About me
As a singer-songwriter I started out the traditional way looking for a publisher to put out an edition of my songbook and CD with my own nursery rhymes and educational songs in German.
Publishers told me that the market for institutions like schools and kindergartens was extremely difficult. Even a big institution would buy one cd and one songbook - and then copy it, even give copies to interested parents. “There is no more any money in that.”
So I started out on my own distributing a cd via the internet offering short demos and one complete song for free mp3-download on my website in German: www.spiellieder.de
As I was producing new material the song for free changed on a monthly basis. The site did fairly well in Google and I was using AdWords to promote it, so the orders came rolling in.
The problem was to collect the money. That was in 2002, I was not aware of Paypal (if it even was around at the time) and people had to send the money to my bank account after having received the cd - what an astonishing number of customers simply did not do. So that business was in the red pretty soon and had to be closed down.
As I did not sell cd´s any more I used the site as an advertising platform for my life events. I liked the Internet, enjoyed programming HTML and CSS and with the advent of AdSense the site became an end in itself earning a profit, however small.
I decided to put my whole repertoire on the web for free download and added www.kulturumsonst.com with songs for adults and an English edition.
I tried various affiliate-systems, but AdSense turned out to be by far the best way to monetize my content - so far.
Are there other ways to make a living with intellectual property on the web than advertising? I started this blog to collect my thoughts on content distribution and publishing on the web, to accumulate relevant links and very hopefully to exchange views with other people.