You’ve learned how to define who you are and what your blog is all about, how to use other online media to help establish yourself in the minds of readers and consumers, and how to generate brand awareness. It’s been like giving you a whole marketing class.
But this chapter is what most bloggers picked this book up for. Now we get to learn how to use your newly established brand to grow your online audience and maximize your income.
Like we said way back in the beginning of this book, different bloggers will have different goals. Success means different things to different people. But if you’re interested in more readers to sell ads, sell products, sell services, or raise money and awareness for your cause, a good brand will make a big difference.
In the sections that follow, you’ll learn exactly where your brand fits into your overall marketing plan. You’ll learn how to plan and add new revenue producing activities to your blog. And you’ll learn how to continue to refine and monitor your brand in order to keep up with changing trends, new competitors, and reader habits.
Most bloggers struggle to earn money.
Earning money online isn’t as easy as many people would like to think it is. The fact that you’ve come this far means that you have what it takes, and you’re willing to put in the effort needed to succeed. Use that fact as motivation going forward and you can join the elite bloggers that are already out there earning real money.
Without customers, a company can’t expect to make money. So they spend a little time and energy building a great brand that attracts lots of customers, give them something to buy, and then follow through to make sure that they’re satisfied customers who continue to shop with them and refer their friends.
For bloggers, the same dynamic is at play. We spent the bulk of this book talking about how to build and grow a strong brand so that you can take the next step and earn money with your blog. But there’s a very important step in between that needs to be addressed first: driving traffic, or visitors, to your blog.
Without visitors, there’s no money to be made. Every monetization scheme in this chapter relies on driving visitors to your blog. Once you have visitors, you can sell ads or you can sell products or you can generate business. Without them, you don’t have a successful blog.
And for bloggers, visitors mean more than just someone who lands on your blog. Yes, that’s the first challenge. But what we really want are readers, engaged readers. Let’s go over a few ways of driving visitors to your blog and then talk about how we can keep them there and turn casual visitors into engaged readers.
WHERE THEY COME FROM
Where do your visitors come from? If you’re like most blogs or other websites, a large majority of your visitors will come from either search engines or social media. These are the two most important drivers of traffic, which is why we devoted rather large sections earlier in this book to them.
People are going to find you, but they’re going to start somewhere else.
They’re going to be searching for information similar to what you provide on Google or Bing, or they’re going to be more casually surfing the Web or their favorite social network and stumble upon something that leads them your way. This is why staying active in social media and working on good search engine optimization strategies are so important. They’re the traffic drivers. They’re how you get discovered.
All of the other ways we discussed for you to grow your brand are also potential traffic drivers. Writing guest posts and articles will get you visitors who are reading your content on another site. Any paid advertising you do or offline attention that you or your brand gets will help send people your way.
But it all starts with good content. When you provide quality content on your blog, you’re laying the foundation upon which everything else is built. Remember, much of the SEO work we talked about in the previous chapter starts with the content on your site, the keywords you use in your posts, and the headlines you use. And without good content, the networking you do in social media won’t do much for you.
When someone lands on your site for the first time, it’s like someone walking into a store or a restaurant for the first time. It’s your chance to make a good first impression. You do that with your brand, and you do that with great blog posts that really engage the reader.
Getting people to your site for the first time is a big step, but that’s not where the challenge ends. A visitor is measured and counted when he or she lands on a page of your site. And growing that total number is certainly one of the goals. But the real key to creating a successful blog is turning those visitors into return visitors or subscribers.
Return visitors, as the name suggests, are people who come back to your blog more than once.
Those people liked what they saw so much the first time that they come back looking for more content, whether to read a new post or view your About page to learn more about you. They’re the equivalent of loyal customers to a company. They’re fans of your brand. And gaining more of them will lead to a successful blog.
Your blog may not get return visitors as much as it gets subscribers. In the blogosphere, people have become comfortable “subscribing” to blogs that they want to continue to read instead of returning to the site each time they want to find a new post. Subscribing makes it simple, because you only get the new posts, and you get them right when they’re first published.
Having an option for readers to subscribe via RSS, real simple syndication, is key to growing your reader base. This is how most people who read blogs do it. They’ll use an RSS reader of some sort, like Google Reader, and use it to follow a number of blogs that they’re interested in.
