A completely FREE guide to developing small niche sites using the WordPress platform. Learn how to setup and administer your site, super-easy monetization strategies and a lot more.
In September 2007 I quit my day job in order to follow my dreams of becoming an Internet entrepreneur.
This blog is my record of that journey. My aim is to learn how to make a living online and transfer that knowledge
to others through this blog.
Each month I post my stats which includes the amount of income that I have earned. Every month I’ll get at least a handful of comments from people saying “wow that’s awesome you can make that much with my blog, I only made $2 with AdSense this month”, or something to that effect. Blog monetization is a complex subject and I’d like to pick it apart a little in this post.
Let’s Talk About AdSense
One area of confusion (I really should be more clear in my stats posts) is that the AdSense income that I report does not come from this blog. I have a small niche site that I setup months ago and then never touched. It earns around $1 a day. Many people think that I should run AdSense on my blog, however I disagree for two reasons.
AdSense Is Not For All Sites
When running AdSense ads, you are not paid a fixed amount per ad. The amount you are paid depends on the site that it is placed on, the standing of your overall account and probably many other factors that only Google knows about.
Google wants to maximise the revenue earned by their advertisers so they try to ensure that their ads are displayed on relevant pages, they want their ads to get lots of clicks and they want those clicks to be made by geniunely interested buyers. They have a system called “smart pricing” which means that if one of your sites performs poorly, you will be paid less per click. However, this penalty is applied to your entire AdSense account.
Now I’m only toying with AdSense and I hardly make any money with it so it doesn’t affect me all that much but if I had a whole bunch of niche sites running AdSense then I would not want to risk having the whole account smart priced by running ads on this blog.
You may be wondering why AdSense would perform poorly here? Simple - my readers are tech savvy Internet Marketers and social media users who know what an AdSense ad is and don’t click on them! Having said that, I have just learned from Courtney Tuttle about a WordPress plugin that allows you to show AdSense only to search traffic which is a major breakthrough.
But I still don’t want AdSense on my blog, and this is why…
AdSense Sends Visitors Away
Search traffic is lovely because it is so targeted. Somebody has searched for something in Google and arrived at your site and hopefully they have found just what they were looking for. So now that you have that visitor, what do you want to do with him? For my niche site I want him to click on my AdSense ads because that is the sole purpose of the site.
However that is not the case with my blog. My niche site took me a few hours to put together and that’s it. On the contrary, I have put thousands of hours of hard work into this blog and it is not worth all of that time and effort just to earn a few cents from AdSense.
I have said many times that the goal of this blog is not to make money. I do still make money with it and I’ll come back to that in a moment but for this particular blog I would much prefer to have an RSS subscriber or a Newsletter subscriber, a StumbleUpon Fan or a Twitter Follower than a few cents from AdSense. These goals are all about extending my reach as a blogger which has the potential to increase my sphere of influence over time and of course, if I work it well, that should also increase my revenue in the long term.
However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t use any direct monetization. Of course I do, but it tends to bring in much more bang-for-the-buck than AdSense. I’ll use ause affiliate promotions, display banner ads for affiliate products and sell private ad-space. All of these things tend to bring in several (or many!) dollars a time, and not just a few cents.
Selling private ad space is another very popular way to monetize your blog but I cringe quite a lot when I see what some bloggers are charging. Let me explain why…
Many Bloggers Under-Price Their Advertising
WordPress themes that optimise for ad-space, especially 125×125 sized square banners are all the rage now so more and more blogs are offering up private advertising. However I keep seeing well-read bloggers offering up their precious screen real estate up for a pittance. If you are in the market for some cheap advertising then read on!
Note that I have listed RSS readership in the above list and really that’s an irrelevant number as those readers don’t see the ads - it’s the actual traffic that counts. However, I can’t see traffic stats (well I could use Alexa but that’s not so easy to compare) and blogs with lots of RSS readers usually have lots of traffic too so it’s just a ballpark.
Banner ads are unsightly things that are usually ignored but they take up valuable space on your blog. Is it really worth taking up that space for an entire month just for a few bucks like the bloggers above? What else could you do with that space?
