Blogging For Big Bucks

This article is for the most ambitious bloggers who believe that their posts are worth money. Well, why shouldn’t they be? Your blog is Internet content, and Internet content has a value. How much value you realize from your blog depends on several variables, the most important of which is traffic.

If you’re making 50 cents a month to start, you might be motivated to reach one dollar, and move forward from there. In the effort, you’re likely to make your site look better and explore the marketing tricks that bring more traffic.

Frontiers in the Business of Blogging

Now that blogging is famous, it has become commercial. Those of us who were online when the World Wide Web was introduced saw the same transformation. The Web started as a free, unexplored medium populated by the primitive sites of early adopters. It didn’t take long for the commercial potential of the new medium to explode into reality. Likewise with blogs.

You can make money on the Internet in four basic ways:

• Sell a product (like Amazon)
• Provide a service (like Expedia)
• Sign up subscriptions to content (like the Wall Street Journal)
• Run ads (like millions of sites)

Just as many thousands of small Webmasters have earned online income from running ads on their non-blog sites, bloggers are doing the same thing. And with the emergence of some high-profile blogs attracting millions of readers, a few bloggers are making very good money.

So, advertising is the business format of necessity if you are to make any money from your blog. But before discussing advertising options, you need to know the other half of the blog marketing equation. Like two sides of a coin, earning money from a blog requires two considerations:

• Visibility: Ad revenue depends on site traffic, and traffic depends on making the blog visible.

• Monetization: I have a friend who laughs every time I utter the word monetize. I don’t blame him for getting the chuckles over such a geekspeak term, but that’s what everyone calls it when a site earns money.

Raising the Visibility of Your Blog

When you first put up a Web site of any kind — blog or nonblog — it’s like putting up a billboard in the desert. A new site is invisible until somebody links to it and looks at it.

I should note that new blogs in hosted services such as Yahoo! 360, Blogger, and TypePad suffer through shorter periods of invisibility than blogs hosted on independent servers. Hosted blogs get a push toward visibility by the host services, which spotlight new sites and new entries.

The quest for links

The key to visibility is links. People find online destinations through links. Traffic is driven by links. Every ambitious blogger wants links leading to the blog’s home page or its posts. In the quest for linkage, two important arenas exist:

• Links on other blogs
• Links in search engines

Links on other blogs are powerful, and there are two kinds. First, gaining a link in another blogger’s blogroll means continuous promotions for your blog. Second, getting linked in another blogger’s post which promotes something you said. These links are extremely targeted and can bring bursts of traffic. Either way, you gain some degree of notoriety and visibility.

Tip: Check out Mark’s post on Link Baiting to gain more incoming links.

Keep your pages on-topic

It is important to stay on-topic with each entry. Posting a long entry about Queen that also discusses other rock bands broadens the page’s focus and dulls its optimization. Naturally, you want to feel free to write naturally in your blog. Optimization principles shouldn’t inhibit your style. But for the most part, good optimization is good for your visitors, not just good for your traffic.

Make your post titles count

It is amazing how many post titles have nothing to do with the post. This point is an optimization downfall for many bloggers. A scathing criticism of a public figure might be titled “It’s an outrage!” and never mention the public figure’s name. An entry about that rock band Queen might be titled “The best rock music I ever heard,” without relating the band’s name. Blogs are famously informal and personal, but you miss an important chance to optimize your posts by not putting key topical words in your titles.

Feed the nets

The page optimization tips of the preceding section are important. But likewise, it’s important to remember that many people — and the most influential ones — read their blogs in news readers. Your most loyal and voracious readers might never visit your site after their first visit, when they find and subscribe to your RSS feed.

Because of the increasing importance of a blog’s feed in promoting and delivering a blog’s content, a relatively new set of practices that could be called feed optimization has developed alongside SEO. Feed optimization is closely related to search engine optimization, thanks to the presence and popularity of blog search engines, which get their listings primarily from RSS feeds.

Ideally, your feed link should be positioned up on the page, in a sidebar, with letters or an icon big enough to find easily.

Tip: Luckily, some easy-to-use tools are available to help you to promote your RSS Feed, and i show each, and how to use them effectively over at RSS Promotion Tips

Using FeedBurnerBloggers who are serious about their feeds know about FeedBurner. Almost every blog service generates a feed for your blog entries, but FeedBurner doesn’t care about these native feeds. FeedBurner creates a new feed for your blog, assists in feed promotion, pings blog directories and newsreaders when you add an entry, measures the readership of your feed, and can help make a little money by putting ads in the feed if you want. That’s a lot of work for a feed optimizer, and FeedBurner is deservedly popular.

You can get started with FeedBurner without making any commitment and without changing your blog in any way. Simply go to the FeedBurner home page and enter your blog address. You don’t need your RSS feed address; the URL of your blog’s home page works fine.

Experimenting with Ads

If you get truly ambitious about commercializing your blog, the final step is putting advertisements on it. The three possible scenarios are

• Banner ads on your site
• Relevant text ads on your site
• Relevant text ads in your RSS feed

A banner ad is a picture ad of any size. A relevant text ad is a different sort of widget altogether. Supplied by Google, Yahoo! or any other company that specializes in contextual ads, these no-picture ads are relevant to the topic of the page upon which they appear.

Three types of payout are associated with blog ads; they do not necessarily correspond with the three types of ads just listed:

• Time: An ad placement is sold for a week or a month, and the blogger is paid a flat fee. The price is based on the blog’s traffic; the greater the number of readers, the more the ad placement is worth. The BlogAds service is a pioneer and leading advertising broker for bloggers, and sells ad placements by the day, week, and month.

• Impressions: On the Internet, an impression is one display of an advertisement Some ads are sold on this basis, with the cost usually measured by every thousand impressions. This method (among others) is used by the CrispAds service to help bloggers monetize their sites.

• Clickthroughs: Contextual ads placed by Google and Yahoo! are paid for every time a visitor clicks one. Every month, Google and Yahoo! add up all the clicks, collect the money from the advertisers, and divide it among the bloggers on whose sites the ads appeared.

P.S I’m by no means perfect at monetizing blogs, because i have chosen not to monetize my SEO & Marketing blog, but i do have many business related websites which earn a fair few dollars, so im just trying to share my experiance with both new and experianced bloggers alike – I hope it helps.If you know of any more please feel free to comment or leave your feedback.

Written by Andy MacDonald from Swift Media UK
Posted on February 25th, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Making Money
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