So You Want to Monetize Your Blog?

You have a blog and you keep reading articles online about making money from it, You ask – “why not mine?”

Well, before you start out here are a few things to bear in mind and a few schemes that will pay you money.

Developing a Strategy

Before you even begin, ask yourself a few questions.

1. What will be the focus of my blog;
2. Who is the target audience;
3. Why will they come to my blog and even more important, why will they come back again;
4. How will I market my blog;

Let’s deal with these questions one by one.

What will be the Focus of My Blog?

What can you write authoritatively about day in and day out? What topics are you interested in and expert in? It’s no use setting up a blog about the stock market if you don’t understand it or have nothing of value to say so find something where you can add value and state your case. Remember, creating a blog is easy but feeding it with new content is difficult, time consuming and hard work.

Don’t think about copying someone else’s material. It has to be quality and original content if you want to develop an audience – especially one that will come back. If you read anything about making money from blogs this is the one piece of information that you really, really need to know - Post quality.

Who is my Target Audience?

Probably something most people over look is who is my audience – who am I targeting? You can throw mud at the wall and see what sticks but there are multiple reasons to know your audience and know them very well. So just who are you targeting – write it down and check back often to make sure you are delivering for that target audience.

Why will They Come to my Blog?

Hopefully because you have something of value to say and because you say it well. You might try to develop a persona or simply be yourself but this is where posting quality and authoritative content comes in – people will want more. Yes, you can try some tricks, run some ads yourself and so on but at the en of the day – you want repeat visitors – you want to develop a community of followers who are so taken by your site that they tell their friends about you.

How will I Market my Blog?

This is where target audience and topic come together. This is where you develop a go-to-market strategy that states how you reach that target audience. Let’s say that your target audience is college kids – well, what do you know about their behavior? Do they use facebook? Do they visit particular types of sites? If so, you can begin to develop advertising placement strategies. You need to know your audience and then build a marketing strategy that focuses on supporting that behavior.

You should write your answers in a short plan and refer to it often. Make sure that you are sticking to that plan and not creeping sideways.

OK – But How Do I Make Some Money?

To start making some money, you should sign up for Google Adsense and place some Google ads on the site initially but I would start to build content and traffic before attempting to add any other forms of advertising. Except for one…..

You should sign up to write some paid blog articles. There are many such schemes and each have their own criteria for accepting sites into their programs. You won’t get paid much at first – perhaps $3 to $5 per post but it gives you a good feeling to see that money coming in.