Chapter 7: Blog Marketing and Monetization

Traffic Generation Is the Key
Assuming you feels qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging, the most important things you need to monetize your blog is TRAFFIC Generation. It is also known as Blog marketing.

Why is Traffic so Important?
For most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people.
You have heard before the rich always get richer. Same apply to blogging, when you get more traffic, you will be able to get more traffic. Some of the top blogger are generating from unexpected sources which we cannot teach you here. For example, while your blog is so popular, journalists will be finding you for interview by doing a Google search on topics you have written. Radio and TV station will invite you for live interview. This is when you get richer by getting more exposure and marketing. Popular sites have a serious advantage. The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.
If you’re intelligent and follow our strategies closely, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site. And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
Beautiful & Attractive Blog Design, Does It Matters?
No matter how attractive and interesting your blog is, if you don’t market it and attract readers to it, you won’t make any money. Basically, blog marketing is any activity that publicizes or advertises products, services, a website or business through the use of blogs. However, before you can market on a blog, you have to successfully market the blog itself. If you can’t generate a healthy amount of traffic to your blog, you won’t be able to directly or indirectly market to them.

Consistency and Effectiveness
The key to marketing your blog successfully is consistency and effectiveness. This means that you have to consistently post new, interesting articles to your blog that are relevant to your targeted audience as well as consistently engaging in activities designed to drive traffic to your blog. However, there is a caveat on this last suggestion. Your traffic generation activities have to be effective. To ensure the effectiveness of your blog marketing strategies you need to become well informed about the types of strategies that typically get the best results, consistently apply them and consistently monitor them. You must be willing to drop strategies that do not work and replace them with hopefully more effective ones. It is important that you are not attached to your strategies but to your outcomes. If it doesn’t work, change it. Flexibility is an essential element to blogging success.
Once you have created your blog and have submitted some interesting and unique posts that are designed to pique interest and engage your reader in conversation through the comments facility, you need to get your blog pages indexed in the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This process is not automatic and if you don’t take the necessary steps you will have little chance of benefiting from search engine traffic. Generally speaking search engines require you to submit a sitemap, however if your blog is hosted by a service like Blogger you won’t be able to access the root directory to obtain the information. Instead you will need to submit code in a meta-tag. Your blog provider will direct you on how to do this.
Once you have submitted your blog for indexing with the search engines, the next most important step you can take to generate traffic to your blog is to submit it to as many relevant blog directories as possible. This can be a time consuming process so if you can afford it you may find it beneficial to pay a service to manually submit the blog for you. Automatic submission services should be avoided as they do not make allowances for the visual confirmation that is usually needed when submitting a blog to a directory. Blog directories can really pay of in terms of attracting visitors to your blog as long as you list your blog in the correct category and you take care to write a description that accurately describes your blog and appeals to your targeted niche.
These steps may generate one time visitors but it is up to you to keep them. If your blog is not updated regularly with new material it will stagnate. Regular posting is not only important in terms of attracting a loyal readership, it is essential if you want to improve your search engine page rank. The best search engine results tend to go to blogs that are tightly focused on a single niche and give their readers unique information and excellent value.

Building Relationship, Retaining Traffic Is More Important Than Generating
Once you have followed these basic steps to getting your blog up and running successfully, you can encourage readers and promote loyalty by subscribing to a feed
Money From Blog Coaching Club – MFB Blogging Phenomenon 2008
service such as Feedburner. Submitting individual posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us can also bring your blog a decent amount of additional traffic.

How to Build Traffic?
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
I’ve already written a lengthy section on this topic, so please refer to my Blog Marketing Guide. That article covers the general philosophy of traffic-building, which caters on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. No games or gimmicks.
Below are some of the traffic generation strategies used by top blog earner.
• Social Bookmarking
• Forum Marketing
• Social Networking
• SEO and Blog Search Engine
• Youtube Marketing
• Classified Marketing
• Web 2.0 Marketing
• Commenting Marketing
• Banner Traffic
• CraigsList Traffic
• eBay Traffic
• Facebook Traffic
• Facebook Traffic
• Join Venture Traffic
• Podcast Traffic
• Social Shopping Marketing
• Directory Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing
All of the above strategies will be shared in our MFB Traffic Generation Guide and MFB Marketing Action Plans Worksheet. Some of it will only be shared in our Advance Marketing Guide.
Examples:
Article marketing is another very effective way to drive traffic to your blog. It is a free strategy and produces naturally increasing traffic to your blog over time. However, it is a time consuming strategy which requires regular submission to article directories of articles closely related to the theme of your site and designed to encourage readers to click on your link beneath the article. It is also important that you do not put the same articles on your blog as you do not want your blog to be penalized under Google’s duplicate content rules.

Finally, take a bit of time and post comments on other related blogs that already have solid monthly traffic figures. Make your comments relevant and interesting and include a link to one of your own posts. You can also interact with others on high traffic forums and use your blog address as your signature link. Over time, these links can generate a decent amount of traffic.

