Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Creating a Profitable Blog

By Randy The Hermit

There are a number of ways that you can monetize your blog.

A popular way to monetize your blog is to sell advertising space to other people or companies that have a product or service to sell.

A similar but different method is to blog on a certain topic or in a certain niche wher you can suggest products or services to your readers in exchange for a commission.

Both kinds of blogs can make a lot of money, especially if the creator has a keen mind for marketing.

If selling advertising is your main goal you have a couple of choices, you can use established services that are ready to go or you can go out on your own and look for sponsors for you blog.

With the first method, you can find third party services like Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network that almost instantly provide advertising for your blog.

This saves you the work of finding prospects and recruiting them to your advertising program.

But the income generated by using the third party services can be a lot lower then most bloggers expected.

Searching and finding your own clients willing to place sponsored ads on your blog definitely has the potential for creating a much better income but it will take more time and effort to get the ads on your blog.

If you have been in the industry that covers the topic of your blog you might find this a bit easier to accomplish if you contact your existing contacts.

If you have experience pitching products and services you can try to your own direct sales with companies that have products in your niche but this method does require you to know at least a little about salemanship.

The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action.

One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation.

Sometimes companies will look for bloggers with experience to design a blog specifically for them that either builds a relationship for the customer or creates brand recognition or works as a presell for their products.

More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

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