Small Business Design Resources

How to Make Money From Your Blog

When you develop your blog, you need to keep in mind the 4 basic principles of profitable website building. These are commonly known as CTPM. The letters stand for Content, Traffic, Pre-sell and Monetize. The four principles work for all aspects of your website business but let’s take a look at them in light of your Blog.

Let’s take a look at each of the words and how they apply to blogging.

Content

Your website content needs to be relevant and interesting first of all. To keep people on your site long enough to pre-sell or monetize, your website content needs to appeal to your readers, so it needs to be relevant to the topic of your website. That’s what will keep people coming back and that’s what will get people to sign up on your mailing list or your RSS feed for more information. A blog is a great way to enhance your content because you can change it regularly, especially with regard to changing search engine entries. You should be analyzing traffic to your site regularly using analytics tools, and you should be checking on reverse seach engine keywords regularly too to make sure you are keeping up with what people are typing in the search engines.

Traffic

Generating traffic is possibly the hardest part of running a website, and this is where the science turns into art. Blogging is one of the most highly recommended ways to drive traffic to your site so it’s a very handy tool if used in accordance with the four principles. But it’s not the only thing you can do. Here are some of the things you must look at, understand and master to generate traffic to your site:

• Affiliate marketing – affiliate marketing is where you get other internet marketers to help market your business by offering them incentives or rewards. For example, if you sell a product, you can have an affiliate sell your product for you and then they get a percentage of the profit and you get a percentage. You generate the product, and they generate the sales.
• Blog carnivals – bloggers of similar topics unite and blog on similar topics. A blog carnival has an edition, like a magazine, centered on a theme. Links to all the contributors are created in the blog. You can look for carnivals being run by others or you can create your own and get others to join in. You can create a carnival edition in your own blog and invite other bloggers to send you articles. Look for experts with great blogs that you want to associate to your blog carnival.
• Advertising – Look into advertising revenue using things like Google Adsense and Google Adwords. Adwords is a program for people who wish to post ads based on relevant keywords. They pay Google to post the ads. Adsense is the program that picks up the keywords and looks for relevant sites to post them to. When you create your site builder template you build in placeholders for ads. Of course, you can rearrange the ads at any time, or remove them all together from your site builder template. It’s up to you.
• Social Media – blogging is one form of social media, but there are many others. Look for ways to get your site linked to from other sites; submit articles to sites like Ezine.

Pre-sell

Preselling your customer means getting them interested in your service or product by nurturing them as customers and giving more than they bargained for in the best possible way – lots of useful information, good service and so on. Your blog should specifically help your customers and is a great pre-selling tool.

Monetizing

Simply put, this is the part where you make money. It might be from advertising dollars, or selling your service or product. Ideally it’s a combination of both.

Using the four principles is just the beginning. For a successful and profitable website you need to be dedicated and determined to reach the top of the search engines. Of all of the above, traffic is probably the most important because without traffic it doesn’t matter how good your content is and you won’t make money.