The only 2 ways to monetize your blog (Part 1)

November 14th, 2007 · 2 Comments · Tags: Blogging & RSS · Internet Marketing · SEO Copywriting

Once you have a blog up and running, you’ll want to find a few ways to make money with it. Even if you are blogging out of pure passion, you can’t deny that enjoying a hobby that makes you money while having fun is one of the best things that could happen to you… right?

Blog monetization is a hot topic in the blogosphere. Thousands of posts have been made on the subject talking about different tactics, techniques and methodologies to earn money from blogging. The matter of fact is that there are only two general strategies through which you can monetize your blog. They are…

Strategy #1: Monetizing your blog’s content

This strategy is based on the idea that people visit your blog to focus their attention only on your content and read what you have to say about the topics they love; and during their visits, they will probably ignore all the bells, whistles, widgets and banners you’ve placed in the blog’s layout.

And it’s true. Many of your visitors will focus on your content, so it makes sense that at least 50% to 75% of your monetization efforts are done through this channel. How? Well, there are a few different ways to approach this:

Selling products
Your blog can be a perfect channel to both pre-sell and to directly sell products. These products that you will sell from your blog can be either yours, those of an affiliates program you’ve joined or even those you promote through a joint venture.

If you want to use the blog to sell the products directly, all you need to do is frequently write about the products themselves, about the problems they solve for you and your customers (case studies produce amazing results), you can go deep into particular features and benefits that you didn’t cover with enough detail in the sales letter, you can answer frequent questions you get asked by your customers, the list goes on and on.

On the other hand, if you will be using your blog as a tool to warm up prospects and pre-sell them on your products, the posts should be more informative and entertaining. You should talk about your industry and share tips and actionable, insightful information with your readers to position yourself as an expert and to gain trust and credibility among them.

Occasionally, you can also mention a product as a way to solving a particular problem, or even write a full product review giving your heartfelt comments about it (both good and bad) but that’s about it… no hard selling when you use this approach.

I’ve seen both methods (pre-selling and direct selling) work just fine on different niches and industries. It will be up to you to test them and decide which one works best for your audience. You may even want to try a combination of both methods in a single blog.

Selling posts or reviews
Another option to monetize your blog’s content is to offer paid reviews or paid posts to the public. If your blog becomes a player in a particular industry, advertisers and other webmasters will be more than glad to pay you to talk about their websites or their products. You can offer this service directly from your blog or you can sign up with services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe to find more advertisers quickly.

Selling links within your content
There are a few services out there (like TextLinkAds) that let you sell particular words or phrases within your blog to the highest bidder. These are not the lists of links that you usually see in the sidebar of some blogs but links within the actual posts.

Later this week, we’ll be talking about the second blog monetization strategy: Monetizing traffic. Remember to subscribe to Copywriting.com’s RSS feed or to the e-mail notification’s list that you see on the top-right side of this page so you don’t miss it… I promise it will be good!