The great thing about having a business blog, is that you, as the business owner can easily add and change content in their site by themselves. Gone are the days when you had to hire a highly paid webmaster to make changes you want and had to wait a very long time before they get back with you. You can make changes quickly to your satisfaction. Although there is a little learning curve, on the average it takes about a week or two to get comfortable with the basics.

Having a blog website will guarantee you sales from the site itself and also able to drive visitors to your physical location.

Affiliate ads have got to be the easiest way to make money from your blog. It is so simple to sign up as an affiliate, get the HTML code to insert in your blog, then display it. Then, whenever you get a visitor to click on the affiliate graphic button and they buy something from that site, you get an instant commission from it.

For opt in subscribers, this is where “relationship” marketing comes in to play. A visitor will come to your site and enter their name and email address and they are immediately sent a greeting email. The beauty of this system is that it is completely on “auto-pilot.” You can carry on a “conversation” with your subscribers by pre-writing emails that either give valuable content or tactfully sell products.

Lastly, selling your own products will be your strongest advantage. Just thing that all your visitors are coming back for more valuable content you provide and you become the authority in their eyes. What better way to sell to this group of prospects who are already “sold” on you.

But one widget that can add to your bottom profit line is the online store widget. This widget is a blog add on that allows a blog page to function as an online store. What is included in this widget is a graphic of the item being sold and description along with reviews, price and buy button. Some widgets are simple and some are very complex full blown productions.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you can’t wait for people to subscibe to your ezine or come visit your physical place of business after reading your blog, an online store is the answer for getting instant sales of the products you carry while they arrive to blog for the first time.

What is very cool about the WordPress blogging platform is that there are literally hundreds of widgets out there, free and paid, that are available to upload to your blog to turn your blog into an online store.

Did you know that after you get your business blog established you can make money from the blog itself? Earlier, I stated that the purpose of your blog is to connect with your audience to showcase your brick and mortar business by posting interesting and informative articles related to your business.

After your blog has a good number of blog posts, say over 200 or so, it’s time to monetize the blog itself.

One of the first methods is to insert affiliate ads. This way, when you are attending to the day to day posting on your blog, you “silently” make money when visitors click on the affiliate link and purchase the product from that link.

Next, when you build up a large viewership to your blog, then begin to sell banner ad space for a monthly or yearly fee.

Lastly, you can develop an information product or membership to sell within your blog.

Having these three sales channels going on simultaneously along with selling products from your business is a winning formula for profits to you.

Well first of all, a smart blogger will make sure that they build up as much as a readership as possible. This is done simply to make regular posts of valuable content about your business or your industry or tips about your product. This process can take several months as you build up your number of posts. The more posts you have, the better you look with the search engines because of quality content and also the the volume of content.

Next, you have at least 5 great ways to monetize your blog:

1. Google Adsense
2. Kontera
3. Affiliate Ads
4. OIO Publisher
5. Banner Ads

Google Adsense is the most popular  one mentioned, however, I have recently noticed more bloggers going on the items 2 thru 5 for better results. There is debate on whether Google Adsense is worth the time since it pays in such a smaller amount per click. In the next post we will go over the pros and cons of participating in the Google Adsense program. You can visit their site at www.google.com/adsense

Kontera is a great text link ad program that pays out more to the blogger than Google Adsense, in my opinion. If you go to www.kontera.com you will find an easy explanation of how it works and to sign up is free. After you sign up, it simply inserts a hyperlink out to an advertiser when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is clicked within the content of your post. Quite clever.

Affiliate Ads are another great way to advertise. You simply sign up (free) with an affiliate portion of a website that carrys a product or service that complements your business. As an affiliate, you receive an affiliate link that you insert into your blog, literally anywhere, and when someone clicks on that link they are taken to the site of that product. If they purchase something from the site referred to, you get an instant commission.

OIO Publisher is a very cool advertising platform that can manage and place banner ads anywhere in your blog automatically. The only downside is you have to pay a small fee to start this program. This program is very effective. You can reach their site at www.oiopublisher.com

Banner Ads are one of the oldest ways of advertising a product or service. This is usually in the form of a small square graphic or a long rectangle ad box at the upper right of the blog header. Banner ads can be quite expensive but effective if you place your banner ad on a very high traffic site.

