Blogging For Beginners 101 Week 3. Planning for Profitable Success

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Edith Beasley
5 years ago
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1 Blogging For Beginners 101 Week 3 Planning for Profitable Success

2 Let s Review the Workbook: Any questions about this past week of information for setting up your blog? What s the story behind your domain name? How did you choose a title for your blog?

3 A Few More Ideas for Promoting Your Blog Attend online events such as Twitter parties add value to the discussion and people just might follow you Write a post about another blog or blogger and link to their site depending on how busy they are and who they are, you just might get a link back to your site from theirs

4 Let s Start Thinking About Advertising: Do you have an idea of how many ads you ll display on your blog? What are some thoughts on tasteful ways to display ads on your blog? After reading chapter 2 in the workbook, what ways are you planning to use in monetizing your blog?

5 Some Things to Keep In Mind While Monetizing While I know the pressure to jump right in and start putting ads on your blog is strong, let s just take a few minutes to think through a few things before we begin doing that. Keep these things in mind as we proceed through the ideas presented tonight. They re good to remember as you decide how to go about making your blog profitable.

6 When to Start Monetizing? Is it better to jump right in and start putting advertisements on your blog from the beginning? Or is waiting until you have a strong readership and following before monetizing the better option? Well, the answer is that there are pros and cons to both:

7 Monetizing From the Start If you re getting any traffic at all to your blog, you have the potential to be earning money. Monetizing from the beginning of your blog can be a good thing in that your readers will know what to expect. You don t run the risk of losing readers down the road because they weren t happy with your decision to start profiting from your blog. However, your options in monetization will be limited because many affiliate programs will only accept you if your blog has been established for some time.

8 Waiting To Monetize On the flip side, waiting to monetize your blog until it has been around for a while and gained an audience increases your credit with the affiliate programs and should get you a better selection of advertisements to post. You may lose readers initially those who are opposed to blogs being used to make money. However, if you are tasteful in how you begin profiting from your blog, this might not be the case. Another pro to waiting to monetize your blog is that you won t be as tempted to scrimp on the quality of your content. Building your blog, its readership, and content will be your only focus.

9 Whatever you do, Keep Your Focus That being said, whichever choice you make regarding when to monetize your blog, make sure that you keep your focus on your content. Your content is what draws in your readers, not your ads. I don t know about you but when I visit a blog that seems to just scream advertisements, I m immediately turned off and will likely go elsewhere. If readers have to look through too many ads just to get to the content that they came to your blog to read, you re going to lose them.

10 More Is Not Necessarily Better It may seem like the more ads you can fill your blog space with, the more money you should be able to make. This is not necessarily true. If the content of your ads has no relation to your blog topic and thus might be of no interest to your reader, your ads are wasting space. Also, it is important to pay attention to what is being advertised on your blog so that your credibility is not compromised. Advertising and promoting products or services that will disappointment your readers could turn them off to your blog, as well.

11 Having given the above cautions, it is important to think through a few other things as you begin to look into monetizing your blog:

12 Ad Placement More is definitely not better. You don t want to overwhelm your reader with ads. On the other hand - How often do you read a blog and not even look at the ads listed there? You want your ads to stand out enough to be available to your readers without scaring them away.

13 Some locations for ad placement: Above the fold: : This refers to the space including your header that a reader sees right away when they visit your blog. It is the area of your blog that the reader sees without have to scroll down or over at all. Sidebars: You will notice that a lot of blogs tend to use this area of their blog page to display advertisements Footer: This is the area at the bottom of your blog page. Your readers will have to read through your content first in order to see your ads at the bottom of the page. Within your content: With this technique, bloggers incorporate their advertisements into their blog content itself. This might include referring readers to a particular product through a link in the text of a post.

14 Ad Content Whether you like it or not, the ads that are displayed on your blog will reflect on you.. What impression do you want to give readers of yourself and your blog? If at all possible, refer only products that you would use yourself through your ad promotions. Look out for your readers don t make them waste their money just so you can earn a few pennies. As you build up trust with your blog readers, your blog s profitability should go up. People will know that they can trust your judgment and will be more likely to order products or services through your site.

15 And, as I stated before, but cannot emphasize enough Do not let your efforts to monetize your blog cause the quality of your blog content to dwindle Your blog content must take priority! Or your blog will fail.

16 Another Way to Make Money: Premium Content Maintaining a blog that focuses on your area of expertise can help you easily become a recognized authority in your field. Once you have established yourself as an authority, you can consider offering premium content through your blog in the form of e-courses or memberships.

17 What Premium Content Could You Offer? Blogs are a massive source of information and remember that not everything has to be free. Although selling premium content is possible in any field, you must have the capability to give something to the reader that is worth paying for. Is there special content that you could provide to your readers for a fee?

18 Some examples of Premium Content: Membership fee to access an established and active forum on a particular subject ( Charging a fee to access an e-course on saving hundreds of dollars in grocery money each year. Membership fee to access exclusive information on personal finances that is updated on a weekly basis.

19 The Possibilities are Endless What are some ideas you have? How could you apply them to your blog?

20 Discussion Think of some of the blogs that you enjoy reading. Can you tell if they are blogging for profit? Have you ever come across a blog that chased you away with all its advertisements? How much do you think is too much when it comes to placing ads on your blog? Put yourself in the shoes of your readers and think through an answer to that question.

Episode 6: Can You Give Away Too Much Free Content? Subscribe to the podcast here.

Episode 6: Can You Give Away Too Much Free Content? Subscribe to the podcast here. Hey everybody! Welcome to episode number 6 of my podcast. Today I m going to be talking about using the free strategy