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.

If you set up a blog on these platforms, you have a quick way of “testing” the waters whether you have the patience, acumen, and creativity to blog. Now I am not stating that you have to be professional publisher to start and keep up a blog.

Make note, though, that when you set up blogs on these free platforms, you run the risk of having no control of it because the blog host can delete your blog for any reason they see fit. Although I can’t state a specific instance of how your blog on these platsforms can get deleted, the most common one is if you violate the “terms of service” of the way you use the blog. Some free blog platforms do not allow you to sell products or services from the blog. Other platforms do not allow you to slander or libel other bloggers, people or organizations.

I can’t stress enough the value of being able to “test drive” the blogging process if you do set up blogs there. I would suggest that you blog, for a while on the free platform when starting out, just to get experience if you want to learn on your own. Then, when you get fairly comfortable, you can set up a “paid for” blog and take it seriously into the future.

What is a “paid for” blog system? Simply, it is a way where you buy your own domain name, “rent” webhosting, and download the blog software to the webhost. Domain names nornally cost about $10 and monthly webhosting costs as low as $5 per month. But the benefits are huge. You can sell products or services, and you can just about do anything you want on your own blogging platform that is legal and moral.

Since you control both the domain name and webhosting, there is little chance of being “shut down” from outside sources.

On the other hand, a blog has a very user friendly administration area where they can add their own content. Yes, the learning curve is still there to add content, but it only takes maybe days, at most to learn.

You can find so many resources on the internet, whether through video or articles that you can find out for yourself that can teach you how to manage a blog.

For the long run, blogs are your best bet because, not only can the owner of the site manage it, but they can also grow the blog, with gaining more knowledge of how to creatively add features to it. Some of my clients who knew nothing of how to manage a blog, learned how to insert a post, moderate a comment, and add a picture in less than a week. From there, they will learn how to insert videos, add their own widgets and change the layout of the blog.

As with any marketing website, you always should have a call to action, a way to guide the visitor to opt in to a newsletter, or sign up for a trial membership or click on an affiliate link to a product or service that your readers would be interested in.

The “call to action” is the oldest, but most effective way of marketing your business. Since you are online and have a blog to complement your marketing efforts, every effort should be made to tell the visitor what to do.

A simple thing like asking people to make a comment on your blog, will dramatically increase  your blog comment count.  If you position your newsletter opt in box to the upper right or upper left column will increase your opt in rate. Better yet, putting the opt in box all the way up in the header will make even more opt ins’ happen.

The key way to get your video the most views is to be “cute” or show dumb situations that humans often portray, animals, babies, music, and contraversial topics. Videos can get just about any subject matter “famous,” but it is the unique content that gets the most attention from the view public.

How often do you get an email from a friend or family that has a link to a funny video or a video that makes you cry? Would you believe that a video, that is being made by a teenage girl showing how to put on make up is getting millions of views per month? You would never thought that something like that gets viewed often! Better yet, there is a video of an Asian girl that runs for about 3 to 4 minutes that just shows her staring at the video camera doing absolutely nothing, getting hundreds of views per day! Crazy!

Video for business is very important. It can’t be “boring.” It has to grab the viewer and capture their interest of the product or service you are providing. Make sure you can find some entertainment value in your video without coming across silly. 

Video will forever go “viral” on the internet and many people will be referring the link to see your video on that video host site or they will “embed” the video code on some other blog or website.

Video gives your business strong count for search engine page rank. So make sure video is a big part of your online marketing campaign.

She is one of the members of the original “blog squad” with Patsi Krakoff. I think they both went their separate ways now but I do keep track of what each have been doing in the blogosphere. They are both still active in the blog world and have published many valuable articles for bloggers everywhere.

Here is a video below from Denise Wakeman on what “jazzes” her about blogging both personally and professionally. Enjoy.

Wordress began in 2003 when matt mullenweg and his development team decided to make an open source coded blog platform. By keeping it “open source,” it means that no one has to buy the code to make blogs….it’s free! Since it’s humble beginnings, in 2003, WordPress blogging software has been downloaded millions of times and now powers hundreds of thousands of personal blogs to multinational corporations around the world. The team of developers are dedicated to keeping up on the updates to make the blog platform even better.

Blogs were originally meant to be personal online diaries, but now they have the capability to full out content management systems. This is the reason large corporations are now using this as their foundation of their websites. There is a movement to go from outdated HTML websites to the blogging platform.

The one main reason why users are attracted to WordPress blogging platform is how easy it is to use. Gone are the days when you had to hire a very high paid webmaster to set up, design and manage a business website.

Once up and running, a WordPress blog can be maintained by a “non-techie” within a matter of hours. I have proof of this because I have personally trained my clients for one full day and from then on, they were writing and inserting their own blog posts and moderating comments like a pro.

WordPress blogging platform is also at home with experienced webmasters and developers too. Because this is an open source code, techno “geeks” can get inside the PHP and CSS code of this platform and tweak it to their heart’s content.

It seems that WordPress will “rule” as the blog platform of choice for years to come.

For more information, go to click here

If you position your business in front of your target audience, you can’t help but be successful. But you must give real, valuable content. It must resonate with the audience you are serving. It sounds simple but so many businesses try to over analyze the “message.” To second guess your market is fatal. Try, instead to be real and develop your content that reflects your values, your personality and what you truly feel that your customers are going to consume and implement.

Once you have a fan club, you then get feedback from them on what they want. The old sales/marketing adage, find out what your “hungry market” wants and give it to them has never been truer.

Your blog should concentrate on reaching out and recruiting more people to your fan base. This is ongoing job. Keep this up and you will be more than profitable in the long run.