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You set up a blog for your business, but you don’t see any visible signs of it making you money. Could it be that it is earning its keep, but you just don’t see it? Here are some ways you can make money on your blog without promoting the competition:

• Search Engine Optimization - SEO is a form of payment. Whether you are increasing your page saturation with the search engines or driving up your PageRank with links, you are indeed paying yourself with SEO benefits. By capturing key phrases in the search engines for your important keywords, you are keeping your blog in the limelight for years. Keep blogging and benefits will be there. Just remember, SEO is payment.
• Sell Advertising - But not to your competition. If you look around on your blog you will likely find some real estate that is just sitting there not earning a dime. Maybe you sell that space to a partner, supplier, or other industry player that doesn’t compete with you directly.
• Pay Per Click Advertising - It can be Google AdSense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or one of the other PPC providers such as AdBrite. Contextual advertising is here to stay. Instead of selling ad space to industry players, just put up some ads that will pay you by the click. This is less lucrative, but easier to set up and less work. But make sure that this isn’t the main focus of your blog. You still want to drive traffic to your website and close sales.
• Affiliate Programs - Join a few affiliate programs and place affiliate ads on your blog. Again, these shouldn’t be your primary focus, but it doesn’t hurt to capture exit traffic and make money on them. They’re leaving anyway, right? Why not capture them as they leave?
• Sell A Digital Product - Create an e-book or a podcast and sell it through your blog. This can be an additional offering that you make through your blog posts and in your sidebar.
• Promote Your E-zine or Newsletter - If you publish a newsletter or e-zine, place your opt-in box prominently on your blog. Then you can use your e-zine to sell and promote your products, services, and affiliates. This is highly effective.

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of your business blog is to drive traffic to your website to close the sale. Anything else you do may run the risk of diminishing that goal. It is usually best to limit the exit holes on your blog and focus on driving traffic where it will be most effective in closing sales. But it’s your blog.

Many bloggers try to make money blogging and they do this in a number of ways. If you have affiliate advertising or sell private ad space then you should never be stuck for blog content.

Affiliates are a prime example. You will only earn an income if your visitors click on the links and actually deliver the required action, normally make a purchase. As a publisher you can help to boost your own sales.

If you are a little stuck for content, write about your affiliate - sell the product. You are the sales person and unless you tell your visitors about the product, they will most likely not even register the existence of an affiliate banner - known as banner blindness.

Likewise, whilst you may not earn any commission, promoting any of the paid advertisers on your site may prove to be good PR. The advertisers of course will not mind at all. The more promotions they can get the better.

If you are comfortable with the product or service then chances are your readers will be as well. There is nothing wrong with a little promotion and over time, your sites ability to make money blogging will grow - you have added extra value to their paid ad - this adds to your reputation as a professional blogger - overtime you can increase the return from running ads.

When writing reviews or recommendations, use the nofollow in the URL’s to ensure that none of the search engines accuse you of paid links.  Private ads and affiliate programs provide a ready source for content whenever you feel a little blank.

Get more information on blogging.

I have a strategy I like to use online that I like to call the Blog-Article Sucker Punch. It revolves around the combination of blogging and article marketing, as if you couldn’t guess by the name. It’s real easy to implement and even easier to grasp because you only need one brain cell to get it, which means most of the human race qualifies.

First, you build a rock solid website. It must be optimized and it helps to have at least one landing page that you want to promote heavily. You can do it with any any number of landing pages, but the more landing pages you have then the more time you will spend marketing them. If you’re new to internet marketing you should stick to one landing page. This combination, however, can work for any number of landing pages that you want to promote.

After you’ve built a solid landing page that you want to drive traffic to, build a blog to promote it. You can build an onsite blog or an off site blog. Which you choose depends on several factors that we can cover in another blog post, but for now just plan on starting a blog. You’ll write to it every day.

How To Make The Blog-Article Combo
Work For You
The first thing you need to do is make sure your landing page is prominently displayed on your blog somewhere. It can be anywhere, but it must be on your blog somewhere. Secondly, write about your landing page or something in your niche related to your landing every day for 30 days. Don’t be over-promotional. Just include useful tips about what you are promoting. Give away your knowledge, but don’t give away the farm.

