Blog Business Plan - How to Monetize Your Blog

Once again, as when you're thinking of marketing your blog, your focus should be on creating great content. People search the internet looking for information to solve their problems. If you provide valuable content that helps them do this, they'll be much more inclined to buy the products that you recommend and to click on your links in order to help support your site.

photo credit: jpockele

StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005--about six months after it was launched--Steve was averaging $4.12 a day in income from his blog. As of the 3rd of May 2006, his blog was making over $200 a day, and by October 29, 2006 it was making over $1000 a day. (Source). I hesitate to use Steve's figures because he's an extraordinarily successful blogger, but at least his figures show that everyone starts out small.

In addition, Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a great article on keeping expectations in check in terms of what it takes to make money blogging here.

One way to monetize your blog is to refer visitors from your blog to a merchant's web site, that is, anyone who sells products or services online. Merchants from affiliate programs range in size from small business to Fortune 500 companies. Depending on the terms of the affiliate program you earn a commission if the visitor you refer makes a purchase, completes a lead form, or downloads software.

Promote quality products and services that are related to your blog's niche, and that you can genuinely recommend. I personally only promote affiliate products that I use and consider to be great products.

There are three ways to find merchants with affiliate programs:

1. Join an affiliate network.
2. Search online for affiliate programs.
3. Go directly to a merchant's website.

An affiliate network is a trusted third party company that handles all of the transactions between affiliates and merchants. There are dozen of affiliate networks out there. Some of the biggest are:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare
• Clickbank

The best way to find out if a particular merchant has an affiliate program is to visit their website. Most merchants with an affiliate program place a link somewhere on their web site titled "Affiliates" or "Partners".

As an example of choosing an affiliate program to join, my blog, Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online, is in the life improvement/personal development niche, with an emphasis on productivity, creativity and simplicity. One of my affiliate programs is "The Silva Life System", which helps people learn to meditate, increase their focus and concentration, boost their creativity, and augment their brain power. This product fits in nicely with the content I provide on my blog. In addition, I use the Silva Method and am very satisfied with the results I've gotten, so I gladly recommend it to others.

photo credit: edkohler

If you join Amazon's Associates Program you can link to them every time you mention a book on your blog--as well as other products that are available on Amazon--and earn a commission anytime someone buys from Amazon after entering their site through your link.

The Affiliate Masters Course is a fabulous resource which you can download for free by clicking here. The basic formula that they provide is the following:

• Create content that people are searching for and that will pull in targeted traffic (by building search engine optimized pages).


• Pre-sell your visitors so that they click on your recommendations with an open attitude (you pre-sell by providing valuable content).


• Generate income through those pre-sold visitors using the low-risk affiliate model as a primary or secondary source of income.

Although the course is mainly directed toward making money with web sites, it can be adapted to blog monetization as well.

Bloggers can leverage their expertise in the area they blog about by creating their own information products, such as e-books, teleseminars, online courses, and so on, and selling them to their readers.

Naomi Dunford from Itty Biz has created ebooks that have sold quite well. In fact, she wrote a four part series on creating e-books; the first part of the series is titled: "How to Make $12,246 in a Day, Part One: Finding and Wooing the Market for your E-book". Michael Martine from Remarkablogger offered a Wordpress SEO teleseminar in October of last year, which has now become part of a new product he's selling: Wordpress SEO Secrets.

photo credit: smith

If you calculate your conversion rate--the number of site visits that result in a sale or other call to action--you can determine how much traffic you'll need in order to meet your monetization goals. For example, let's say you want to make $1000 a month from your blog; you're promoting a product that sells for $20; and you earn a commission of $5 for each product you sell. You therefore need to sell 200 units of the product each month in order to reach your goal of making $1000 a month online.

If you're getting 500 visitors a day and are selling one unit of the product a day, then you can calculate that if you got 100,000 visitors a month you would be selling 200 units a month. It's now a matter of revisiting the different ways of getting traffic to your site in order to determine which ones you'll focus on and creating a traffic strategy to drive 100,000 visitors to your site a month.

photo credit: Daniele Pesaresi

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