may also consider having a free members area where selected few have access to the content. This way you virtually decrease the supply. This will only work if your content had high demand before.
• Second is allocation of resources. Allocation of resources in blogging means investing more time (if required money) to research the topic you are about to write. Write the post in a unique way or better with a whole new perspective.

CASE II: Blogger is selling some product or service

Here the commodity is not free and those who want it or need it have to pay some price. When you are selling something, the price is decided by the demand and supply in the market (here blogging community).

When money is involved, it becomes easier to understand the market. Price decreases with higher supply and increases with increase in demand. So if the product/service you are selling is available elsewhere in plenty (may be lower price) you will have to decrease your price too. But if the demand is high and supply is low (only a few more sellers are there), you can increase the price as well.

There are some more factors which decide the price as well. One of these factor is customer awareness. Think of the condition when a certain product eg. Blogging Guide is available in plenty but the customer is aware of only your guide. The customer will buy yours. You can set higher price. This is a case of Virtual Demand (a imaginary high demand and low supply condition).

Whatever I have mentioned above are only few of the theories of Demand and Supply in Blogging. To succeed you need to understand them and apply these theory practically. For example, I told you about how demand and supply control the price. You can use it to decide the at what price you should sell your product/service, so that people buy it. How to make them buy your product and service at a ceratin price.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will answer them.

PS: The most important thing to note about Demand and Supply is that how impractical (it is mostly theory) it may seem, it governs the market. You can think of cases where the theory may not apply, but in most cases Demand and Supply theory works with a high efficiency.

Editor of Agent Deepak – A student at IIT, Kharagpur. He has 3 years of experience in Blogging and also have 1 year experience in SEO, Graphics design and Web design. He is tweeting @AgentDeepak. If you are on Facebook you can also befriend him @AgentDeepak

Photo Credit from Chief Ingredient