What problem does your website solve for its users?
Does the answer to that question fly off your lips? Did you have to think about it? Can you answer it even after thinking about it?
How about this - fill in the blanks in the following statement:
“I give my users _________ and I get ________ in return.”
Am I overstating things if I say the key to success with any website is found in those two blanks?
A couple of examples…
On my ecommerce site: “I give my users a variety of trailer hitch accessories and I get money in return.”
On my wife’s personal blog, she would say: “I give my friends and family updates on my life (and about eight million pictures of our 11 month old son) and I get a feeling of connection and happiness in return.
On CourtneyTuttle.com: “We give people simple insights into how they can get traffic from the search engines and we get coaching clients, membership website subscribers (until recently ;) ) and joint venture offers from other businesses in return.
If you don’t have a written plan for your site, you should at the very least be able to make a clear “I give this and I get that in return.” statement. If you don’t have that mantra in your head every day, how can you expect your business to progress?
I don’t do a lot of blog reading, but often I’ll click through to sites I find in comments here on the site. I’ll read a post or two, and all too often I find myself saying “What’s your point?” On most of the sites I visit I don’t see any clear message of “The author is giving me this, and hoping to get that in exchange.”
Now you might not care if your users/readers see an obvious “give and receive” message on your blog, but think about this: In the last 30 days, I have spent over $5,000 just on information. The crazy thing is I’m GLAD I’ve just shelled out five grand for knowledge, because I know I’ve purchased some really high ROI solutions to a few of the problems we face in our business.
If you want to make money, you have to be the provider of a solution for which a large enough group of people is willing to pay.
I don’t think that sentence reads very smoothly, but I’m leaving it alone. Go back over it a couple times and let it sink in.
What problem (faced by a large enough group of people) does your presence on the web solve?
Your primary goal, maybe even your obsession, should be to answer that question.
If you can’t fire off the answer, stop whatever else you’re doing and start figuring it out. Our experience at Court’s Internet Marketing School is the earning power of a site really takes off after a) the author discovers what problem he/she can solve for the audience, and b) the audience agrees.
Let’s Brainstorm Together
Maybe we can help you get started today by going through a little exercise in the comments section. Here’s how it will work: anyone who feels like they have a clearly defined “I give this and receive that in exchange” statement, please leave it in the comments. It’s some free advertising and a branding opportunity for your site. :) For those of you who aren’t quite sure yet, make your best attempt.
Everybody else, click through to the sites behind a few of the comments, then come back and reply to the site owner’s statement. Did the site match the give/receive statement? Leave some POSITIVE feedback. I’m putting everyone on notice now that any sarcastic and/or critical comments will be immediately deleted. Court and I have very thick skins; you can feel free to call us morons all day long. We’re not in the business of setting other people up for that same treatment though, so if you can’t say something nice…
source:courtneytuttle.com
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Jun 21, 2009
Jun 16, 2009
5 Ways to Make Money Blogging (Once You Have Traffic)
Making Money From a Blog - Moving Past AdSense
While it is possible to make some money with a blog of any size - your chances of earning income from a blog do generally increase as you increase your readership numbers.
Many bloggers start out monetizing their blogs using ad networks like AdSense. While ad networks like AdSense can still earn you a nice income as your blog grows (many large blogs use them) - an increased audience will also open new opportunities to you as a blogger.
1. Direct Ad Sales
One thing that becomes possible as your readership grows is that you can begin to attract your own direct advertisers. I’ve written on this topic numerous times before so rather than writing a long tutorial on the topic let me point you to some previous posts:
* Find a Sponsor for your Blog
* 10 Ways to make your Blog more attractive to advertisers
* How to Find Advertisers for Your Blog
* Finding Advertisers for Your Blog
* How much should I charge for my Advertising Space
* 5 Ways to Find Direct Advertisers for Your Blog
2. Ad Representation
Many bloggers struggle to sell advertising on their own blogs. Most bloggers are not experienced in the area of ad sales, don’t have contacts in the advertising industry, are unaware of how much to charge or even what technology to use to serve ads. Most of us also are passionate about writing content and building community - the admin of finding and interacting with advertisers can often be a distraction.
One alternative once you have a reasonable amount of traffic is to outsource your ad sales. Some blog networks and ad networks will handle this kind of thing for you once you have enough traffic. Generally you need a fair bit of traffic for them to look at you but in these tough economic times I suspect we’ll see more and more services to do this.