Pricing of ad-space is a very personal thing. I’m sure somebody like Garry Conn knows he could charge a lot more than $6 so he must have his reasons for doing so. However, I suspect that many bloggers simply pluck a figure out of the air and then just leave it like that.
This is exactly how I started. When I first put ads on the blog I had around 15,000 visitors to the blog that month and I charged $50. However, a short while later I doubled my advertising rates to $100. Why? Because I mixed in affiliate banners with private advertisers and I noticed that several of my banners were making me close to $100 a month so I increased the rates accordingly. I don’t get many advertisers now but I have removed most of the ads now anyway as I prefer to use the space to promote my writing and social media profiles.
Under-selling ad space isn’t the only way that many bloggers make me cringe.
Many Bloggers Don’t Build Beyond The Blog Itself
I have talked before about the benefits of building assets that generate revenue long after the initial work is done rather than always working for money month after month. A blog is an asset. All of the affiliate sales that I made last month (with the exception of BlueHost that I’ll discuss in a moment!) were either from posts that I had written a long time ago or from the affiliate banners that I mentioned earlier on.
I did not have to do any extra work in the month of April to earn that income. If I was to stop blogging completely, I would still earn some income for quite some time. However, a blog has much more potential than earning revenue from direct methods that I’ve talked about in this post. Once you have started to develop a good readership (a couple of hundred readers perhaps) then your blog takes on a whole new power as a platform from which to launch a whole business.
My blog is in the Internet Marketing niche so there is lots of potential there. I have already released an ebook which has brought me several thousand dollars in income over the last 3 months. You may not see the connection between the ebook and the blog - I would not have made anywhere near that much income if the book had not been so heavily promoted on both my own blog and the rest of the blogosphere. I could not have got other people to promote it for me if I had not had been a complete unknown. The relationships I have built up in that time allowed me to reach out to a far wider circle of influence than I could have reached on my own.
I’m now writing a course about driving traffic with StumbleUpon and I use this blog to talk about it. I’ll promote it in my newsletter and I’ll be offering it up to affiliates which again allows me to reach out to the audiences of other bloggers in my niche. I would not be able to do any one of those things without this blog! Without it, I would have to rely on getting traffic to my Stumble Rush site with methods such as pay-per-click advertising. I have already talked in depth about how you can make money blogging by selling your knowledge in this way.
Conclusion
Some bloggers have absolutely no interest in making money from it but I’m guessing that those bloggers don’t read this blog! If you do intend to make money online and a blog features in that strategy then I urge you carefully consider exactly how you want to do it. There’s more to blog monetization than just slapping up some AdSense ads and hoping for the best.
Many blogs are filled with fluff just in the name of sticking to a posting schedule. This post outlines several kinds of blog posts that provide value both to your readers and to you as a blogger. I explain the benefits of each one and suggest when in your blogging career they can be put to the most effective use.
1) Standalone Guides
What Are They?
A standalone guide is a tutorial-style post which stands on its own - the kind of tutorial that does not need any proof. There is a problem to be solved, and your post shows how to solve it and nobody will argue with you as to whether or not your guide works. The guide itself is all the proof it needs.
For example, Embedding YouTube Clips Into WordPress. This isn’t a perfect example as WordPress 2.5 makes it somewhat obsolete but that post has drawn traffic and links for months.
Benefits:
These posts tend to stand the test of time, and do well in social media. They provide genuine value to the reader and yet they do not need any kind of credibility on behalf of the writer to do well. In fact, they can be an excellent way to build credibility as you demonstrate your knowledge in an topic and your ability to teach it.
When To Use Them:
Standalone guides are a great way to kickstart your blogging career. If you have just started a blog on a topic these types of posts are a superb way for you to demonstrate your knowledge in that topic, establish yourself as an authority, and get some traffic rolling in via social media. All new blogs need solid pillar content and these posts are a great way to get started.
2) Guides with Social Proof
What Are They?
