Having a blog is your opportunity throw your voice into the wind and have it travel around the world. Subjects that you can opine about are virtually unlimited. Describe your kid's first birthday or give away your grandma's secret cake recipe, but don't tell grandma. Your blog can be all about you and your interests or conversely some famous movie star or politician that you are zealously following online. Whatever it's about, after your blog is up, chances are that you are paying ISP and or hosting fees for throwing your powerful voice into the wind. So how about making it pay for its own weight?
Writing diaries and journals has been a popular activity since paper and pen were readily available. So when the internet rolled around, it only made sense that writers put their words on the computer. These diaries or journals weren't called blogs until Joran Barger phrased the term “weblog.� It was through a simple joke from a blogger, Peter Merholz that cut weblog into we blog. Other bloggers began picking up the word blog and soon it spread like wildfire.
Bloggers were largely ignored as a force to be reckoned with until a specific televised event had critics up in arms. Some remarks made by 2002 Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, not shown by the media, were heavily criticized by bloggers. In fact bloggers made such a terrific din online about issues that the mainstream media had missed, that it raised a controversy at a national level which wound up with a very wounded and chastised Senator Lott stepping down unhappily from his lofty position.
Senator Lott was not the only victim of his own "fame". The popular news show “60 Minutes� also fell victim to the tenaciousness of the blogger community. News anchor, Dan Rather, was reporting a story about President Bush's military service. Documents presented to backup the story were later discovered to be forged and it was bloggers once again who raised the uproar. As a result, Dan Rather was fired and CBS had to broadcast a somewhat red-faced apology to the public.
Some bloggers have a hard time keeping fresh content in their blogs or other activities come up that steal away their time. When this happens, they often put their blogs along with the domain name up for sale. This is where you can make money without actually having to write a blog. You can buy these lower priced blogs, fix them up a little just like you would for a renovation on an inexpensive house and then resell them for a profit.
Other bloggers are attempting to grab a piece of the millions of available advertising dollars by putting ads on their blog. Visitors leaving those blogs often click on the ads and for each click, the owner gets some small revenue. Google Adsense, and Adbright are just two of the many online entities that allow you to customize ads for your blog.
The great thing about ad revenues is that you can be collecting revenue, even if you have ignored your blog for quite some time. If however, visitors have been commenting on your blog and keeping it alive or constantly changing for the search engines, then you traffic will be increasing along with your residual income. There are tricks and tips to the size of the ad format relative to its surroundings and the placement of the ad that can make up to 400% more money for you, so before you run out and just put Google's adsense on your blog, read up on this a little more.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful tools for generating income for your blog. Basically, you use your blog to sell someone else's products for a percentage of the sales. Usually, the best products to put nice pretty "affiliate tagged" images of on your blog are those that are related to your blog topic. Your enthusiasm for the related topic will help the product to sell itself to the customers. And as a bonus for helping to keep your blog interesting, you can get great graphics that are not **just pretty pictures**.
Some of the affiliated marketing sites you can look at are Commission Juncton, and LinkShare. Linkshare has a one time cost that is a little expensive, however most of Commission Junction is free, and clickbank the massive info marketplace is definitely free. These groups have a massive variety of products for you to choose from. Your blog can be the platform to showcase related products that sell themselves easily.
Cluttered ads on a blog are particularly unattractive to potential customers. A nice mix of valuable content combined with related product ads is your best bet at getting your product sold. Try not to put too many different classifications of products together. This can make your blog awkward looking and turn off some potential buyers. Another tip, the more focused the topic of your blog is, is the more money you will make from Google's adsense should you choose to use this easy option. Blogs that talk about everything under the sun, tend to have audiences that are searching and not buying. Blogs that focus on Polish Camera Lenses or light weight racing bicycles or dating in afghanistan ( note how specific these topics are ) tend to have audiences that are far more likely to buy or purchase something and Google and others are well aware of this distinction.
Getting more people to visit your blog is important to generating sales or getting more ad revenue. The more people who visit your site, the more potential for income that you have. Traffic can be directed toward your blog by commenting in other topic related blogs and leaving your own blog address in those. Consider putting your blog address in your signature as your comment in forums and don't be shy to put your blog url/address in your Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Linkln or Myspace accounts for more curiousity seeking traffic.
MSN and Yahoo are two search engines that appear to put emphasis on indexing blogs which are up to date. Reach 100-200 search engines just by submitting your blog posts to a number of ping services. An automatic ping/alert goes out when you update your blog so insure that your blog settings include a number of ping services and not just the standard default rpc.pingomatic.com. This will tremendously ensure that many search engines are immediately made aware that you have a new entry in your blog. Thus you can increase your traffic, with a simple update.
The power of a blog can be extraordinary. Most of us who have blogs update them once or twice a month, oblivious to the fact that there are others who are earning tremendous 6 and 7 figure amounts from their blog. At some point in time, most of us have heard of these few geniuses and have even tried a few things to see how we can monetize our blogs. Unfortunately most of us have failed or just not made more than a few dollars monthly. The truth is that sometimes a few simple changes can both increase traffic exponentially and also create a steady income of $50 to $100 dollars daily on autopilot, which most of us would find to be quite fantastic. What kind of changes would those be? Click below to find out.
Lots of great ideas on how to monetize your blog. But there are a half dozen even more potent ideas than these mentioned above. Come over and have a look at how you too can monetize your blog like the big boys.
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