What I did not have on the list is putting your own product or products for sale on your business blog. The best way to monetize your business blog with your product is to write a digital “book,” an ebook. It could be a book about how to do something or a summary or a valuable resource to your visitors. You simply upload your ebook on your webhost and connect a pay button to it that is attached to a graphic image on your blog. In future blog posts, I will go into detail on this.

A great example is if you have a blog about golf clubs, you may want to put an affiliate ad for golf instructional videos. This is a perfect match since your market is not competing with theirs. When someone clicks on your affiliate link, they are sent to the product site for golf videos. Your visitor then has the chance to purchase something from that site. When they buy something, you get a commission immediately. The beauty of this system is that it is automatic. You don’t have to fill out any paperwork, you don’t fiddle around with a support desk, and you aren’t responsible to deliver the product.

A number of you may have heard of the Google advertising program called “Adsense.” This involves siging up with Google Adsense and then placing a code on your blog. When the code is inserted, a section of the blog will show up text ads that are related to the keywords and keyword phrases that best match what is on your blog.  Although, not an exact science, the flaw here is that more times than not, the text ads are not related to the product or services or content you write about. What’s worse, is that text ads that pop up may be products or services that are in direct competition with your own product or service. So currently, this is not my favorite way to monetize a blog, but many of my students wanted to hear my “take” on it.

Another great way to monetize your blog is through “CPA” or click per action. This is where you set yourself up as an advertiser with a CPA network that provides products for you to click on and insert into your CPA offers on your blog. When a visitor clicks on the hyperlink, you get paid from the click-through. The visitor does not have to purchase anything! You get paid from the lead you sent to the CPA network company! How cool is that?

That last and final way I see to effectively monetize your blog is through selling your own product. The most common way to do this is through ebooks or “how to” courses that cover your industry or market. People are constantly looking for solutions and will gladly pay for it through your own blog site because they already trust you and will be open to what you have to offer as original conteint.

Too many business bloggers feel it is only necessary to post valuable content in order to entice the visitor to visit their physical location. As you know, the premise of this blog is to build your online presence via a business blog and give people the incentive to visit your location.

It is very helpful that your blog have enough information on it to make the visitor’s trip to your location worth it to them. Remember the customer does not care about you. They only care about themselves and the product or service you have that can benefit them.

There are three immediate ways you can profit from your blog itself.

1. Sell affiliate products
2. Sell your own digital product
3. Hold online seminars

Each one of the above is very effective in making you money even if the web visitor never went to your “brick and mortar” location.

In the next post, we will go into detail on the above captioned ways to profit directly from your blog.

With the internet we tend to read more online now. So, the information we used to read in the morning newspaper, or the magazines we read off the newstand are now found online as well. For example, take the Wall Street Journal. You can purchase the newspaper at your local grocery store. But you can also go online to www.wsj.com and read it online. The benefits of the online version is that the latest news releases are going to be up to date versus the paper version could be outdated by the time it is distributed at the newstand.

Since we love to read, especially if it is very important and informative to us, personally, we are willing to buy this information for money. A great example is forex trading, where you want to know the “secrets” of the the expert traders so you can use their techniques to get a head start on making profits sooner than later.

Information products have never been more popular than today. So dig deep in your own business and find a way to write an ebook about your product or service. You will find that if you combine selling an ebook on your blog along with the products and services you sell in your brick and mortar business, you will easily double your profits!

One of the main reasons why blogs exist in the first places is the power it has to present content. As you recall, content can be in the form of text, audio, pictures and video. Now the real action is in the blog owner to promote and sell original information products. It is a natural extension of a blog.

For instance, a blog that talks about boats is a perfect candidate to promote a safe boating guide. A blog that is about photography could publish and promote a book on step by step photography for beginners. There is no limit to how a blog owner can publish and promote their own information product.

Don’t forget that your blog is a platform for covering everything that is about your niche, your business, and your products and services. Don’t waste any opportunity to monetize your blog!