Some guides teach people a technique that will not show results immediately and these often require that the author somehow prove that the technique works in order to establish credibility. My Twitter Guide falls into this category. I couldn’t teach people about Twitter and its benefits as a marketer if I didn’t have lots of followers and couldn’t show the traffic driven by Twitter.
Benefits:
As long as you can be confident that you can teach the techniques to others, these guides can not only be of great value to your readers but can establish you as an authority in the field and can lead to the creation of paid products further down the line. Furthermore, if readers adopt your techniques and have similar successes, they can become evangelists for your method thus giving you even more credibility.
When To use Them:
If you have the proof at the ready, you can use these right at the start of your blogging career to carve out a niche for yourself and begin the process of developing authority and credibility.
3) Resource Posts
What Are They?
A resource post is something that pulls together many resources on a subject and is something that readers would want to refer to over and over again. A couple of examples that I have used are my list of DoFollow Social Bookmarking sites and my list of Free Internet Marketing ebooks. Resource posts don’t always have to be in the form of lists, but they often are.
Benefits:
The benefits to the reader is that the posts save them time by having everything they need around a subject in just one place. These kinds of posts have a habit of being bookmarked in social media sites such as Delicious so a really good one can bring in a lot of traffic and inbound links over time.
When To Use Them:
Use them sparingly throughout your blogging career. One downside of resource posts is that people can get tired of them - “oh no, another top 10 list”. You have to make the effort to make them extremely comprehensive and high quality to really reap the benefits.
4) Achievement Showcases
What Are They?
These are basically posts where you get to brag about your achievements! However for these posts to be of value to your readers you have to be able to impart some kind of knowledge onto them, perhaps by showing readers how you achieved what you did in the hopes that they can replicate it. An example from my blog is when I discussed how I doubled my subscribers in a week and broke down where the traffic came from and what I did to attract it.
Benefits:
The benefit to the reader is that hopefully they can learn from your experiences and transfer that to their own ventures. The benefit to you is that you can establish some credibility but perhaps more importantly, you can demonstrate your transparency and show yourself as a real person.
When To use Them:
These kinds of posts aren’t suitable for all blogs. They don’t tend to do all that well in social media, so they work better once there is already an audience present. If you use them too early in your blog lifespan you also run the risk of looking like a fake. One technique you can use is to make them a regular feature (like I do with my monthly stat reports) and what this does is make your blog like a soap on TV - people want to check in and see how you’re doing.
5) Opinion Posts
What Are They?
These are the kinds of posts that started it all - where the blogger unleashes his or her personal opinion of some topic onto the world. They may be rants, observations, lessons learned and so on. Some examples of my own opinion posts would be my rant about sales letters and more recently, my opinion about how not to leave blog comments which stirred up a nice bit of controversy!
Benefits:
The benefits for the readers is a wooly area - they may not have educational value like guides but they can offer a different of value such as pure entertainment, encouraging the reader to think for themselves, broadening their horizons and so on. There are some bloggers such as Steve Pavlina who’s entire blogs are built around these kinds of posts.
As a blogger, opinion posts are a superb way of establishing your voice, showing people who you are, what you stand for and what you are about. These posts tend to foster conversations both on your blog itself in the comments and also in form of backlinks where other bloggers feel compelled to discuss your opinion. If your opinions run against the mainstream you will often attract negative publicity as well as positive but this can actually be a good thing too because it weeds out people from your readership that won’t benefit from your writing, and it converts your existing readers into evangelists.
When To Use Them:
It is best to reserve these kinds of posts until you have a readership otherwise they just fall on deaf ears. The more popular you already are, the bigger impact your opinion posts will have so start stocking these up early ready to unleash when you’ve gained a following!
6) Product / Service Reviews
What Are They?
Quite simply - your critique of some product or service usually tied in with an affiliate link that makes you money if your readers buy through that link. I’ve done a handful of such reviews such as Instant Money Reports ebook, and the new Butterfly Reports system.
