Biga Blog

Do You Want To Profit From Your Blogging?

2010-11-27T15:02:00.000-06:00

If you have a blog and are looking to make a profit from it then it is imperative that you get it to the point where it is attracting lots of traffic. You can have the most attractive offers in the world to monetize your blog, but if you don't get the right volume of traffic, you are not going to make significant money.

With the above in mind, if you are intending to make money from your blog, your first priority has to be to make your blog as popular as you can by taking every opportunity you can to grow your readership.

How do you go about this? Well, as a first step, it is vitally important that you know the demographic of your target readership - if you don't know this, you won't be able to consistently write in the correct way to capture and keep your target audience.

Ideally, you should be writing on a subject that is of interest to you - always supposing, of course, that you have interests in areas that are popular and where people are proven to spend money.

If you hope to make money blogging then you are going to have to update your blog with fresh content on a regular basis - this will certainly be a lot easier if you are writing on a subject that you know and love.

You don't have to be the greatest writer in the world to make money from blogging, but you do need to be writing in a style that attracts and keeps the attention of your readership - popular blogs are never boring - if you don't entertain the people who come to your blog, you'll not develop a fanbase of the size needed to sustain a decent blogging income.

So, just how do you drive traffic to your blog? Getting links back to your blog from other Websites is what you need to focus on. You can do this in various ways such as finding forums about the topic of your blog, joining in with the conversations and putting a link back to your blog in your forum signature. Writing articles and submitting them to a few of the top article directories putting a link back to your blog in your resource box is another good way to drive traffic.

You can monetize your blog with affiliate programs related to the subject matter and contextual advertising programs.

If you have a blog where you regularly post interesting and topical content in a popular subject area, where you promote attractive, related products and services and spend time building traffic on a regular basis, there's absolutely no reason why you cannot earn money from your blogging.

More Reasons Why You Need A Blog

2008-06-09T10:05:00.000-06:00

Blogging used to be just a method for stating your opinion, but now blogs are used to opine, to review, and to sell. In fact, many Internet marketers base their entire business around blogging.

Here's why.

Blogging is really just basic communication. All it takes is a computer and an internet connection and you can set up a free blog on one of the many blogging services.

Its flexibility is also one of its outstanding features. There are numerous platforms to blog from, from Wordpress to Joomla to Drupal, and dozens more in between. And even if you don't want to host your blog, you can set one up at one of the many free blog services like Blogger or Wordpress.com. And even if you use the free services, you can always take your blog to your own server at a later date.

Many people also feel that blogs create an intimate atmosphere for learning and research. A blog can create a simple credibility that can help sell your products because it helps create an "Everyman" aura, that is, a stripped down, hype-free way to talk about products.

If your opinions get read and respected, you might find that your credibility will begin to increase around a particular subject. People will begin to look to you to offer your opinions on forthcoming issues. And once you are established and considered an expert in a niche, your ability to sell from your blog will increase dramatically.

Once you are established, don't be afraid to ask people to sign up to your list. This will be a list where you can reach your readers at a moment's notice. A great way to utilize this list is to send a message to it when you have made a new post to your blog, and encourage your readers to not only read your new article but comment on it.

By using your list in this manner, your subscribers won't feel that you are using your list merely to sell to them. Of course, you can sell to them from your blog, and if your readers begin to comment on your posts, you are helping to enhance your blog's stickiness.

Blogging is a terrific tool for any Internet marketing business. Done in the correct manner (meaning that if you intend to build your credibility, you should blog in the most personal manner possible), you'll be blogging your way to success in no time.

Why Blogging can be a Waste of Time and Money

2008-01-09T14:49:00.003-06:00

Every day millions of people start blogging. Indeed, the best estimates show that a new blog is created every single second of every day. As if this weren't enough extra material being added to the Internet, there are of course millions of blogs already in existence. There is a vast amount of new information being added to the Internet every minute of every day.

Many people have been told that blogging helps increase your visibility on the Internet. That's true enough, but if you are in business at what cost?

Let's assume your time costs $100 an hour and that you spend a total of two hours a week adding to your blog. That's $200 a week or $10,400 a year. That's the cost of blogging to your business. You really should calculate the amount of time and its value to your business.

Once you've found out how much blogging is costing your business, you need to consider how much money it is actually making. How many people bought items or services from you as a direct result of your blog? If you don't know, you need to add tracking codes to your blog links to ensure you can work this out.

Also, add up all the advertising income or affiliate income you've generated via your blog. Then look at the total. If it is less than the cost, you're wasting time and losing money by blogging. Don't let the fashion for blogging overcome traditional business requirements of profitability. For many people blogging is actually draining their profits, but they are unaware of this because they are not measuring their blog.

Ensure you measure your blog using tracking codes so you can check the real value of your blogging efforts. To do otherwise could seriously affect the profitability of your business.

True enough, blogs can raise your visibility on the Internet and can help boost search engine rankings. But being top of the search results for a particular keyword is of no value to you in business unless being top of the page actually translates into sales. Far too many people chase search engine ranking at the expense of chasing customers.

If you are using a blog to gain search engine ranking, but have not measured the income generated as a result, you could be wasting your time by writing your blog. As with everything in business, measurement is essential if you are to do your best. So don't blog hopefully; measure its real impact.

The Bad Side of Blogging

2008-01-09T14:49:00.001-06:00

How many blogs do you suppose there are on the Internet? Whoops another one was just started, and another, and another and..

There are millions of blogs online today and everyone is practically tripping over each other to start their own. My question is why?

You can answer that in word. Money! People think blogging is the magic bullet they have been missing to make money for the first time in their life. The other thing is blogs are so simple to start that a child of 10 could do it.

Of course after a few days the new blogger begins to realize that the money is not flowing in and this is going to become work. They sure are spending a lot of time working on their new blog and they have not made one penny off of it yet.

This is the bad side of blogging. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your blog and it takes even more work to convert some of that into a paying customer.

If you value your time you lose money every time you set down and post in your blog. Let's say you spend 30 minutes writing a 400-word blog post and you do that everyday for 1 month. You have just spent 15 hours and you may not have even made any money yet.

That's the rub right there. First of all most people will never write 30 posts in the first month or maybe ever. The Internet is cluttered with blogs that were started with good intentions and abandoned like an orphan.

Someone should start a blog orphanage for abandoned blogs that we could adopt and offer tender loving care to. The bad side of blogging is you may be the next victim of “blogging is work” syndrome. Another blog started and abandoned because blogging is work and is not the easy road to riches you hoped it was.

A really good blog is one that is started by someone who would keep it up if they never made any money at it. The reasons for this are that the topic of the blog is a passion for the blogger. They have an interest in the subject matter. They may even be an expert in what they write about and their expertise shows.

The reader comes back over and over to see what the blogger will say next. They pull out their credit card to buy a product the blogger recommends. They click on a Google ad or subscribe to a newsletter. It is all so easy when the blog is kept up to date with useful information. The blogger has avoided the bad side of blogging.