Also during that 30 days, write one article per day and submit it to 10 article directories each day. At the end of 30 days you’ll have 30 articles at 10 directories - that’s 300 starting links. Those links are not ends of themselves. They are the means to an end. What you are hoping to do is to make your articles readable and popular enough that other publishers in your niche will want to publish them. That’s not as hard as it sounds.

Let’s say that each of your 300 articles (30 X 10) is published one time per month for the next six month. Now you have 1,800 inbound links. Each of links will serve to push your website further up in the search engines for your keywords. Higher search rankings translates into more traffic. But you’re also writing to your blog during that entire six month period, and you’re writing to it every day. Because each blog post is a separate web page and you are linking back to your landing page with every blog post, you’ll have 182 additional links to your landing page - at a minimum!

Keep in mind that your blog posts will also be ranked in the search engines for your keywords. That will draw traffic and consistency in publishing daily will keep traffic coming back to your blog. Plus, if you promote the blog in other ways through social media and networking, you can get even more traffic. You’ll use your blog to drive that traffic to your landing page. All you have to do is sit down and count the links and the traffic. Do the math and you’ll soon see that the blog-article sucker punch is a powerful search engine marketing strategy that can make you money over time. But for it to really be effective, you’ve got to make sure your landing page is ready to close the sale.

I found an excellent article on WordPress plugins that could make monetization of your blog easier. But I’d like to offer this word of caution before you use any of these plugins or try to monetize your blog in the ways that this article suggests: Be sure that you are absolutely committed 100% to monetizing your blog this way; otherwise, you could ruin your credibility.

Top WordPress Plugins - Monetize Your Blog With Ads

By Jim R Regan

One of the questions I get all the time is how to you monetize your WordPress blog with plugins. This is probably the most efficient and easy-to-use method of getting advertisements up on your website. The best part is, most of these services allow you to take payments and disperse ads automatically! Cutting out the middleman is an excellent option for any blogger. If you can manage your ads yourself, you can take 100% of the earnings instead of having to pay commission fees.

There are many ways to utilize ad space on your website. Some of the more popular methods are 125×125 banners, 468×60 banners and text links. As the internet develops, websites are becoming more and more slick with Flash, AJAX, Mootools and other ways to become Web 2.0. With this, advertising has branched off into “peel away” ads snug in the upper corners websites, bar ads across the top of the page and even video ad units. I think that a lot of this is overkill, so we will focus on traditional banners and text. Lets take a look into the top WordPress plugins for placing ads on your blog.

When it comes to making money with your blog, nothing is overkill. You’ll know it’s overkill when you actually start losing money because your traffic will go away and so too will your advertisers. That’s when you’ve gone too far. Before you go that far, however, be sure to run tests. Will your users leave if you employ these tools? If so, you’d better pull out before you are entirely committed.

1. OIOPublisher

This is a brand new WordPress monetization tool that is by far the best in class, luckily for us it is also the most cost-effective . With a solid amount of options (review posts, text links, banners, inline text, etc), OIOPublisher is what I use here at theNetFool.com! This is the only plugin that I have ever paid for, and at just $37 one-time cost, this thing literally pays for itself and almost anyone can afford it. When you install the plugin, it opens up a whole new section of your WordPress administrator backend, a “business” tab that offers extensive options and tracks all of your clients. Everything is very easy to use and understand, I had mine up and running in just 30 minutes!

One thing I especially like about OIOPublisher is the built-in widgets to encourage readers to buy ads. All of the unused banner spaces can be automatically filled with ads of your choice and redirect to your purchase page. There is even a widget that comes with the plugin to show how many ad spaces are available on your site at all times. I think that $37 is totally reasonable for this awesome WordPress plugin. Not only do you get an easy to use administrative section, you have everything automated for you and your one-time fee covers the plugin on multiple websites! If you are looking for an easy way to link directly with WordPress and get your blog monetized, look for OIOPublisher.

