Monetising your blog

Monetising your blog

Making money from your blog involves quite a few things: a willingness to work harden entrepreneurial / businesslike approach knowledge of / willingness to learn relevant web technologies monetising strategy consistently implementing the strategy all these ingredients are crucial to turning your blog from a non-paying though passionate source of personal expression to a solid revenue stream.

To motivate you in this direction you can consider the fact that may bloggers earn upwards of $100 per day and some even cross the $1000 per day mark. Moreover, these figures have been achieved with little or no startup costs other than the time spent in writing and maintaining their blogs. Just as importantly. Also consider the fact that for every successful blogger. 99 others are not.in this chapter, we look at both the 'soft' skills required as well as the techniques that you can use to extract revenue from your blog.

The basics

Some of the concepts in this section are covered in greater depth in other chapters. It is being included here again as these techniques and attitudes are crucial in creating and maintaining a successful blog. Only if your blog is a success that is with hundreds and thousands of daily visitors can you then focus on deriving money from it.

Attitude, commitment and consistency

Before we look at the different revenue streams that are possible with blogging. the first thing to sort out is your mental attitude. Blogging for money, like any other entrepreneurial activity, is hard work. it is in fact, the single hardest thing that your will have to face if you are serious in transitioning front a passionate blogger to a professional one. this does not mean that you leave your passion behind. The only difference being that now your passion is now going to be a source of income also.

The key factor that separates successful bloggers from the unsuccessful ones is commitment. of course, success can be defined in many different way but for the purposes of this chapter we consider a successful blog as one that has hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. a blogger who is successful with his blog has primarily committed himself to being passionate about his interest and providing visitors with relevant information. note that at this stage revenue is not an issue. Transitioning from just sharing your passion on a subject to actually making money from your passion may sound simple but in actual practice, there are complications.

When you are passionate about blogging, you may find that you have ambivalent feelings about earning money from your blog. if you believe that using your passion to earn money is wrong then you first need to decide whether you do want to use your blog to earn a living or not. Once you commit yourself though the sky literally is the limit.

Commitment not only involves a desire and willingness to be a professional blogger. it also means being consistent with your postings. A blog is a service, albeit, in many cases a free one but nevertheless it serves an audience. In one sense you could consider your site visitors as customers who pay you by visiting your site. The means that you have to be consistent in your postings to attract an audience.

Once you begin posting regularly you will attract an audience of readers who will form the initial base. This trickle of readers will continue to evolve and grow and many will come to your blog expecting fresh content one each visit. This expectation of your audience you can control to some extent by deciding how often you are going to post. Remember that it is difficult to scale back from posting several times a day to once a day to several times a week without having an impact on your readership.

A better approach would be to start slow and increase the frequency, as you get comfortable with balancing blogging with the rest of your daily schedule. Give yourself sufficient time and be realistic about how often you can post. If you can initially post once a week, make sure you stick to the once a week schedule until you are comfortable with it and are ready to increase the posting frequency. Remember that your visitors will come to expect your posts according to the pace you set. a once a week post will attract a once a week audience and so on.

Another technique is to set goals for yourself. Take the time to write down a monetization strategy and commit yourself to certain time bound goals on what you would like to achieve in that time. For example, you may decide that you want to be in the technorati top 10000 in six months. Once you define specific goals you can then focus your energies in working in that direction.

Once again, we would like to stress that getting your blog to be successful requires hard work and serious commitment on the blog author's part to continually keep the content of the blog fresh and updated.

Quality of content

Quality is a very subjective term. The primary mark of a quality blog is the content. This has less to do with the language and more to do with the subject matter under discussion. Most web visitors will be forgiving of occasional grammatical and spelling errors if the content is high quality and is not directly relevant to the site's topic. Example, if you are writing about jet engines, the emphasis will be on the technical details and accuracy of what you state language will not be so important. if however your blog is about writing or language then obviously, you definitely need to pay attention to the quality of the language as well as the content.

The balance between gaining the respect of your readers through what you write and the importance of keeping your language error free is a fine line that is always not very clear. This primarily depends on the topic and the demographics of the audience. Fortunately, in most cases you will receive sufficient warnings from your readers on what you are doing wrong. Pay attention to negative remarks. Judge for yourself whether it is an exaggerated personal viewpoint and can be safely ignored or whether the it is genuinely warranted. If the criticism is constructive, accept it in good grace and go about making the necessary changes, genuine blogs are built on the ability of the writers to express themselves honestly and passionately, as well as on their ability to accept constructive criticism graciously and take corrective measures.

If you feel that your writing is not up to the mark and could do with some improvement, blogging is one way to practice. Also there are plenty of writing resources available on the web to help your improve your writing skills. Aim to be clear in your language and avoid using ling sentences. Group thoughts into paragraphs and use the minimum number of words to express the maximum. Avoid repetition unless the context warrants it.

The focus on creating relevant content is to make your website more search engine friendly. There is a whole industry around the concept of optimizing your web site for search engines. the general industry term for this activity is search engine optimization or SEO.

There is good SEO and bad SEO, sometimes called white hat and black hat SEO. Good SEO techniques follow guidelines laid down by search engines in making their sites search engine friendly. For those who are serious about turning blogging into a long term income source there is only type of SEO to pay attention to good SEO.

