GET SOCIAL (OR NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK)
Let’s be clear – I don’t mean to sit on Facebook all day or to tweet your links incessantly on Twitter. What I mean by this is that you need to get involved in your off-site community. Why? Because people like to help, link, retweet and drive traffic to people they know and like. Look at all the things I’ve linked to above or people I’ve mentioned in this post. I “know” them all, except for one. Half of them, I initially “met” by interacting with them on social media. I communicate with people on a non business level through my social channels and the relationships I build ultimately help me promote my blog.
Traditional brick and mortar businesses get involved with their chamber of commerce, attend local networking events, sponsor local youth teams, advertise in local papers… bloggers need to be involved in their off-site topic community with social media.
INTERACT WITH YOUR ON-SITE COMMUNITY
Once you HAVE an audience commenting or sending you emails, be sure to interact with them. Don’t simply ignore the 12 comments on a post or the follow up questions readers might ask. Do your best to answer them and offer the additional help or advice they’re looking for. This is any easy way to help turn one time visitors into actual readers.
I’ll use an offline example to try and drive this home. My son plays youth football. Every year, he outgrows half of his equipment and we have to replace it. But I know nothing about how the equipment should fit, sizing, etc. One year, I happened to go to a local, non-chain store in our town. The prices were higher, I had to wait 30 minutes to get serviced… but it was because they used their specialty knowledge to ensure each customer was specifically helped, sized and fitted correctly. When I went to the big chain stores, I was pointed to an aisle. This non-chain store actually spends time fitting my child’s helmet specifically to him. So they are now the first store I go to for my son’s equipment and the first place I refer other parents to.
When you’re starting out – be that helpful blogger. People will remember it. They’ll return to your site, they’ll subscribe to your list and they’ll refer your site to friends. I understand this gets harder to do the bigger your blog gets – but if you’re reading this, you likely don’t have a big blog yet – and helping your internal community is a great way to help build your audience.
I was one of the first people to start using the Thesis theme. So when I started doing tutorials, I would have people frequently post questions about them and I did my best to help them figure their problems out. Even though my blog at the time had less than 10% content on Thesis, I suddenly found myself being linked to and mentioned on tons of sites as being a helpful resource on Thesis. My still small Thesis Tutorials category is now one of the most visited categories on my site – and those tutorials help drive people into other portions of my site, to my social profiles and to my mailing list.
PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE
Honestly, I find that this is the stumbling point for most people wanting to earn an income through blogging. You build it and wait for them to come. [headdesk]
In addition to being social and interacting with your on-site community, you need to LET OTHER PEOPLE KNOW YOU EXIST. And you do that with good old fashioned promotion and hard work. Findguest posting opportunities and work hard to promote your new blog. Create a few pieces offlagship content. Ask friends to help promote said (only the truly worthy) flagship content. Ask friends to link to you from their blogrolls. Hold a contest. Market, market, market. This is the toughest part of building a new blog – and an absolutely vital one.
FORGE THROUGH “THE BLOGGING DIP”
It’s no secret that I absolutely LOVE Seth Godin’s book, The Dip. It’s all about knowing when it’s time to quit and when you’re just quitting. After the initial high from building something new wears off, you’re then writing great content and promoting your blog – the two hardest aspects of blogging – and it’s easy to start feeling deflated at all the work you’re putting in and watching subscribers only trickle in at the beginning. I’ve taken to referring to this as “The Blogging Dip” because it’s the timeframe in which most bloggers lose interest, give up and declare “it” didn’t work.
I’m not saying you should continue on the same blogging path for two years if you’re still not seeing results and audience growth after some time as passed. But you have to realize this dip exists and decide beforehand whether or not you’re willing to work through it. If not, there’s no point in even building a blog in the first place.
START MONETIZING
It never, EVER fails that at every Affiliate Summit, I will have a blogger come up to me after my session, tell me they have a decent readership, but they’re not making any money. When I ask how they’re monetizing their blog, the answer is usually the same… with ads on the sidebar.
Now don’t get me wrong – I run ads on my sidebar and those ads make sales. But they make a very insignificant amount of sales compared to the other ways I monetize my blog. You can’t simply slap up six 125X125 ads and expect to make a significant income.