This looks like a good tool. Since I’ve never used it I can’t vouch for it, but if I were to go this route on my own blog then this would likely be a plugin I’d consider. The price does seem reasonable and it looks like you have quite a bit of control. I would probably not use this plugin on an out-of-the-box template. I would likely have a designer work me up a unique blog design that would be compatible with this plugin. I believe that would make your monetization efforts a lot more effective.

2. WP Text Ads

This was the popular monetization solution before OIOPublisher went public, and it is without a doubt a very good product. My problems with WP Text Ads are:

1. The product is overpriced at $127

2. There is no support for banner ads, text only

With these factors in mind, I am really not too bullish on the WordPress plugin. However. Taking the service as is, I think it is very good if you are interested in providing mostly text link spots to your advertisers. The ads are very easy to style, and you can even set the rates at which they run differently to ensure the maximum payback efficiency. Again, the one-time $127 is expensive… but if you are selling a steady stream of ads it should be too much of an issue since it is a one and done type deal.

I agree that this is overpriced. $127 seems expensive to me, especially since Google penalizes link sellers and buyers. You do want to exercise caution if you decide to sell text links. You should know that Google does penalize sites that sell text links for PageRank value. If you do sell text links, consider selling them for the traffic value and not for the PageRank or link juice value.

3. WP Bankroll

This blog monetization service really only applies to selling blog posts, paid reviews and paid plugs on your blogging website. It is definitely not as professional as OIOPublisher or WP Text Ads, but it gets the job done and can be used completely free if you are willing to provide a backlink to their website (else $20-$50). There are definitely some interesting features to point out. You can determine how many links are allowed to be active in each post, minimum word count and cost.

There is another very clever feature that allows you to randomly allow your guest posters links to appear in your sidebar. Overall, I wouldn’t really recommend WP Bankroll unless you are solely looking for sponsored/guest posting on your website and do not have any money to spare on a plugin. If this is you, then by all means use Bankroll… but I’d rather see you with OIOPublisher or WP Text Ads .

This looks like another reasonable recommendation. The same caution applies to paid reviews and sponsored posts as applies to text links. Do it for the traffic value and not the PageRank value.

4. Text Link Ads

I figured that it is only fair I include this opportunity, although they are really not what we are looking for by “cutting out the middleman.” Text Link Ads is a service that offers 50% commission for text ads, where they essentially handle all of the work for you. This is a nice option if you don’t want to go out and look for people to advertise on your blog, but I still figure that you would be better off with a down-payment and 100% of the gains.

This program is a lot more like buying into an Adsense or a BidVertiser type advertising program than the previous options. The plus here is that they install the ads for you and pay commission based of views and clicks. Downside is that the minimum payout is $25 and you are only getting half of your potential income. Still, a popular option that many choose as an alternative to Google Adsense.

50% is a big piece of pie and if you don’t earn at least $25 then you are out that. Doesn’t seem like a good deal to me. It may be OK for a short-term solution if you don’t have time to manage your own monetization efforts. If that is the case then you can use this service until you can afford to manage your own efforts, in which case you can switch over to the plugin and reap more of the benefits.

Monetizing your blog can be the smartest or the dumbest thing you can do to your blog. Before you intend on placing ads, you need to make sure that your design can handle it without looking cluttered and that you are seeing enough visitors to render the decision. Think of it this way, if you wouldn’t want to pay a toll to read your content, you are not ready to place ads on your website. These awesome WordPress plugins are just some of the monetization programs, and I wanted to focus on those that operate direct with your blog’s administration center. Stay positive, and keep posting new content… you’ll be seeing income in no time!

-The Net Fool

The author of this article is Jim “The Net Fool”.

He is owner of theNetFool.com If you’d like to learn more about blogging, you can visit http://www.thenetfool.com You’ll find all the information you need!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jim_R_Regan

I agree with his assessment that monetizing your blog using these plugins can be very smart or very stupid. That’s why you need to carefully consider whether or not you want to go this route before you do. I would not monetize a company blog using any of these methods, with one exception: Only sell advertising on your blog to companies within your niche that do not compete with you. For example, if you are a real estate agent and you are approached by a mortgage lender in your market to sell a link from your blog to theirs then that would be OK since you do not sell mortgage products; it’s actually a good fit. But I would tell the mortgage lender that the link would be “nofollow” so that neither of you lose any search benefits.