3. Start Your Own Ad Sales Network
One thing that I’ve been hearing more and more bloggers doing is joining together to sell advertising as a collective or network within a niche. You might not have enough traffic to attract a top tier advertiser alone - but what if you joined with 4-5 other medium sized blogs in your niche and approached advertisers together?
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can work on blogs of all sizes but once a blog has an engaged and loyal readership it can really pay off. Readers that have tracked with you for a while are more likely to buy something that you recommend than a one off visitor - so this is a particularly useful strategy if you have built a ‘community’ rather than just a blog that has a lot of search traffic. The key is to find products to promote that are of a high quality that you can genuinely recommend and that have high relevance to your readership.
5. Sell Your Own Product
Another monetization strategy to start thinking about once you start seeing growth in your readership is your own product to sell.
Whether that product be an e-book, a membership area, a real hard cover book, training (online or real life), consulting, merchandise…. once you’ve got a loyal readership who trusts you and sees you as an expert in your field you’ll find that they are increasingly likely to buy something that you sell.
You’ll also find it easier to get other blogs in your niche to promote your product once you’ve build a blog with profile. I’m seeing more and more bloggers doing this and suspect that as advertising budgets get smaller in the current economic climate that we’ll see more and more of this type of approach (I’ve previously called it ‘indirect income’) by smart bloggers.
source:problogger.net
While it is possible to make some money with a blog of any size - your chances of earning income from a blog do generally increase as you increase your readership numbers.
Many bloggers start out monetizing their blogs using ad networks like AdSense. While ad networks like AdSense can still earn you a nice income as your blog grows (many large blogs use them) - an increased audience will also open new opportunities to you as a blogger.
1. Direct Ad Sales
One thing that becomes possible as your readership grows is that you can begin to attract your own direct advertisers. I’ve written on this topic numerous times before so rather than writing a long tutorial on the topic let me point you to some previous posts:
* Find a Sponsor for your Blog
* 10 Ways to make your Blog more attractive to advertisers
* How to Find Advertisers for Your Blog
* Finding Advertisers for Your Blog
* How much should I charge for my Advertising Space
* 5 Ways to Find Direct Advertisers for Your Blog
2. Ad Representation
Many bloggers struggle to sell advertising on their own blogs. Most bloggers are not experienced in the area of ad sales, don’t have contacts in the advertising industry, are unaware of how much to charge or even what technology to use to serve ads. Most of us also are passionate about writing content and building community - the admin of finding and interacting with advertisers can often be a distraction.
One alternative once you have a reasonable amount of traffic is to outsource your ad sales. Some blog networks and ad networks will handle this kind of thing for you once you have enough traffic. Generally you need a fair bit of traffic for them to look at you but in these tough economic times I suspect we’ll see more and more services to do this.
3. Start Your Own Ad Sales Network
One thing that I’ve been hearing more and more bloggers doing is joining together to sell advertising as a collective or network within a niche. You might not have enough traffic to attract a top tier advertiser alone - but what if you joined with 4-5 other medium sized blogs in your niche and approached advertisers together?
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can work on blogs of all sizes but once a blog has an engaged and loyal readership it can really pay off. Readers that have tracked with you for a while are more likely to buy something that you recommend than a one off visitor - so this is a particularly useful strategy if you have built a ‘community’ rather than just a blog that has a lot of search traffic. The key is to find products to promote that are of a high quality that you can genuinely recommend and that have high relevance to your readership.
5. Sell Your Own Product
Another monetization strategy to start thinking about once you start seeing growth in your readership is your own product to sell.
Whether that product be an e-book, a membership area, a real hard cover book, training (online or real life), consulting, merchandise…. once you’ve got a loyal readership who trusts you and sees you as an expert in your field you’ll find that they are increasingly likely to buy something that you sell.
You’ll also find it easier to get other blogs in your niche to promote your product once you’ve build a blog with profile. I’m seeing more and more bloggers doing this and suspect that as advertising budgets get smaller in the current economic climate that we’ll see more and more of this type of approach (I’ve previously called it ‘indirect income’) by smart bloggers.
source:problogger.net
Jun 6, 2009
Making Money On The Internet With Blogs
Can just anybody really make cash on the internet using blogs? There are many internet entrepreneurs that are over exaggerating things and shooting hypes after hypes so that they can sell their blogging products and programs to marketing novices. On the other hand, many long time but burned out bloggers thinks that earning money with blogs is overrated. They say they are not really earning enough amounts to even cover their everyday expenses. Are they really promoting their blog properly? Are they using the right monetization methods?
