How To Make Money With Blogs

John Chow recently posted a call to mon­ey­mak­ing British-​​Columbia blog­gers for a news­pa­per inter­view in his province. (Too bad it’s not about Cana­dian blog­gers, since I’m in Ottawa, Ontario, and I would have loved the extra publicity).

Nev­er­the­less, this is an inter­est­ing topic I wanted to cover in this blog because a lot of peo­ple are ask­ing about it. In fact, we dis­cussed it on a call with Clay­ton Make­peace, enti­tled “Blog­ging For Dol­lars.” Peo­ple raved so much about the call that they’ve begged Clay­ton for a sec­ond one. (And yes, by pop­u­lar demand, we’re doing one in March, so stay tuned!)

But let me share, how­ever, some of the things we dis­cussed on the call — along with a few tid­bits on how you can make money with a blog.

Based on my expe­ri­ence, a blog has one or more of five major goals. Aside from the stan­dard busi­ness and per­sonal goals of a blog (like jour­nal­ing, gain­ing pub­lic­ity, con­nect­ing with audi­ences, post­ing news, etc), the five major goals, in terms of using blogs to make money online, are:

1. Cre­at­ing visitors
2. Cre­at­ing evangelists
3. Cre­at­ing leads
4. Cre­at­ing sales
5. Cre­at­ing businesses

A blog is def­i­nitely one of the best SEO machines out there. The Inter­net (with the word “Inter­net,” I mean peo­ple who are on it, as well as search engines who crawl and serve it) are typ­i­cally look­ing for one thing and one thing only. It’s not prod­ucts or busi­nesses. It’s not even web­sites. It’s information.

In other words, fresh content.

And the fresher the con­tent, the more impor­tant you become in the eyes of the Inter­net. Blogs, since they are typ­i­cally known for deliv­er­ing fresh con­tent as opposed to, say, a sta­tic web­site, are regarded far more favor­ably by the search engines.

That’s why blogs get crawled and ranked faster than most typ­i­cal web­sites, whether the blog is search-​​engine-​​optimized or not. (Granted, a bit of SEO can also increase your stand­ing even more. Writ­ing SEO-​​focused copy aside, blogs by them­selves have inter­nal processes and extra plu­g­ins that can greatly improve their visibility.)

This is the rea­son why I’ve con­verted some of my sta­tic web­sites into blogs — they are not blogs per se, but I’m using the blog as a con­tent deliv­ery and man­age­ment sys­tem. (Take, for instance, my flag­ship web­site at The Suc­cess Doc­tor, Inc., which uses Word­Press as its guts.)

And the results are pretty impres­sive. One of the blogs my wife and I have cre­ated reached #1 in MSN in only five days and #1 in Google in only nine days — and this, for a spe­cific and pop­u­lar keyword.

Blogs are fan-​​creating tools, too. Many blogs have thou­sands — even hun­dreds of thou­sands — of loyal fol­low­ers. And they do so for three rea­sons: partly because the blog helps to con­nect with read­ers, partly because blogs are more “human” than sta­tic web­sites, and partly because they give con­trol back to the user.

For exam­ple, it’s eas­ier to sub­scribe to, and be removed from, RSS feeds. Unlike email, with its plethora of spam, scams and impossible-​​to-​​opt-​​out mail­ing lists, RSS feeds allow any­one to sub­scribe only to those web­sites they pre­fer. And to visit those web­sites (most often when a new post is made) when they prefer.

Plus, email comes with its own risks. Spam has forced fil­ter­ing processes to be more aggres­sive, and the more aggres­sive the fil­ters, the greater the inci­dence of false pos­i­tives. (I’m sure you’ve had, at some point, some of your most impor­tant emails acci­den­tally fall into your junk folder.)

Peo­ple don’t want to miss their impor­tant emails. And they don’t want to miss out on impor­tant news or noti­fi­ca­tions. Blogs solve that since RSS feeds are com­pletely con­trolled by the end-​​user, and can never be spammed (unless, of course, you’re sub­scribed to the com­ments RSS, which is a dif­fer­ent story altogether).

But noth­ing stops you from offer­ing your read­ers to join a mail­ing list, too. In fact, like this blog, you may have noticed that I also ask peo­ple to sub­scribe to a mail­ing list in as many loca­tions as pos­si­ble. I do it on the side­bar, within the con­tent (at the end of my posts), on archived pages, on search pages, and so on.

The opt-​​in rate for a blog may be a lit­tle less than, say, an opt-​​in page. But the qual­ity of the sub­scriber who joined a list as a result of vis­it­ing or being a reader of a blog is far greater.

Why? Because the beauty of this process is that peo­ple can get a taste of who you are and what you offer (and how peo­ple react to you, based on their com­ments as well as their thoughts expounded on social net­work­ing sites when your blog is dugged or del.icio.us’ed), which builds aware­ness, trust, cred­i­bil­ity and, above all, rela­tion­ships with your subscribers.

How­ever, blogs are great for dri­ving sales. Some of them, like John Chow’s blog, are prac­ti­cally busi­nesses onto them­selves. Just look at some top blog­gers out there, like Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch​.com, Pete Cashmore’s Mash​able​.com, and Dar­ren Rowse’s ProBlog​ger​.net. Some blog­gers make incomes as high as six fig­ures with their blogs, and they do so in many ways.

Plus, any­one can blog, and any­one can mon­e­tize their blogs, too. You can be 93-​​years old (it’s one of my favorite blogs, actu­ally), or as young as 12.

(I also agree with John Chow, in that you shouldn’t blog for money. You can make money with blogs, which is dif­fer­ent. Blog­ging strictly for money can make you some money, but it won’t make you rich. Your goal, really, is to serve, teach and share with your read­ers, if not at least enter­tain them. And in the process, you mon­e­tize your efforts.)

Let me share with you how you can make money with blogs, which I do in seven ways (and I’ve linked to some exam­ples online):

1. Ads (for exam­ple, I make money with AdSense, Kon­tera, Click​bank​.com, CJ​.com, and my own prod­ucts, like Mar​ketingESP​.com);
2. Prod­ucts (I pro­mote my own prod­ucts, from soft­ware to infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, includ­ing books, CDs, DVDs, ebooks, etc);
3. Pro­mo­tions (I also make addi­tional pro­mo­tions either through my blog or to my lists, and not just new blog post notifications);
4. Links (I use links within my posts, with­out pro­mot­ing, such as for ref­er­ences, reviews, rec­om­men­da­tions, related prod­ucts, etc);
5. Instruc­tions (for exam­ple, I use my blog to teach affil­i­ates, pro­vide proof, launch prod­ucts, offer incen­tives, induce refer­rals, etc);
6. Endorse­ments (I often use my blog to pro­mote affil­i­ate prod­ucts, ser­vices, busi­nesses or offers that are rel­e­vant to my readers);
7. Dona­tions (such as free reports, courses, sam­ples, soft­ware, etc that are ad-​​supported or pro­mote prod­ucts in themselves);

(Oh, speak­ing of dona­tions, and let’s not for­get tips, which you can do by click­ing on the dona­tion but­ton on the right side­bar. If you feel this con­tent is valu­able, then go ahead and “buy me a drink.”)

I’m a lover of acronyms, because acronyms are easy to remem­ber. I not only use them as mnemon­ics but also use them as tools when I  teach. You prob­a­bly know this already, such as with terms like QUEST, OATH, FORCEPS, UPWORDS, FAB, etc.

So let me ask you, can you spot the mnemonic above? In it is the biggest secret to turn­ing this knowl­edge into money.

About the Author

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