You can also offer the opportunity for people to subscribe via email, using a service like Feedburner. Some people prefer to get emails from a few blogs that they follow instead of using an RSS reader. And others will instead choose to follow you on Facebook or Twitter if they know they can receive new content that way.
Any way they do it, your biggest fans will be your subscribers.
And as that number goes up, so too does your ability to use your blog to earn money.
Come Back for More
I’ve seen steady readership and subscription growth over the past years in my home design blog. I’ve used these sneaky features to help me acquire steady, loyal readers.
Sometimes I post longer-form articles and show an excerpt that requires readers to click to read the second part of the text and photos. This adds more page views to my site stats and it starts to get readers in the habit of clicking around in the rest of my site; that first click warms them up!
I make it easy for first-time readers to become subscribers by adding this link to my RSS feed at the end of each and every post: Click here to subscribe to our daily design videos and features.
The best advice I ever got was to increase my posts from three times a week to five times a week. (I’d blog every day of the week, but I need to rest on the weekends!) More content on a blog, delivered with extreme regularity, attracts more traffic. Seriously, you shouldn’t expect readers to get very excited about your blog if you’re only creating one post a week. Blog readers have big content appetites.
—Jay Johnson
Design2Share design2share.com
Not all readers are created alike. And your content can have a lot to do with how readers interact with your blog.
A passive reader, for the purposes of this book, is someone who casually reads your blog. They may only come once, they may return more than once, and they may even subscribe. These are all good things, but there’s another step that you want readers to take. You want them to interact with your blog in some way other than just reading.
This “action” is what makes someone an active reader. Active readers are great!
Active readers are people who leave comments, start conversations, share your posts in social media, refer their friends to your blog, and contact you with questions or feedback. They’re a blog’s version of early adopters and brand ambassadors. They’ll be the first to offer feedback, and they’ll get conversations going around your brand that will piqué the interest of others.
The more active readers you have, the more likely you are to be successful. But active readers don’t just show up one day and start making noise. There are ways that you can (and should) elicit this type of interaction on your blog. Here are a few.
ASK QUESTIONS
lf you use your posts only to state facts or opinions, that sounds to your readers like you’re speaking at them. You’re not asking for feedback, and so they’re not likely to provide any. Asking questions on your blog and in your social media feeds for people to answer is a way of getting them involved.
When people feel like their feedback is desired, and that what they have to say matters, they’re more likely to get involved.
OPEN-ENDED POSTS
Similar to asking questions, leaving some of your posts open-ended will encourage people to chime in with their own thoughts. lf you state your opinion on a given subject, end the post by stating that you’d like to know whether or not people agree with you. This way, readers know that you’re looking for information from them to advance the conversation, and they’ll be happy to provide it if they have an opinion on the subject.
ASK FOR COMMENTS
Just like your open-ended posts, asking for comments at the end of each post will help get a conversation started around your content. But don’t just ask for comments and leave it at that. Make sure you follow along and get involved in the comments section yourself. Create that two-way Street of communication that makes your readers feel like welcome and valued members of a community that centers around your brand.
SURVEYS AND POLLS
Surveys and polis are easy ways to get people involved in your posts. By asking for their input, you’re getting them to take an action that goes beyond just reading. Surveys and polis can be on anything related to your field, and can even be surveys about the type of content you’re providing.
Some of the most successful bloggers regularly ask their readers the equivalent of “How’s my driving?” You may get some criticisms, but that’s a good thing. Your readers will become the best focus group you could ever ask for, and they’ll help you steer your brand in the right direction (more on this later).
GIVEAWAYS
Using contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways on your blog is a great way to elicit action from your readers. People love free stuff, and the readers of your blog are no different. You can offer one lucky winner a free hat, shirt, book, etc. just for sharing your post on Twitter, or for leaving a comment, or for subscribing to your RSS feed.
This way, you get people excited, and you provide them with an incentive to do something you want them to do.
Often, people are more than willing to do what it is you want them to do, whether that’s sharing your content with others, subscribing, or commenting on your blog. The biggest hurdles are just making it easy for them to do so and providing the smallest of incentives. Even if giving something away for free isn’t an option, great content can serve as a top-notch incentive in and of itself.
