Monetizing Your Blog

You are writing and publishing powerful and informative blog articles a few times a week. You are very careful to write about what others need and want within your area of expertise. How do you monetize your blog?

Do you really want to monetize your blog?

The first question that you need to answer is whether you really want to monetize your blog. There are some people who believe that turning your blog into a money-making tool is not right. Of course, in order to get people to pay attention to what you are doing and subsequently get them to buy what you are selling, there has to be some promotion of your business involved. The idea that social media (which includes blogs, of course) succeeds on the premise of people forming and maintaining relationships and not on hard selling is contrary to monetizing.

Once you have worked out your feelings regarding the ethics and comfort level of monetizing your blog, there are some steps to follow, which will help you to accomplish what you set out to do. You must be committed to making it happen and to jumping in with both feet. For example:

• Advertising: If you decide to advertise your blog, you should do it wholeheartedly and really put up as many ads as you feel are appropriate. Don’t merely place a tiny advertisement in a far off corner.
   
• Donations: If you want to go the donations route, don’t just put in a link for donations and leave it at that. A large number of your visitors may fail to even see the link.
   
• Selling your products and/or services: If you plan to generate income by using your blog to help you sell your products and/or services, make sure that you have something unique and high quality to sell. You need to sell them in a way that compels your clients and prospects to really want to buy.
   
• Expect criticism: When you begin to monetize your blog (if it was free before), you should expect that some of your connections won’t like the idea. Hopefully, the majority of the feedback that you will be receiving will be positive. If that is the case, you are still ahead. There will always be people who don’t deal well with change. Even those people who offer negative criticism will do so only once or twice, and with any luck, will stop after that.

Will you be able to live comfortably from what you earn with your blog?

The answer to that is most likely yes, if you do it the right way. If you are devoting all of your time to the blog and generating income, you will succeed. If you are working at it part time in addition to having another full time job, it will take longer for you to see results. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. It certainly can be done.

Is generating an income from a blog something that anyone can do?

No, it isn’t. In fact, the statistics say that the majority of people who attempt to earn a living from their online work do not succeed. If you are very intelligent about it and go about it the right way, you will succeed. You must apply your intelligence when it comes to your blog to the web itself. You much be web savvy. If you are web savvy, you have a great chance at bringing in money.

What exactly does it mean to be web savvy?

You don’t need to have a heavy technical background but you do need to be very comfortable and have a working knowledge of several different web technologies. The specific list of important web technologies for you and your blog really depends on what you are doing. There are some technologies that are useful for all businesses, such as:

• HTML/CSS
• Blog software
• Trackbacks
• RSS/syndication
• Blog comments (and comment spam)
• Full versus partial feeds
• Search engines
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Page ranking
• Social bookmarking
• Tagging
• Traffic analytics
• Email

If you don’t have acquaintanceship in those areas mentioned, your chances of success will go way down. It is well worth the investment of time and effort to educate yourself before you attempt to do anything as far as monetizing your blog. You will work hard in your efforts but you will also be rewarded for those efforts.

Embrace change

You might now ask yourself what are the risks involved in this venture? The greatest risk that you will be faced with is the idea that opportunities will present themselves and you will miss them. It is critical that you think like an entrepreneur rather than an employee. The thing that is in the strongest position to hurt you is not knowing what you don’t know. A very important skill to develop is the ability to recognize opportunities when they come along. If you miss opportunities, you are losing money, you are losing (or not gaining) website traffic and you are losing the chance to help more people to solve their problems.

Your income-generation strategy

You should map out your strategy before you begin and have a philosophy in place. It isn’t necessary to write an entire business plan before you begin, however, you need to write a description of how you plan to $0 to whatever number you want to earn per month. Of course, as  you continue to grow and succeed more and more, your end number will increase. Once you have started to earn an income from your blog, you will see that there is a lot more security in that than there is if you were working for someone else. Going forward, you should refer back to your income-generation strategy whenever you are faced with the need to make decisions regarding your blog business. It may be helpful to you if you research how other people have designed their strategies and borrow the concepts from them. Nobody ever said that you have to reinvent the wheel.

Generating traffic

The single most important element when it comes to the success of your blog is website traffic. The reason that traffic is so important to your success is that the more people who pay attention to you and what you are offering, the more money you will earn because there are more people who will be willing to pay. The more website traffic you have, the more opportunities you will have.

Building traffic

The way to build traffic is with high-quality and compelling content. Your content needs to be informative, educational, and extremely valuable to your readers. If you don’t see a pattern of increase in your traffic month after month, there is a distinct possibility that you are not doing enough. Your strategy may be appropriate and spot on but you may need to be doing more of the same. Your traffic should be increasing with every month that passes by.

Conclusion

It is a wonderful thing when your blog generates income for you, although it is important to remember that there is a lot of hard work and time involved. It is, of course, very important to stay centered and to keep reasonable expectations. Having a solid, healthy number of followers will be critical to your success as well as all of the other things that were mentioned. You are doing what you love and getting paid for it at the same time. There is no limit to how successful you can be. All people understand that if they want something valuable, there will be times when they have to pay for it and they will be happy to do so. On your end of things, you need to maintain a consistency and a commitment to high quality and value that will make your readers/clients want to be loyal to you and to want to continue to do business with you indefinitely.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team and don’t forget to “like” our Facebook page.