There are unethical SEO methods that may temporarily boost a blog's search engine ranking but ultimately, this could prove disastrous. if the search engines determine that what you are doing is not permitted and is only designed to boost rankings without any relevant content, they can penalize and black list your site. Unfortunately, search engines do not give a clear set of guidelines on what is permitted and what is not. this is because those who try to artistically boost their rankings that the search engines use to detect good content from bad content.

Invariably those who use black hat SEO are not bothered about providing quality content on their site. Their primary interest is in luring visitors to their websites and getting them to click on advertising links. Luckily, for those who are interested in building a good quality blog with a lot of useful content, there is only one SEO guideline to keep in mind create good, high quality, useful content. search engines will in any case index your site and provide links to your site when relevant search queries are entered.

Deciding on the topic

If you are new to blogging or are still floundering about for a topic to blog with, remember that your topic should be something that you are passionate about, are an expert in or something that you are interested in enough to want to deeply research and write about. Your visitors, in all likelihood, will be research and write about. Your visitors, in all likelihood, will be just as interested as you are in the topic and your blog may become their default source of information on the subject. Also try and keep the topic as broad as possible to give you a wide choice of advertisers and the possibility of having a near limitless supply of content to create. With a very narrow topic it may be difficult to continually, find new and fresh content to blog on daily.

The topic you decide on will also determine your ability to turn it into a revenue source, given that there are about 1 billion people connected to the internet as of now, the chances are that almost any topic will have an audience of interested enthusiasts.

However, for a blog to make money there will need to be a minimum number of regular visitors that can then be translated into revenue. There is no fixed benchmark to determine the ideal number of regular visitors. For a niche up market topic, it may be sufficient if you are passionate about sailing and wish to create a steady income. On the other hand, if you are blogging on a wider interest topic like say, celebrities, you may need an audience in the tens of thousands before you can consider monetising your blog.

Building traffic

The single most important thing that will separate your blog from the rest of the crowd can be reduced to a single word: traffic. if your blog does not have visitors, there is very little you can do to monetise it. Income from your blog is a function of traffic that is, the move the traffic, the more the potential income you can generate. if you are able to consistently increase the number of visitors to your blog your income will grow proportionately. This is a self-stoking cycle. The more visitors you have to your blog, the more you will attract

All of the techniques discussed in this fast track contribute to building traffic. However, all these are secondary to the primary point of importance: high quality, focused content.

Building a blog with high quality content is the only sure fire way to ensure that you attract traffic that will consistently grow. High quality content is something that will engage your users and want them to revisit your site again and again. this means that you will need to take the time and effort to think through each of your postings and to set high standards for yourself.

in the beginning, when you start out, the focus can be less on quality and more on just making sure that you meet your posting schedule. This is because for most bloggers the main problem is not about delivering quality content but the commitment to maintaining a consistent schedule. once you get comfortable in your posting schedule you can then pay closer to attention to maintaining and enhancing the quality of your content.

by paying attention to the quality of your blog posts and keeping focused on your topic area, you are doing two things you are consciously or involuntarily educating yourself in the subject area. This will make you something of an expert in your area of interest. Second, you are positioning yourself as a trustworthy source of information on that particular topic. These two factors will act as the reinforcing glue that will keep attracting visitors back to your site.

For the first few months forget about traffic and concentrate on building traffic. Be thankful if you receive any comments positive, negative or indifferent on your blog. If people are staying long enough to read your blog post and comment on it. then you're doing something right.

Hook in a free program like google analytics

http://google.com/analytics. to keep track of traffic growth and to understand how your visitors are reaching your site where they come from, how often they come new and returning visitors, what search terms they use to find your site and what are the most popular posts they visit.

Once you get an idea of your visitor patterns, you can then go about trying to improve on this by creating more content with reference to the same thing, for example if your most popular post was about a vacation in an exotic location, you may want to do a follow up story about the same place. You could also sell advertising space to tour companies in that area. However, this decision should be consistent with your monetization strategy and your blog theme. if for example, if your blog theme is about digital photography and the vacation post is primarily to illustrate the techniques you used to in taking those awesome shots then another post on the subject of vacations maybe inappropriate.

You should also be willing to spend some time marketing your blog. Those approaches are more fully covered in chapter five. Only consider paid advertisement if you have a serious plan in monetising your web site. However, the most basic technique, which is free except for the time you spend, is to visit other blogs of interest and get involved in the comments section there. Most comments sections provide a field to leave your website address. Participants in the comments section who like what you say may follow back through your link for more information about your blog.

do not, unless the conversation warrants it blindly post links back to your blog. This is considered as bad etiquette and many blog owners will remove such links. This is what is known as comment Spam. For example, if a blog is discussing politics, do not drop into the comments section and say something like please visit my ice cream blog at xyz.com. Keep the comments meaningful and only point to content on your site if you feel that your post on the subject will better illustrate this.

When you find a blog post that you particularly like and wish to write a post on it yourself, make it a point to leave a track back link on the author's original post. a track back provides a convenient method to leave links to your blog on other blogs with similar content. Similarly, visitors who refer to a post on your blog can leave track back links on your site. Track backs and links from other web sites help in improving search engines. Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it , the only way to get quality track backs and links to your blog goes back to the cardinal traffic building rule provide quality content.