Tips for Profit-Oriented Bloggers December 1, 2006
Posted by Andrew Wee in : blogging , trackbackI’ve got feedback from newer bloggers who are having difficulties generating consistent income from their blogging efforts.
Blogging can be a profitable and fulfiling venture. If you have a strategy in place, you’ll not only see your pool of regular readers grow in time, but you’ll build a community of readers and learn from them in the process.
Given that blogging is an established traffic generation method and compliments many income monetization business models, here’re some points for consideration as you’re building up your blogging proficiency.
- Positioning/Branding
It’s important to establish the positioning of your blog.
I’m seeing that “Internet Marketing” is too big an umbrella to blog under, or at least to provide the amount of depth of coverage that would be useful for blog readers like yourselves.
In the last couple of weeks, you might’ve detected that this blog is moving more along the lines of
- Blogging
- Affiliate Marketing
- Traffic Generation (especially social traffic)
If you’re blogging within a broad category (such as golf, internet marketing, the legal profession), choose one or two niches and focus on those.
However, if you’re picking a niche such as “pet geckos”, you might want to go horizontal in your focus, ranging from gecko grooming, nutrition, exercise (a cradle-to-grave approach if you will).
- Content Building
I realize there’s a great temptation to load a blog up with adsense the moment it’s created.
Resist the urge.
If you have 10 visitors a day, your CPM rate will not be very high.
It’ll serve your long term interest better if you focus on building quality content for at least 1-2 weeks, establishing yourself as a content creator before looking at the monetization aspect.
Quality content should help your readers in the following ways:
- It helps them solve a problem they’re currently facing (the more painful the problem, the more valuable the solution)
- It helps them do something they’re already doing faster,more effectively,at a lower cost. Maybe all of the above.
- It’s something unique and you’re the only person they can get it from.
You’ve probably already heard my refrain that Content is King, Queen and the Crown Prince too.
- List Building
Building a list helps you maintain contact with your visitors/readers. If you create a compelling reason, they’ll opt-in to your list. This gives you the opportunity to follow up with them, build a relationship and if you recommend useful products or services, you stand to benefit from the relationship.
I’d suggest going with Aweber or GetResponse for your list building solution.
- Blog Monetization
Although blog monetization is important, I suggest that it should factor into your plans, but be the last aspect you look into. That’s because if your blog degenerates into a daily updated sales page, you’ll ultimately turn off your readers.
When choosing to participate in a marketing promotion, ask yourself the following questions and answer them truthfully:
- Does this product/service provide value to my readers?
- Have I invested my own money and time into this product?
- Did it work? Was it effective?
- Would I promote the product, even if I didn’t benefit from it?
If your answer is “yes” to all the questions, by all means go ahead. Your readers will know you stand behind your recommendation.
On the other hand, I’ve seen affiliate marketers whose blogs consist of one promotion after another.
I don’t think they’re in tune with their readers at all. (And their traffic numbers tell the story).
Whatever you might consider doing, think this through:
Would you watch a TV program if it consisted entirely of ads? Would you read a book or magazine if every page asked you to buy something?
Have mercy on your readers (and ultimately yourself) by sparing them the neverending sales pitch.
They’ll thank you for it too.
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Hi Andrew,
Great Advise from you. Really it hard to part to not to put adsense ad in the beginning but i am sure your reason is valid if blog is for branding “me” purpose. Another point I agree with you is one after another of sale pitch in the blog post. It can be really irritating sometime.
Great Post Andrew
John
http://www.JohnTanBlog.com
Hi John,
tks for your feedback.
i had a look at your blog
i was wondering if you might be interested to bring your blog to the next level?
you might want to include more content for your readers and tone down some of the adsense. it will hurt you in the long run.
Thanks for always proving such solid advice Andrew! I am finding it hard not to put advertisements on my blog though.
Ethan,
I looked at the traffic rankings for your blog. I don’t believe you’d be missing out on much if you removed the adsense and it’ll help you out a whole lot in the long run.
If you are serious about generating income from your blog, you’d want to post content more frequently.
Hi Andrew!
Do you think that posting consistently like 1 post a day is better than posting 7 post in one shot every monday? I would like to know if these 2 ways make a difference to the reader and search engines?
Mine is not a marketing blog and my focus is to drive more traffic and improve the stickiness. But I believe the same principle applies whether it is a marketing blgo or not right? :>
Hi,
Rather than look at how you would like to blog. why not look at the issue from your blog readers prespective.
i guess it’d be easy for them to come one time and read 7 new posts and then disappear.
but if you’d like to build regular readership, it’d be good to post one post at a time. I tend to blog at the time i post, rather than pre-write multiple posts.
if time is an issue, you can set up scheduled posting (but it isnt entirely bug-free).
you might also want to update your WP blog to 2.0.5 as it fixes a number of security bugs too.
[...] What is Your Strategy for Your Blog? Tag:blogging, blogs, home based business, internet business, internet marketing, online marketing, seo, starting a business, wordpressRecently, I read a post by Andrew Wee entitled “Tips for Profit-Oriented Bloggers“. His suggestions make a lot of sense to me and I have spent the past several days strategizing and re-positioning my blog. I’ve made several changes and have several more left to be completed. [...]