Benefits:
Let’s get one thing clear - these kind of posts will ONLY benefit your readers if you offer an unbiased review of the product in question! If you do that, the benefits to the reader depend on the outcome of the review. They can help readers make up their minds about something they might have heard about it, and if the product is genuinely useful it can direct a reader to something that can enhance their lives. But lets face facts here - most people don’t need new stuff, new ebooks, new memberships and will do just fine with what they have!
The benefit to you of course is primarily income from affiliate sales. There can also be a more subtle benefit when you have the ability to present the negative aspects as well as the positive. This can establish your honesty which helps develop your online reputation which can have positive repercussions further down the line.
When To Use Them:
Unless your blog is specifically designed as a product review blog, don’t start posting these too early. No matter how good your review, you are likely to antagonise some readers and possibly lose them. This may be acceptable once your blog is more established but don’t do it when you are in the early stages and trying to develop a following. No matter where you are in your blog, always use these sparingly.
Have I Missed Any?
These are my thoughts on the kinds of posts that I find myself writing most of the time. What types of posts do you use on your blog? Have you ever sat and thought about the benefits they bring?
In this post, I’ll be showing you how to install a FavIcon onto your WordPress blog using a cool new plugin. This is my first ever video post, be gentle :-)
What is a FavIcon?
A FavIcon is the little graphic that is displayed to the left of a URL in the address bar of your browser and in the tab displays in the case of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Many sites just have a generic icon and in my case I have been using the default BlueHost icon for 8 months which is a bit slack really! A custom icon can help your site stand out from the crowd a little.
The MaxBlogPress Plugin
The plugin that makes this so easy is called MaxBlogPress and I was told about it by the author recently. That page is a little bit like a sales letter, showing you not only how to install the plugin but doing a very good job of exaplaining exactly why you would want to.
Here is my video showing you how to use the plugin, it’s very easy:
One thing I would like to note is that the author has done a pretty good job of monetizing this plugin. As I mention in the video, when you first activate the plugin you will be asked to register it which signs you up to an email list which you then have to confirm your subscription to. Upon clicking the confirmation link you are then directed to a page that is trying to sell you some blog traffic package. You’ll need to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to select “no thanks”.
I’m not entirely sure what I think of this. On the one hand, I don’t like those offer pages - I think they are sleazy but on the other hand I think software developers often go unrewarded so its perfectly justifiable to want to generate some income from a useful plugin such as this. I suppose I would have preferred to not see the offer page and instead have it pushed upon me more gently via the autoresponder later on.
Anyway, enough of my rants, this plugin offers the easiest way that I know of to create a FavIcon for your WordPress blog.
Blog comments are often thought of as a measure of engagement amongst the blog readers. People like to join in the conversation that is going on within the comments. If you have a new blog it can be hard to get started so here are 10 WordPress plugins that can help. Where possible, I have linked to equivalents for other blogging platforms.
1) DoFollow Plugin
By default, WordPress marks all links (including trackbacks) within the comments section as “nofollow” which means that the Google spider does not follow those links. If you install a plugin that removes this tag, then every time somebody leaves a comment on your blog they get a useful backlink to their site. This does have its downsides of course - it also attracts more spam comments.
There is more than one do-follow plugin to choose from, Dofollow simply strips the nofollow tag from all links in the comments. If you want more control, Lucia’s Linky Love is a little more selective over which nofollow tags are removed. It encourages the blogger to set a minimum number of posts that must be set by a commenter before the nofollow tag is stripped for them. It will also leave nofollow on comments left on older posts.
The two plugins above are specific to WordPress but it is also possible to remove the nofollow tag from Blogger, Typepad and Moveable Type blogs.
2) Top Commentator Plugin
This is a method that I use here on this blog. It is a widget that shows the people who have made the most comments within the specified time period. You can select how many people to show in the list and what the time period is. My widget resets itself every month giving newcomers a chance to get on the list and I show 10 people.
The links in this widget are dofollow and they stay there for the duration of the timeframe as long as that person is not dropped off the list by another commenter. Because the widget is installed site-wide, it creates a semi-permanent link from the blog home page.