If, on the other hand, you are approached by another real estate agent in your market who wants to buy an ad on your website then refuse their offer. You don’t want your traffic, which you have worked hard to get, leaving your website or blog to go to the competition. You’d rather have their business long term than to take the short term benefit of advertising money. Wouldn’t you?

There is a type of blog, though, that I’d have no problem selling advertising on and that is a blog set up specifically for informational purposes. Let’s say, for instance, that you wanted to start a blog that caters to real estate investors. You aren’t selling a service; you are just writing an instructional blog to teach other investors how to find properties, the pitfalls to watch out for, how to evaluate a property for investment purposes, etc. Obviously, you aren’t going to make any money on this blog if you don’t figure out a way to monetize it and squeeze some benefit out of it for yourself. It’s perfectly acceptable to write this kind of blog. Here’s what I’d do to make an instructional/informational blog worth your while:

• Develop a custom blog design - You want your informational blog to be eye-catching and unique. It tells your visitors that you are serious about teaching them your skills.
• Decide what monetization models you will use before you begin - Very important. Have a plan then work your plan. Know before you write your first post that you will be selling banner ads, text ads, or paid reviews. Maybe it will be all of the above. But decide before you start how you will monetize your blog. But don’t implement any of the monetization models at this time.
• Before you do anything else, focus on building traffic - Before you sell your first ad or attempt to sell anything at all, focus first on developing great content and building up your traffic. If you only have two regular readers, your ad values will not be much. No one will want to buy an ad for a blog with only two readers. You must concentrate all of your efforts in the beginning to writing great blog posts and attracting loyal readers. How long will that take? It depends. It could take three months or a year depending on several factors such as your writing skills, your niche and its popularity, whether you own your own domain or you use a free host, and your ability to market your blog effectively. However long it takes, do not sell any ads until you get your loyal traffic numbers up to a point that you can safely say you’ve attracted an audience.
• Sell your first ad - Don’t go bonkers with ad sales until you test the waters first. You want to see what will be the most effective monetization method for your blog. Some blogs will do better with text links, others will do better with banner ads. Know what your visitors will go along with. If you start implement ads and you see your traffic start dropping then you probably want to stop selling those types of ads. All the ad sales in the world won’t matter if you don’t have any traffic. It is important that you keep your blog’s visitors in mind and only implement methods that they will tolerate.
• After testing the waters, start selling - Once you’ve reached a level of comfortability, begin selling ads full force.

Blog monetization through ad sales can be lucrative if done the right way. But everything you do on your blog must be done to serve your visitors. Otherwise, you will not get, or keep, that many visitors.

A ghostwriter can be a big asset if you do not have the ability to write. You’ll have to figure the cost of the ghostwriting service into your business plan from the very beginning. Will you write the blog yourself until you start selling ads? Will the ghostwriter write all the posts until you start selling ads? Make sure you define it in your plan and count the costs before you begin. Make sure that you have enough money in the bank before hiring a ghostwriter for several months with no profit so that you can work your way toward your monetization efforts when the time is right. And also make sure that your ghostwriter understands the long term vision for your blog. If you plan to sell ads later on then let your ghostwriter in on that knowledge right from the very beginning because it will make a difference in how he writes your blog for you and if he knows that you will be selling ads later then he can make that transition go more smoothly for you in the writing throughout the life of your blog.

There are still a lot of people around who do not believe blogging and social bookmarking can lead to sales for commercial products. Just like those that thought blogging was only a fad back in the 90s, bloggers who think that blogging and social bookmarking have no real benfit for businesses and product sales will learn they are wrong.

Many SEO people are convinced the only way to make money on the web is to rank well in the search engines and that you live and die by search engine traffic alone. Smart SEO people do not rely solely on search engines and try to get traffic from many different sources.

Here is a good example of a niche blog using the blog to sell product. It is well put together and with social bookmarking will likely rank well in the search engines for their products. With social bookmarking added into the mix they are also likely to make sales that do not go through the search engines.

