Making Money With Your Blog – How We Do It

If you have your own blog or are thinking of starting one up, it is completely natural to wonder if you can make money with that blog…and if so, how much. 

Interestingly when we became involved in blogging several years ago, we already had a couple of solid, money-making online businesses under our belt.  Blogging was simply an experiment to see if we could extend our marketing to new people using  this technology. 

It was right about this time that email spam was becoming a big problem and email marketing was becoming more of a challenge – not dead – but more challenging for sure.

So, the idea of building a loyal following with a blog where the technology is much more “Pull” than “Push” from the customer’s perspective made sense. 

SO HOW DO YOU MAKE MONEY WITH YOUR BLOG

When big name bloggers started out they turned hours of work each day into a few hundred dollars worth of advertising revenue adding in some affiliate sales for good measure. 

Some even built this to a respectable $100K a year business, but blogging became more competitive real fast and the chance to have a $100K blog for the small guy became much more in line with winning the lottery than achievable. 

But, blogs became useful in another way…and even some of the top name bloggers figured this out as they evolved their blogs from money pages themselves to marketing vehicles that attracted traffic, built relationships and trust that could be converted into big money online. 

In our case, our blogs are HUGELY important to our business for driving traffic, creating relationships, as a front-end to list building and as a method of communicating with our growing markets. 

Typically, every market we go into we launch our own information products – using the systems outlined inside InfoMarketer’sZone.  Nearly 75% of our profit comes from selling our own information products. 

We are not alone in that, pretty much every major blogger out there today has caught on and now drives traffic to their own ebooks, reports, courses as a major percentage of their income. 

HOW DO YOU GET YOUR BLOGS TO WORK EARNING MONEY?

There are two very important keys to getting more traffic and conversions:

1. Post frequency – you want to be posting daily to really be relevant in your field and give people a new reason to find you each day and your existing readers a reason to visit your site each day. 

2. Be relevant, interesting AND lead the discussion.  This has taken me some time to learn, but I study top bloggers to see how they do it.  Much of this comes down to knowing your market, what they are frustrated with, interested in, AND having the confidence to lead the dialog in your marketplace in a way that respects your reader so they want to read you and they want to participate.  We have some blogs in the Personal Development space where we have tried new approaches to starting dialogs that have worked incredibly well (beyond my expectations) – it all has to do with using words and tapping into emotions your market is wrestling with.

To wrap up – I guess the combined tip is to be “frequently interesting” to your readers and that will get you the eyeballs, interest, attention needed to monetize. 

Do you have a question about blogging — leave us your question via comment against this post and we’ll get you an answer asap.