5 Ways to Monetize Your Business Weblog
by Kathleen Hobbins
Small business owners often get the advice that a business weblog is a great way to make money. It is, but only if you take the appropriate steps to monetize it. There are five chief ways to monetize your business weblog.
- Use your business weblog to sell your own products or services. Showcase your products or services in a sidebar and use the accompanying post to highlight them. You want to be careful with your tone. Most people who keep coming back to a blog aren’t interested in a hard sell. They would prefer candid and accurate information. Use your blog to develop trust over time. The sale may take a while.
- Use your blog to promote affiliate products. An affiliate product is one that is created by someone else who makes it available for sale through an affiliate network. If someone buys the product from your site, you get a commission. The products should be carefully chosen to reflect the subject matter of your blog. You also need to be sure that you have a high opinion of the product you promote. You don’t want to lose the credibility of your readers by promoting something that doesn’t meet your standards.
- Sell space on your blog for advertising. The easiest and best known way to do that is to set up a free Google Adsense account. Once your account is set up, you can place code on your site to display the ads of other internet marketers. When your reader clicks on an Adsense ad, you get paid. There are two disadvantages with the program, however. First of all, the amount that you get paid is typically very small, so you need a large amount of traffic coming to your site and clicking through on the ads before you make any money. Secondly, the nature of the ad takes the reader away from your site, when your general aim is to keep your readers on your site. Some internet marketers have made good money with Google Adsense, however, so you may want to test your results to see if it is profitable for you.
- Drive readers from your blog to your money site. This is an indirect way of making sales. But if your business weblog is not your chief website and you have, in fact another site as a money site, you may find that a profitable business model is to attract readers with good content to your blog and then entice them to click through to your money site by describing your great offers.
- Use your blog to generate a list, then market to the list. Again, this is an indirect way of monetizing your blog. The common advice about list-building from your blog is to offer a free report on a pertinent subject in exchange for your reader’s email address. Once you have the email address, you can develop a relationship with the reader through your email campaign and use the relationship to market related products to your list. The products can be affiliate products, your own, or a mixture of the two. For an example of that model, have a look at the blog that you’re reading!
I knew once of a new internet marketer who wrote an interesting blog but, amazingly, failed to offer any money-making options. It was largely because he was uninformed about how to go about it. You have now been informed. So take action and make some money with your business weblog.