There are several plugins to choose from, I use one by Nate Sanden and if you go for that one, be sure to check our Wayne Liew’s tips on it.
CommentLuv is a plugin I began to explore recently and I really like it. Basically, whenever another blogger comments on your blog, the plugin will search their website link for an RSS feed and try to extract their latest blog post and then link to it at the end of their comment. The link is nofollow but that can be turned off by one of the plugins mentioned above.
4) Most Commented Posts Plugin
Most blog themes have sections where you can highlight special content. If you scroll up on this blog you’ll see that at the top I have a Useful Posts section, Recent Posts and a block advertising my ebook. Another usage of one of these areas would be to show the most commented posts. This can encourage even more comments to the posts. Of course, you need to have a few comments to get started with this tactic.
5) Recent Comments Plugin
If you have a few particularly insightful commenters, you highlight their comments with the Recent Comments plugin The benefit of this plugin is that it actually shows a snippet of the comment text itself, rather than just a link to the person who made it. So this really encourages people to think about what they post.
I’d say the biggest downside to this one is that it takes up a lot of screen real estate and depending on your blog style, can make it look a little cluttered.
6) Subscribe to Comments Plugin
What can happen a lot with blogs is that somebody reads a post, is inspired to comment and then forgets all about that post as they move along to the next one or even to the next blog. The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows the commenter to choose to be emailed when a new comment on that post is made. This is particularly useful if the commenter has asked a question of you.
One tip - by default, have the checkbox switched OFF otherwise all your commenters will start getting emails every time a new comment is made and that is a fast way to get you into the spam filter!
7) Threaded Comments
Once you start getting conversations happening within the comments it can get a little messy. Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin allows users to explicitly reply to each other and shows the comments in a nested fashion like you would see in a forum perhaps.
Another benefit of this plugin would arise if you tend you get asked many specific questions by your readers. Courtney Tuttle is a big fan of this plugin and uses it extensively to do answer his readers questions.
8) Gravatars Plugin
If you’ve been around a few blogs you’ll see that there are various ways of getting an avatar for yourself. This plugin attempts to grab the avatar from services such as MyBlogLog and show it next to the commenter name. I have just installed it on this blog to see how it performs.
The advantage is that you get to put a face to a name which is nice for you and for your readers it helps them to brand themselves. One potential downside is that it might slow down the loading of your pages. Now if only I could figure out why my own avatar isn’t showing I would be more enamoured with this plugin!
9) Custom Smileys Plugin
Depending on the kind of blog you have, you might find it fun to allow users to put their own little smileys in their comments. This is just a fun thing of course but if your blog is the right fit, it can allow your commenters to enjoy the experience a little more.
10) Edit Comments Plugin
When you write thought provoking posts you want to allow your readers to reply with thought provoking comments. It can be really annoying for them to write out a nice long comment, submit it and then realise that they put a typo in there. This plugin will allow your commenters to edit their comment for a short time after posting.
Some General Commenting Tips
First of all, don’t go crazy and install all of the plugins listed above as that can make your blog look unnecessarily cluttered. Pick a few that you think could work with with your style of blog and test them for a little while and then evaluate.
Once you’ve started to see more comments being made, you will inevitably see more spam comments too. I have recently surpassed 10,000 spam comments and I am now getting several hundred every day! If I didn’t have a good spam filter in place I’d go a little mad!
There are a number of plugins that can automatically filter a large number of these for you. I use Akismet which comes with WordPress by default, but others also swear by Spam Karma and Bad Behavior.
Once you’re getting all these great comments from your readers don’t forget to reply to them! Also, it can be nice to reward your commenters now and then with a mention in a blog post or a backlink. One thing that I do is have a look through the posts listed by the CommentLuv plugin and if I find a good one, I link to it in my weekly link roundup post at the weekend.
Most people who try to make money blogging do it by selling (directly or indirectly) other people’s knowledge and this often leads to a very poor return on the time and effort invested into the blog. I made over $2000 last month and none of that income would have been possible without this blog but the majority of that income came from my own knowledge, not somebody else’s.