As you continue to blog, you need to find ways to continuously monitor your brand. This way, you’ll be able to make changes to the brand when needed, refining it and improving upon it as you go.
Zac Johnson points out the importance of staying ahead of the game, emphasizing the need to always keep thinking about tomorrow. “Since blogging can be one of the slower methods for creating a business or revenue source online, it’s important to always think about the future of your blog and its branding at all times. When going live with your first blog, you’ll want to make sure that you have a brandable name and logo that will help identify you in the crowd and allow people to recognize and remember your brand as an authority for information within your niche,” he says.
“As your blog continues to grow over the years with more content and readers, your brand will also continue to grow.”
Companies call this brand management, and when things get really bad, rebranding. They take what they’ve already created, and start fresh. They spend millions of dollars to change their logo, or run television ads promoting themselves in a new way. At the end of the day, they want consumers to see them differently. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s too little, too late.
For new bloggers, it’s not as much rebranding as it is brand upkeep and brand growth. Things change over time. Fads come and go, the economy goes up and down, and readers will come and go.
But the core brand that you’ve built using the tips in this book won’t change all that much.
It will just need to be revisited from time to time so that you can make sure everything is in working order, and you’re still achieving the goals you set out when you created the brand.
Just as you wouldn’t send your kid off to first grade and not check his homework until college, you also won’t just send your blog into the blogosphere and assume it’s working at optimal capacity every day. “Encouraging feedback by allowing readers to post comments and send personal messages through a contact form on your blog are the two most effective ways to monitor and control your brand,” Ros Gardner says.
When you hear feedback that’s less than positive, don’t just get mad and turn away—instead, listen. “Any negative feedback about problems with your product must be dealt with and corrected swiftly,” Gardner says. “Positive feedback, on the other hand, can be used to build out a testimonials section on your blog.”
We talked about the importance of listening to your readers in order to learn what they like, what they don’t like, and what they want more of. As you continue to blog and your readership continues to grow, catering to the early readers who participated in your blog in some way is essential. They’ll steer you toward success, and they’ll bring you more readers as time goes on.
An essential part of the ongoing evaluation of your brand should be to listen to this group of people, and to continue to elicit feedback from them so that you know how you’re doing. I’ve seen many blogs grow quickly, only to become stale or become boring over time because the bloggers stopped listening to their readers. They had so much early success that they thought they knew all the answers, and they stopped trying, took it easy, and stagnated.
Here’s a blogging truism: successful blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. When things are going well, they can always turn sour. Just like when things are going slow, they can always pick up. The most successful bloggers never stop working to better their brand.
In addition to listening to what your readers have to say, you can keep abreast of what’s happening with your blog by setting up a Google Alert so you’ll know every time it’s mentioned. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on a set of keywords or phrases. You can set them up easily by going to google.com/alerts.
Try adding alerts for the name of your blog, your name (if that’s different), and any other keywords that you’d like to keep an eye on. You can set them to come in once a day, or more or less frequently depending on how often you feel like receiving the emails. These alerts will tell you when Google picks up your content. They might notify you if another blogger or article mentions you, or show you if your posts are picked up or posted somewhere else on the Web. You can visit each link straight from the email, and if there’s a mention of you or your brand on another site, you can leave a comment or get in touch with the writer. This is a great way to monitor the conversation around your brand, and to network with others who have found your content useful.
Finally, you can use your blog stats to make sure things are going in the right direction at all times. Most blogging platforms will offer their own stats and analytics so that you can see the basics, such as number of visitors, where they’re coming from, and what they’re reading. But if that’s not enough, you can use a free tool, such as Google Analytics, to get a more in-depth look into the traffic on your blog. Setting it up is easy; begin by registering at google.com/analytics, and then adding a small snippet of code they provide to your blog.
By monitoring your blog’s traffic, you can learn what posts are the most popular, whether or not you’re driving more visitors each month, and where those people are coming from.
This will help you decide if the strategies you’re using to grow your blog are working, or if you need to rethink them.