You need to join affiliate programs (or a master affiliate network if your blog focus is very scattered) and link – tastefully – to products and services within posts. If you have a lot of pageviews, look into selling advertising on the site (either on a CPM basis or on a CPC basis with a program like Adsense). Create an info product you can sell. Market products and services you genuinely love to your mailing list (however, don’t simply blast them with ads – you’d better have some useful content surrounding any calls to action).
Additionally, don’t be SCARED to monetize. I meet one too many bloggers who tell me they don’t try and monetize their site for fear of alienating readers. Well, as Lee Odden once said, “It’ll be tough to pay the bills with a wallet full of famous.” I’m not saying to slap Adsense at the top of every page or shove offers down readers throats. But there is NOTHING WRONG with monetizing a blog to help afford you the time and money to continue helping your readers on a regular basis. The minority that IS offended might bitch the loudest, but if you monetize tastefully, they WILL be the minority.
If you own a productivity blog and do a post on “Six Ways to Find Two More Hours in a Day” then LINK, with an affiliate link if possible, to the products or services that you’re showcasing as making their lives easier. You’re actually doing your readers a FAVOR. You can either A. not link them and force your users to do a off-site search to find them B. link to them without an affiliate link or C. link to them with an affiliate link and potentially get commission on something you were going to link to ANYWAY. Why the HELL would you not choose to use method C?
When it comes to monetizing, I’m also a big fan of doing reviews. That said, never lie, always be honest in your reviews and never sell out your readership’s trust in you for a twenty dollar affiliate commission. Oh, and for the love of all things PLEASE only review products you’ve actually USED. There’s enough crappy, bullshit reviews on the Internet. Make yours worthy of being read.
NOTE: Once you start monetizing, you need to add a Disclosure page to your site. Missy Ward has a great Disclosure page on her site you can take a look at. I’d say to take a look at mine, but it’s not exactly one you’d likely want to model your own after – but it still does the job. ;-)
USE TOOLS TO SEE WHAT’S WORKING (AND WHAT ISN’T)
Once you have an audience, you need to start using tools to see what is working on your blog and what isn’t. You can use Google Analytics (free) to see where your users are coming from and what pages their visiting most. You can use Crazy Egg (paid) to see what users are clicking on (and what they’re not) when they’re on your site. You can use link cloakers (GoCodes is free – Eclipse Link Cloaker is better, but paid) to easily insert links (and be sure to use SID codes to identify which sales come from which ads) and as a result find out which ads and mentions are working and which aren’t.PopUp Domination (paid) is great for increasing newsletter subscribers.
CAN YOU REALLY MAKE MONEY BLOGGING?
Understand that most who attempt it won’t, but ANYONE CAN. You might be thinking, “Wow, thanks Rae. That was encouraging.” but the fact is that most people simply don’t follow through. If you really work at it and really FOLLOW all of the free advice out there you CAN do it. If you’re the type who would rather have condensed information in one spot versus searching the net, Then Traffic and Trust (paid) by Nick Reese might be a great starting point for you. But understand all of the free or paid information in the world isn’t going to help you unless you FOLLOW THROUGH.
Blogging isn’t easy money – it’s simply an easy opportunity. YOU have to decide what you’re going to make of it.
What follows is a quick summary of my main income streams from blogging. Before you read it though – keep in mind that every blog is unique in how it can make money. Some of the following income streams will work on some blogs a lot better than others – the key is to experiment with as many as possible and see what works best for you.
I run a variety of affiliate programs on my blogs – most of which bring in smaller amounts of money that don’t really justify a category of their own (but which certainly add up).
Last time I did a wrap up of how I make money blogging this category did not exist for me – I didn’t really have any of my own products to sell at all. However in the last year or so I’ve released 3 E-books – 
This is another newer category for me but one that continues to grow.
Private ad sales directly to advertisers have fallen for me in the last year (they previously ranked #3 on this list). This is partly due to a change in my own focus but also partly due to the economy as it is. I should note that this area does vary a little from month to month depending upon the campaigns we’re asked to run – we’ve had a couple of months where it actually ranked #2 in the last year.