Many people are starting a blog for the intention of using it to make online money. There are thousands of blogs being created each day and while many of it is intended to earn money, many are not. The actual numbers really vary and depend on what you are looking at. If you want a web business that involves of blog marketing, then you would be blogging for moolah. On the other hand, if you just have a blog that you use to share your ideas and journal more or less, you are probably not blogging for cash. Everyone blogs for a different reason.
Blog marketing to earn money implies that you are simply blogging for income. If you want to make an amount of money that will add up to become anything, you need to be persistent, and consistent. To do so there are some things as well as techniques and promotional tools that you must learn and learn how to use. Keep reading for more.
While goodcontent is something that you will need for your blog to earn money, you also want to ensure that it is original content as well. It’s hard to advertise a blog with articles that is taken from other sites and that you do not own the rights. Plagiarism will cause you in trouble with Google and also the person that originally created the content. Be sure that all of your contents are those that only you have the rights to. This is an important lesson to remember and practice when you are promoting your blog to create cash. Content is the real deal to successful marketing lately.
Another aspect of blog marketing for profits that is really necessary is tracking. You want to be able to track your readers and clickers to determine where they are coming from and where they are leaving. You should be able to evaluate what keywords they used to stumble upon your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take away all of the guess work when talking about blog marketing and making cash with blogs. You should be able to determine what keywords are working, and which are not so that you will know which keywords to work on and which ones to discontinue using.
Another thing that is important when you are maintaining a make money on the internet business blog is to look for other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. Link exchanges will aide you receive more visitors from the search engines. You gain more advantage if you can get some good backlinks from high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your backlinks, the better for the search engine rank of your blog. When Google and the other search engines recognize your link exchanges, they can rank your sites pages higher.
Blogging for money can be achieved with the right marketing system. You just simply need to know what works and what does not. Blog marketing can be a trial and error basis. If you feel you might know of a new method to advertise your blog the most effectively, try it! You just never have the idea if it will work for you until you do. Then if you stumble into something that works well and can be duplicated, you might want to make it into an ebook and create more profits by marketing it as well. Just make your blog work well and make more dollars for you.
source:makemoneyou.blogspot.com
Many people are starting a blog for the intention of using it to make online money. There are thousands of blogs being created each day and while many of it is intended to earn money, many are not. The actual numbers really vary and depend on what you are looking at. If you want a web business that involves of blog marketing, then you would be blogging for moolah. On the other hand, if you just have a blog that you use to share your ideas and journal more or less, you are probably not blogging for cash. Everyone blogs for a different reason.
Blog marketing to earn money implies that you are simply blogging for income. If you want to make an amount of money that will add up to become anything, you need to be persistent, and consistent. To do so there are some things as well as techniques and promotional tools that you must learn and learn how to use. Keep reading for more.
While goodcontent is something that you will need for your blog to earn money, you also want to ensure that it is original content as well. It’s hard to advertise a blog with articles that is taken from other sites and that you do not own the rights. Plagiarism will cause you in trouble with Google and also the person that originally created the content. Be sure that all of your contents are those that only you have the rights to. This is an important lesson to remember and practice when you are promoting your blog to create cash. Content is the real deal to successful marketing lately.
Another aspect of blog marketing for profits that is really necessary is tracking. You want to be able to track your readers and clickers to determine where they are coming from and where they are leaving. You should be able to evaluate what keywords they used to stumble upon your blog and where they did their searching. Doing so will help take away all of the guess work when talking about blog marketing and making cash with blogs. You should be able to determine what keywords are working, and which are not so that you will know which keywords to work on and which ones to discontinue using.
Another thing that is important when you are maintaining a make money on the internet business blog is to look for other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. Link exchanges will aide you receive more visitors from the search engines. You gain more advantage if you can get some good backlinks from high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your backlinks, the better for the search engine rank of your blog. When Google and the other search engines recognize your link exchanges, they can rank your sites pages higher.
Blogging for money can be achieved with the right marketing system. You just simply need to know what works and what does not. Blog marketing can be a trial and error basis. If you feel you might know of a new method to advertise your blog the most effectively, try it! You just never have the idea if it will work for you until you do. Then if you stumble into something that works well and can be duplicated, you might want to make it into an ebook and create more profits by marketing it as well. Just make your blog work well and make more dollars for you.
source:makemoneyou.blogspot.com
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