Finally! We’ve come to the good part. You’ve put in all the work. You’ve established and grown a solid brand. You’re attracting readers and keeping them interested in what you have to say with great content. It’s time to make money using your blog.
Most people think of making money online as selling ads. And while we’ll cover advertising as one key way of making money on your blog, there are many other ways that you should consider as well. Often people give up after they try to sell ads and it doesn’t work. So I’m going to start with everything else, and get back to ads later.
WRITER FOR HIRE
Good blogging often means good writing. Blogging will give you ample practice to exercise your writing muscles. Look at a blog as a showcase of your writing style and talents. If you’re so inclined, put out feelers to blog networks and news sites for guest blogging gigs and, eventually, a paid blogging opportunity. Look for organizations with websites in your content vertical—which you should know about for your blog, regardless—and reach out to those without blogs, offering your assistance. Other opportunities to write for a living may be offline, writing for a local newspaper or magazine, for instance.
CONSULTING SERVICES
lf you have a home staging blog, then you have a platform to sell your services as a home stager. Real estate blogs for Realtors, health and fitness blogs for home trainers and masseuses, astrology blogs for astrologers, cooking blogs for caterers, business marketing blogs for business consultants—all of these are examples of how a blog advertises that your services are for hire.
Be sure to include information about what you do and how you work with the public or business sectors in your blog’s About page. One blogger we know actually has a “Hire Me!” tab in her navigation bar, and she spells out how she wants to work with her readers.
Your blog should provide potential customers with deep insight into your personality, your points of view, and your depth of knowledge about your content vertical.
PUBLISH A BOOK
We encourage you to explore self-publishing your own print and e-books, but a number of bloggers have landed their own book deals with commercial publishers. Traditional houses will market, advertise, and sell your brand and your blog on their own dime—and that’s a great way to expand your brand’s influence, reach out to new markets, and increase your blog’s traffic. Many bloggers have been able to compile “best of my blog” posts or other content to create their books— but you’re a writer at heart, and even coming up with new material on your subject shouldn’t be too difficult!
SELL E-BOOKS
Instead of bothering with physical, printed books, as long as your users are online, you might want to offer them e-books for sale. The same rules apply for self-published paperback and hardcover books, except that everything is now electronic. Write your text out in a Word document and convert it to a PDF. Take the PDF to a company that specializes in e-book services like eBooklt!, eBookTemplate-Source.com, Smashwords, or Scribd.
WEBINARS
Webinars are great ways to authoritatively reach your audience and monetize their enthusiasm for your expertise and advice.
A webinar is an online conference, with one person-you, the expert blogger!—lecturing and conducting a question-and-answer session with many people.
Bloggers sign up to use an online webinar service that allows your audience to plan ahead and participate in either a free or paid event. Some webinars allow you to show live video of you talking alongside a PowerPoint presentation of your discussion. Participants log in to the webinar site using a Web address, user name, and password that you provide, and they can either listen to the audio through their computer or phone in.
There are many webinar services you can explore for hosting your online presentations. Most are free if you have under a certain number of participants, with a fee for expanding your audience when your webinars begin to generate buzz with your blogging audience. Free services, perfect for bloggers, include Vyew, Yugma, and Yuuguu.
APPS
Consider developing an app for the iPhone and Droid around your blog. It’s a great way to market your brand while making money. Do you have a yoga blog? Develop a “Two-Minute Pose of the Day” app. Is your blog about the Rubik’s Cube? Why not a Rubik’s Cube app? Apple provides free app development software on its products and site. Actual app-making development just takes time and patience, and an app form to be submitted to Apple or Google.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
One way to make money as a blogger is to participate in one or more affiliate programs. An affiliate program is an online system for marketing products that involves three parties. In essence, you help other people market their products, and you make money every time someone buys through your link.
One of the largest and often one of the more prosperous affiliate marketing programs for bloggers is offered by Amazon. Becoming an Amazon Affiliate is free and simple, and it allows you to “sell” any product offered on Amazon for a small commission.
While Amazon might have everything under the sun for bloggers, there are plenty of other affiliate networks to check out. One or more may be a perfect fit for you and your audience. You can try Click Bank, Share a Sale, and Commission Junction to start.
