Sunday, August 29, 2010

Making Money From Blogs

I've been blogging for a little over a year and one thing I have found to be true is that making money off of blogging is hard work.  First of all, you need fresh topics to write about continually.  You have to give your readers a good reason to keep coming back.  Then, you have to very highly publicize your blogs.  I'm getting better at this.  Currently, my blogs are promoted the following ways.

1.  Listed on Technorati
2.  Listed on Blog Catalogue
3.  Listed on Zimbio
4.  Listed on Delicious
5.  Shared thru Google Buzz
6.  Shared thru Google Reader
7.  Shared on Facebook
8.  Shared on Twitter
9.  Links with other bloggers.
10.Emailed to select readers

Since really getting into the blog promotion phase of this project, my page impressions have increased over 400% monthly.  Having a solid readership is of critical importance if you every want to make money from blogs.  You also need to invite people to follow your blogs.  This can be done through Google Friend Connect, Feed subscriptions, and anything else that is available for readers to click on to follow.

Some things I didn't think of until a friend of mine suggested it is to link my blogs together.  I currently have 4 active blogs.  Each of these has links to the other 3 blogs.  This makes it easier for readers to find all of my blogs.  It also helps your Google search ranking which is very important if you want people to find your work.  Other things you can do to increase your page rank are:  incorporating search terms in your blog titles and in the body of your posts.  I also use a labels gadget to make sure all of my labels (which are nothing more than Google search terms) are repeated several times throughout my blogs.

Once you have readers, now you have to figure out how to convert readers into dollars.  The easiest thing to setup for starters is Google AdSense.  These are the ads that you often see at the top and along the sides of pages you read on the internet.  When people click those ads, you get paid a small fee for driving traffic to those advertisers.  The problem here is that Google doesn't allow you to actually TELL PEOPLE TO CLICK ON THE ADS.  So, people just have to figure that out for themselves.  You just have to hope that the ads are enticing enough to get people to click. 

Most of the time, when a person doesn't want to click ads, there are really just a few reasons.

1.  Privacy - many people fear that advertisers can track their internet usage.  Nobody wants this.  Clear out your cookies and temporary internet files and that should take care of most of these worries.  Generally speaking, your privacy is safe with Google AdSense.

2.  Safety - it is common to fear viruses and other harmful applications that can hit your computer from clicking on ads.  For me personally, I will click on ads from reputable companies because I trust that those ads will be safe.  Generally speaking, ads are safe.  Just be smart about what you click on.

3.  Value - If ads do not appear to have great value, nobody is going to click them.  This is the responsibility of the advertisers.  Your job is to simply get eye balls to see the ads (but don't tell people to click them).

4. Attraction - if the ads aren't visually attractive and stimulating, many people will not think to click them.

Remember though:  you can not tell people to click on your ads.  Instead, your viewers have to understand that these ads are how you pay for your time of providing valuable information to them.  Your information is free to them.  If they see an ad and have interest, then clicking on it can benefit them and compensate you for your good work.

Other ways that you can make money from your blogs include:

1.  Sell something related - I am going to use my blog to promote my upcoming management book.

2.  Offer advertising space to willing advertisers.  You may be able to get paid directly from advertisers.  I am going to contact some of these companies for this very reason.  Eventually, someone will agree to a deal.

3.  Associate / Affiliate Programs - these are programs where you get commissions for selling products on your blog site.  You provide links to products and when people click and purchase, you get paid.  Amazon.com is big in this area.

4.  Offer you personal services.  You are probably an expert at the topics that you write about.  Someone might want more individualized help from you.  Offer this as a consulting service and get paid for it.

These are just a few of the points that will help you make money from your blog site.  Surely there are other ways and you should explore your options if you want to make money from blogging.  Start with the information here in this article and build from there.  If you're like me and you're already writing blogs, you might as well get paid something for it.

No comments:

Post a Comment