If you would like to get pricing from us on how we can set up a sales blog for you, Click here and submit a pricing request for professional blogging services

PPP = PR0

Pay Per Post was a good idea that came about 2 years too late. I tried it for a client and had bloggers write product reviews. it owrked out ok, but not worth the 15% fee Pay Per Post wanted.

Had they started earlier they would have had a chance to make more money before Google basically shut them down. I know pay Per Post is still there, but I don’t see how advertisers are going to want to have posts made on PR0 blogs.

I also don’t see bloggers wanting to risk their page rank just to make a little money from Pay Per Post. So am I predicting the demise of Pay Per Post? Well . . . Yeah.

Google has given bloggers who blog for Pay Per Post a PR 0. The blogs may still rank well in the search engines, but Google effectively killed the idea of having advertisers bid on blog posts based on the PR of the blog.

Will we see yet another lawsuit against Google for doing something with PageRank. Maybe, but it won’t fly. The bottom line is you can complain all you want about google and page rank but they own page rank. They can do with it as they please.

I’m glad I did not use my blogs with Pay Per Post. I was definitely tempted.

If you want a real job blogging where you are paid monthly for posting to daily blogs for companies, click here and send in the blogger job form.

If you are using google adsense in your blog, uploading the adsense deluxe wordpress plugin might be a great option for you.

Rather than having your adsense appear at the top and bottom or in the sidebar of your blog is okay, but much less effective than having the adsense appear in the middle of each blog post you make.

After uploading it and activating the adsense deluxe plugin, go to options and you will see an adsense deluxe tab.

You install your google adsense code into the appropriate box and save it as your default. If you also use yahoo publisher or have other adsense accounts or channels, you can set up more than one adsense account inside your adsense deluxe plugin.

When you are making a post, in some versions of wordpress, you may have to “save and continue editing” each time you post before you hit publish, then the adsense deluxe toolbar will appear above your text box.

Simply put your cursor where you want the adsense to appear in your post and choose the adsense account you wish to use from the dropdown. Then hit publish and adsense should appear where you wanted it.

Easy to use and increases your clickthrus. I recommend it!

Advice is a funny thing. Everything from what doctor to use, to what car to buy, everyone has an opinion and most are ready and willing to give you advice about almost anything.

People base this on their own experience. You have to decide what advice you will use or not use. The same goes for advice about all things related to seo, Internet marketing, blogging, web design, etc.

The short answer to the question this blog post is about, “What Should My Blog Be About?”, is whatever you want it to be about. it’s your blog. Blogs are a funny animal. No matter what the blog is about, it should have your own personality and choices built into it.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you are not blogging the way you should or that your blog is not a “real” or “legitimate” blog. That is just their opinion about what they think every blog should be like.

If every blog was done the same, then blogging would soon be history because it would be extremely boring.

Seo advice for blogging. What works for one blog may not work for another blog. 2 different blogs + the same seo techniques = 2 different results. You have to find what works for you. That means listening to what worked for someone else and possibly trying it out. Then based on the results you get, you decide to keep that going or try something else.

Content Advice for Blogging. Again, here you will get a lot of opinions. One thing I do know is your blog needs it’s own personality. You have one of those, so use it. Do not be afraid to be yourself. it’s what makes you different from everyone else and what will make your blog different from all the other blogs. Don’t conform your blog to fit what the other bloggers are doing. have your own style.

Keyword advice for blogging. There will be some who advise you to use a 15% keyword density, some who say 8%, some who say more or less %. Ignore them all. They have no clue as to an exact percentage for keyword density. Talk about your topic, whatever you choose that to be. Use keywords and phrases naturally associated with your topic and the search engines will pick them up and help people find your blog post. Do it naturally. Don’t spam the blogpost full of keywords just because you want a top listing in google.

Make money blogging advice. This is where it really gets messy. If you are blogging to make money, there is nothing at all wrong with that. There are bloggers who tell you that if you are there to make money, you are not a “real” blogger. They think it’s an art form or whatever. That is okay too. That is what they want THEIR blog to be for. That is their right. Just like it is your right to blog for money.