ADVERTISING
As mentioned before, selling ads on your blog is the most common form of revenue generation for bloggers. And there are many ways to do it that don’t turn off your readers or interrupt your content. Ads, when used properly, can be a great way to make money on your blog without a whole lot of effort on your part. A popular way to get started is to sign up with an ad serving network, such as Google Adsense or Media.net. These networks will allow you to add a bit of code to your site, and they’ll handle the rest, paying you for clicks that those ads generate. This is popular among bloggers because it requires very little effort. They have the advertisers already, and they handle every aspect of the process.
But for larger blogs, it may be worthwhile to sell the ads yourself.
By selling the ad space directly, you can make more money and ensure a certain amount of money per impression, or per month, without worrying just how many people click on the ad itself. Doing this may require you to go out and contact advertisers to get them interested, which takes more time and energy on your part. But this effort can pay off. And by including an advertiser information page on your site, you may get people contacting you instead of your having to go out and find them.
There are a number of other ways to put ads on your site that are less popular, but still very effective. Services like BlogAds.com will let you sign up, choose your own prices, and let advertisers contact you directly. Or Kontera.com will allow you to place ads in the form of text links within your posts, so you don’t have to crowd your site with banners.
The key with advertising, as with most other forms of monetization mentioned here, is that the more readers you have, the more money you can make. For advertising especially, the money you can earn is directly tied to the traffic you have. Advertisers will be willing to pay a premium to reach a large audience.
This section on monetization is a great start, but there are many, many more ways that people are making money online. This was meant to provide you with a basic introduction to the ways bloggers make money.
Hopefully your creative juices are flowing. If you want more details on any of the ideas mentioned, or specific instructions on how to set them up, you can easily research them online. And they’re all areas taught in much greater depth in the home-study “Professional Blogging” course taught by the New York Institute of Career Development (nyicd.com).
The blogosphere is big, and it’s getting bigger. Hopefully this book has given you a greater sense of how the most successful bloggers among us are using the tools at their disposal to grow and earn money. But the dirty little secret of blogging, and the online space in general, is that it’s constantly changing. The tips and advice provided in this book are a launching pad. While the fundamentals of branding provided here will never go out of style, the tools and techniques may change overtime. Change happens fast in the digital age, and every successful blogger has a responsibility to stay up to date on what’s going on in the blogosphere. Already today there are a couple of shifts taking place that are worth noting.
The first is the increased use of more dynamic content. We made note of this earlier in the book, but it’s crucial to realize that bloggers now are providing more and more audio and video content in addition to plain text in order to attract new readers and keep old readers coming back for more.
Internet users have proven that their attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
Whereas a traditional newspaper reader might be more than willing to sit down and read a two-page article, your blog’s readers most likely won’t. They want content they can consume in a hurry. They’ve come to expect to be quickly entertained.
When building a successful blog, you should account for this shift. Start experimenting with video content early on, and your likelihood of success will only go up.
The second shift is a change in the way we consume online content. Of course you’ll want to include an RSS feed option for people who use an RSS reader. But that might not be enough anymore. Allowing people to subscribe via email or getting your content on social networks is vital to meeting your readers’ needs. The motto here is “Be where your readers are.”
More and more, people are browsing and consuming online content from phones and tablets.
This “mobile shift” is one you should pay dose attention to. Already, companies large and small are becoming aware of the need to have a website that’s optimized for mobile traffic. This means ensuring that people who visit your page from their phones can get the full experience.
If you use a Smartphone to browse the Web, you know how frustrating it can be when you visit a site that’s practically unusable. The text is too small, the links are too dose together, and you can’t zoom. Most of the popular blogging platforms are already accounting for this device switch, but you should be aware of how your site looks on a phone or tablet, because that’s how many people will end up coming to your blog.
The rest is up to you. Keep this book as a reference, but actively use it! The worst possible action for bloggers is to take no action at all. There’s always something to be done to improve and build upon your brand. Hopefully this book has given you some ideas that you can put into practice. Hopefully it’s opened your eyes to some new ways you can help grow your audience.
Now you know that you’re a brand, and that everything you do online is an effort to build a successful blog that ties into that brand. A successful blog takes a lot of work. But the truth is, it’s work that you’re going to love.
Go forth and conquer!