I’ve been in this Internet Marketing game for six months now and I started the blog just to keep a record of my progress. It was never intended to be a money maker - I always have other projects for that. What surprises me is how often I see advice given to newcomers to start a blog. Personally I think starting a blog is a very bad way to start making money online.
Why? Two reasons. Firstly it takes a long time to get the momentum going with a brand new blog and secondly, the monetization models chosen by most people rely on having lots of readers and traffic which makes the whole process rather slow and painful.
Popular Blog Monetization Models
First I want to mention what most people do and highlight how they are usually proportional to the amount of traffic or subscribers that the blog has. Also, have a read of what Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak and Josh Spaulding recommend.
Advertising (needs traffic) - this includes all sorts of on page advertising such as AdSense as well as direct ads.
Affiliate Programs (needs subscribers) - this can take several forms but usually the best way to make money as an affiliate is to do a good review of an affiliate product or share your experiences with using it. I would class affiliate banners as another form of advertising.
Sponsored Posts (needs subscribers) - these kinds of posts pay out in proportion to the popularity of your blog. It is difficult to make money with them as a new blog and once you start to get popular you can lose credibility with them. You won’t catch me doing one any time soon (ever).
There are all sorts of variations of the above but the most common forms of monetization used by the vast majority of bloggers falls into these categories. There is certainly potential to make money with these techniques but you tend to have to keep working at it month after month. An advertiser can stop advertising at any moment, and you always have to keep finding new affiliate programs to promote or your blog audience will get bored.
Now if you have a hugely popular blog then you probably won’t have any difficulty finding advertisers but if you’ve managed to get that far then I would argue that you could still be making a lot more money by selling your own knowledge.
Selling Your Own Knowledge
What do I mean by “selling your own knowledge”? I mean putting together some kind of product based around the topic of your blog. That product might be an ebook, a course, a tutorial video, a membership site or maybe even some kind of physical product. I have been looking at a lot of blogs lately and I am surprised at just how few of them do this. Those that do seem to be the ones who are making money!
When starting a blog a popular piece of advice is to “pick a topic that you know about”. After all, how can you expect to write on a regular basis on a topic you know nothing about? Okay this blog is kind of an exception to that rule as I knew nothing about making money online when I started. However, the key thing is - I do now! And now that I do, I can cultivate that knowledge into a form that I can package and sell to others.
Blogging is a time consuming activity. The vast majority of blogs that are doing well are filled with value-laden posts that have been carefully crafted and researched. This takes time. It also takes a huge amount of time to get out into the blogosphere and promote that content so that the blog actually draws in new readers. Why do all this work if all you are ever going to do is display ads for other people’s products and be an affiliate for other people’s products?
Analyzing the ROI
Advertising seems to fall into two camps. One is the on-page ad programs such as AdSense. These only bring in pennies per click so you need a LOT of traffic to make any significant income from them. The other is direct advertising such as those 125×125 ads you see on many blogs including this one. The more popular your blog becomes the more potential you have to earn from these but there is always a ceiling here due to the limitations of screen real estate. John Chow recently discussed this problem on his blog when a reader suggested he could extend his income from his blog to $300k a month.
The other popular method is selling products; either your own or other people’s as an affiliate. When you sell your own product you own 100% of the profits. Of course if you bring affiliates in to sell your product for you then you pay them a cut but any income generated by affiliates is income earned that is totally outside of your blog - and that’s another one of the advantages.
You can use your blog as leverage - to get your brand out there, to build credibility, to develop relationships in your niche and this allows you to extend your revenue earning potential far beyond the reaches of your individual blog.
When you make money as an affiliate for somebody else’s product you can only earn as much as the sales that you can directly produce from your own blog. Sure there are programs with several tiers but each tier earns less thus reducing that ROI further. When you sell your own product, your own blog is just the starting point, not the end point.
Look at the following diagram:
What I am trying to show here is that when you only sell other people’s knowledge you are confined to the reach of your own blog and thus you are entirely dependent on how much traffic and how many subscribers you can directly attract to your blog. When you sell your own knowledge in the form of a product that other people will want to help you promote, you open up the field and now have access to the reach of all those other bloggers combined.