Some bloggers make money with adsense or yahoo publisher. Some blogs never do well with either of those things. Some blogs can get revenue directly from advertisers. Other blogs cannot get people to advertise. Some use paid posts through companies like PayPerPost.com.

Other blogs directly sell a product or service. They are more of a store than a blog you might say, but once again, you get to define your own blog. It’s not up to anyone else.

Other blogs point people to a website the blogger owns to get the readers to buy a service or product. Other bloggers use affiliate links. You can post about topics related to a product or service someone else sells and make a commission if a reader clicks the affiliate link you provide and buys the product.

You can do book reviews and give your amazon.com affiliate link to where people can find the book to buy.

You have to see what works for you and try a lot of different things. And I repeat, it is YOUR blog. YOU choose what it is about. use YOUR personality in your blog posts. You have to find the things that work for YOUR blog.

Be confident and bold. try new things. The best blog in the world has not been created yet. Make your own path. maybe everyone else will soon be following you instead of the other way around.

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I found this list on John Chow’s blog, who used it to brag that he is No. 2 on the list. Too bad is the list is 27 blogs short of the 100. That leaves room for others to move into the clique.

John found out about the list through e-mail from 45n5, the original publisher. I’ll recount the Top 10 on the list for you now:

1. Problogger
2. John Chow
3. Shoemoney
4. Dosh Dosh
5. Entrepreneurs Journey
6. Andy Beard - Niche Marketing
7. eMoms at Home
8. Nate Whitehill
9. Carl Ocab
10. NetBusinessBlog

What’s So Interesting About This List?

I find this list interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I’m always intrigued that on such lists there is always some work-at-home mom group involved. It’s not surprising in the sense that “OMG, I didn’t think moms working at home could be that successful.” Rather, it’s intriguing because there are a lot of work-at-home moms who earn a supplementary income to their husband who is the primary breadwinner and those moms have become a powerful force in the U.S. economy. Then there is the work-at-home mom who has risen above the pack and made a success of herself such that her income has surpassed her husband’s. Such moms are the essence of what is beautiful about the U.S. economy and why we like living here.

The second reason this list is interesting is because each of the top 10 blogs on the list (and I’d presume the full 73) are as different as night and day. They all have their own individual personalities, seem to fill their own particular niches, and most of them have a clearly defined purpose and target a specific audience. These are all things I’d say are necessary for a successful social blog. And these blogs do fall into the category of what I’d call social - social in the sense that they attract a large group of readers primarily through word of mouth, social bookmarking, and other similar online marketing techniques. For instance:

Expanding On The Differences

ProBlogger, the most popular make money at home blog on the Internet, is a blog primarily targeted at other bloggers. In fact, the About Us page of ProBlogger says this about itself, “a Blog that helps bloggers to add income streams to their blogs.” That’s a pretty specific niche.

John Chow bills his blog as a personal blog, but he likes talking about making money online. He recently wrote a blog post that discusses why he doesn’t write about making money more often even though some of his readers have asked him to. Interesting read.

eMoms at Home is, obviously, targeted at moms who work at home, and written by a work-at-home mom, Wendy Piersall, who has met with some level of success working at home. I must admit, this was a great idea and Wendy talks about how she started her blog on her About Us page. It wasn’t meant to be her primary enterprise, but I’ll let you read it yourself ….

Carl Ocab is 14 years old. Can he teach you something? Probably, but find out for yourself.

I could go through the entire list and give an overview of why these blogs are all different, but I think you get the idea. I did see one more interesting thing at the bottom of the list of 73. One of my favorite bloggers, Michael Martine, was listed as being in the Sandbox. That’s just one more reason the list is intriguing.

The Most Important Question of All - Why?

So why am I discussing this topic on this blog? The reason is simple and a little self serving. Each of these bloggers targets a segment of BCPs own target market. Of course, anyone with a blog to write is a part of the market we’d like to target, but make money-at-home bloggers are a group that can benefit tremendously from the services that we provide. We can leverage their time so that they can make more money. If you know any make-money-at-home bloggers who need someone to help them buy back some time, send them our way. We’d like to talk to them.

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