Pay per click programs can also be very effective ways to drive traffic to your blog. However, these programs can be costly so you will need to conduct a cost benefit analysis to determine whether the potential profits to be made from the goods or services you are marketing are worth this expense.
If you follow these steps you will be best placed to generate traffic to your blog from which you will gain a growing base of loyal readers. Effective blog marketing will result in visitors to your blog who are interested in what you have to say and therefore who will be more open to the related products and services you are offering. A loyal readership provides you with a source of potential customers for your products, services and affiliate offers. When it comes right down to it, if you have monetized your blog well and you market it effectively, it can make you a lot of money. Register Google Adwords PPC.

How to Monetize Your Blog Effectively?
In my coaching program, I will be sharing with you the top 10 ways used by most successful bloggers to earn an income from $500 to $8000/mth from blogging alone. Monetizing your blog is simple, you just need to sign up the right programs and integrate into your blog or website to start generating an attractive income from it. The difficult parts are actually generating targeted traffic and also how to integrate the available monetizing platform strategically. All these will be taught with hand-on video in my MFB Online Coaching Program.
Firstly, before I go deeper into how to monetize your blog. I felt that it is necceary to share with you shortly why most people failed to earn money from their blog or website. It is important to understand the common mistakes and error made by most blogging failure so that you will not repeat their mistake again.

Getting Your Mindset Right! Do You Really Want to Monetize Your Blog?
Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money using their innocent blogs. If you think that by commercializing your blog is unethical, uncool, lame or anything along those lines, then don’t do it, don’t commercialize it.
If you have the above mixed feelings, then you should first sort out those feelings first before thinking about monetizing your blog. It is seriously important to sort them out and tidy your mindset before starting implementing any steps to monetize your blog. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from blog is challenging enough, you don’t want to self sabotage yourself and only release it when you give up on this business again.
You need to have a mindset to feel genuinely good to earn an income from your blog. You should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.

If your blog provides genuine value, you definitely deserve to earn income from it, and much more than your expectation. However if you find yourself full of doubts over
whether this is the right path for you, you might find this want to ask yourself this: How Selfish Are You. It is about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
Don’t ever be shy about you want to generate an income from your blog. If you are going to put up an ad, then really put up ads. Do not just sticks a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere in your blog.
If you are going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t place it in a place where no one will see it. Put the word DONATES and pray for the best. If you are going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, give your visitor compelling reasons to buy. Of course, it must come with good intention, create value must be your ultimate first mindset. Don’t destroy your credibility by selling for the seek of selling. If you are going to do this, then fully commit to it. Perseverance leads to success. Just like now I am typing this eguide, it is not easy but I preserved and write with the mindset to value add as much as possible. Do you know, you can get tons of thank you from buyer for selling them, for asking them to take out their credit card to pay you? Just does it with a mindset to value add as much as possible? Selling will make you rich.
Complain from readers? You need to expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will make noise, depending on how you do it, but it is really no big deal. As long as the ratio is reasonable, like out of 1000 comments, only 1 give negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most that complaints will leave your blog and never return after a few weeks. Adsense and Text Link is still my most profitable income generating tools, although they are not my only source. You will learn more lately in this section.

Can You Make a Decent Income Online?
Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for any individual working part-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from 5 blogs, and these sites are only a few months old. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate such an attractive income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. Keep in mind, I am still working as a financial consultant servicing my 100 clients and doing coaching part-time.

Can Most People Do It?
I am not going to share about mindset here, but if you really want to achieve a success in this blogging business, I like to request you to feel “equip” yourself with 2 things. Believe this system and preserve till you success. If you can hold yourself accountable and push through all mental obstacles, you will be able to do it. So if most people can do it, than this business is for everyone. But if you are not prepared, than even I give you the most successful business, you will also fail it, not to say a proven e-guide.

Thriving On Change
Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains.
It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.
Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.
The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out.
Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.
I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself.

What is Your Overall Income Generation Strategy?
I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.
Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. Again in our coaching program, we have already build a customize monetization plan with checklist for you to follow, yes to follow and not for you to create one again.

Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once a year and review it once a month. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.
Refer to our monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.
When devising your income strategy, feel free to copy. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize my site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Will Putting Ads on My Blog Site Hurts My Traffic?
Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
“Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.”
Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.
I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

Multiple Streams of Income
You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On my site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all?

Blogging Software and Hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it. Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface. And you can’t beat its price — It is free!
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger or Wordpress.com if you want to seriously monetize your blog. You don’t get enough control. If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset. You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s. Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes. If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk. It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from. I highly recommend HostGator for a hosting account with domain registration. They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support. I know many online businesses that host with them, and I myself transferred all my domain and hosting from Yahoo to HostGator a year ago.
Cheap Domain Registration at GoDaddy , Yahoo Small Business, 1&1 Netowrk

Conclusion
Marketing is the most important part in all internet business including blogging business. Therefore we have spent lots of effort in our MFB Traffic Generation Guide and MFB Marketing Action Plan Worksheet. These guides not only will give you details overview of each strategies but also the secret, untold actions and tactics used by successful internet marketers. Many of us know about all those strategies but why we are not successful in it. Simply because there are still something not told to you that you do not know. In our Action plan worksheet, we compress only details actions, NOT THEORY, into 1 page for each strategies, yes 1 page of FULL INSTRUCTION to follow and guaranteed results. I can boldly tell you each pages I can sell them for USD49 and total cost is USD 490 worth of direct hardcore instructions from 10 strategies. This is something you really won’t want to miss out again.
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