Analyzing My Own Income
I’ve had two months where the income has significantly jumped and the reason for that jump is largely due to affiliate revenue of the BlueHost hosting package that I promoted in my free ebook about WordPress. Notice that I haven’t even had to actually sell anything here. My ebook was free but the principle is the same. I had some knowledge which I packaged up and monetized, and I then harnessed the power of other bloggers to extend the reach of that ebook far beyond what I could have achieved from my blog alone.
5 Steps To Selling Your Knowledge
Step 1 - Establish Credibility About Your Topic
Your blog is your platform to allow you to show off your writing ability and your knowledge about the topics you choose to cover. The first product that I am going to actually sell will be my course on StumbleUpon but I have already started to establish a certain amount of credibility by blogging about StumbleUpon inthepast. Not only that but as this is a social media site I can demonstrate social proof by publicly displaying my profile so that other people can see how many sites I have rated, how many fans I have and so on.
If you try to launch a product cold with no prior mention of it you have to work extra hard to convince people that you know what you are talking about. Having a blog is a wonderful pre-selling tool. You can talk about a subject long before you even give people any idea that you might be developing a product around it.
Step 2 - Develop & Package The Knowledge
I didn’t have much knowledge when I started this blog but now I’m starting to learn things. I know a lot about Twitter, WordPress, StumbleUpon and I also know a thing or two about building a reasonably popular blog in a fairly short time. Look to your own blog, delve into your posts and see which topics you could expand upon.
I never thought about producing a product about StumbleUpon until somebody else did the same thing. I feel somewhat guilty that I kinda stole his idea but once I started to write down what I knew about StumbleUpon I realised it was a huge amount of information. What do you know a lot about?
You don’t have to know everything right now. Look to the future, what are you learning about that you might be able to teach later on? I have a strong interest in developing niche sites that make money. I haven’t succeeded yet but if and when I do, I might be able to teach other people how to do it. You don’t have to be an expert right now. People seem to like my posts where I show how I fail at things!
Step 3 - Allow People To Get To Know You
When you create a product, it usually needs to be professional, to the point and free of personal anecdotes and any fluff. That is not the same when it comes to your blog. Feel free to talk about your personal experiences on your blog. Be a bit more informal. Stick a picture of your ugly mug on your home page, write an about page, include a way to contact you and over time people will get to know you.
People buy products from people. If they like you they are more likely to buy from you! Of course not everybody will like you, that is just human nature but if you never reveal anything of yourself on your blog then people don’t even get a chance to know you and decide whether they like you or not.
Step 4 - Get To Know Other People In Your Niche
In order to extend your reach as I showed in the diagram above, you have to get yourself out into the big wide blogosphere and network! There are many ways to connect with people in your niche - you can even use StumbleUpon to network in some niches!
I’m no expert in product launches (I’m still hoping somebody’s gonna buy me Jeff’s new Product Launch Formula!!) but from my own experience I have found that one of the best ways of promoting something is to email people who already know you about the product. Sure you can email a bunch of strangers, and I did do that when marketing my Twitter guide, WordPress ebook and most recently my Easter Egg Hunt but the majority of the people who promoted those things for me were people I already knew from our chats / emails / comments exchanged over the last few months.
Step 5 - Putting It Together and Launching
I don’t have the answers to this last step as I have only scratched the surface myself but I know that my readers are getting to know me, I am getting to know other people in my niche and I’m starting to formulate ideas for products that I can create in the coming months.
I’m going to buy that Product Launch Formula that everybody and his dog is promoting at the moment and hopefully I can apply it and then perhaps in the future I can come back to this point and expand on the launch process itself.
Conclusion
Making money blogging is a popular way to start making money online but the common monetization models bring in very little revenue for the amount of work needed to really get the blog off the ground. If you are going to bother building a popular blog then don’t just give away all your knowledge for free and rely on selling other people’s knowledge. Sell your own!
