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.

How do you get to know your audience? Simple, get yourself in front of you potential audience that you are catering to.  The most obvious and easiest way is to join online groups, forums and comment on other industry related blogs. This is how to engage immediately with your core audience. Remember that these people will gravitate towards you if you have something of value to offer.

When entering a forum or established group in your industry, kindly introduce yourself and start participating in meaningful “conversation.” There will be a lot of discussion threads so make sure you only pick the ones where you have some expertise or something meaningful to contribute to. You will gladly be accepted into the “group” if you prove yourself as helpful and friendly.

Forums and groups have a way when you registered as a user, to enter your URL back to your blog site or any site you want people to return to when click on your name to get further information on you. This is how the long term benefit comes back to you.

In the end, the object is for you to reach out online to your targeted audience in order to gain readership to your blog.

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.

What is a relationship? It is developing trust and gaining favorable reputation with your customers. This takes time. No one wants a “relationship” thrust upon them in a short time. Japanese businessmen have a ritual where they have to know you for quite a long time before they will do business with you. They have inner patience to “give and take” within this relationship and make it in their best interests to do business with you. It is not because they got “burned” from some unscrupulous business scammer, rather, it just makes sense that they feel comfortable doing business with you after judging from your actions that likely to prove you are worthy to do business with.

It makes good sense to keep your blog content consistent to “prove” to your visitors that you are real and have value to offer them. If you sell at all, it comes down to how people buy. They buy from people they “like, know & trust.” It has been written in many creditable sales books that the relationship is the key to successful selling.

So, when blogging, keep this principle in mind. You should take the time to lay out consistent and relevent content that you know your visitors will appreciate and use. Don’t waste your time, and their time, in content that has no value. Also, keep asking your visitors and customers what they want to see in your blog. Let them have a “voice” in what they want to see from you. I guarantee that you cannot second guess your customers  on what they want from you. Asking what they want in content, what kind of additional service or product your business can provide, will be very important to your business.

Your blog’s sole purpose is truly a collaboration between your business and your customer.

I found a great video here that shows what kind of equipment he takes with him when he travels the world and still manages to post  regularly on his blog. Remember, just because you are away from home doesn’t mean you can’t keep up your blog! Enjoy.

We are an online society, and it has taken on the world stage. I truly believe that in order to survive into the future, you need an online presence. Often, in my seminars, I even intruct my students to reserve their own name with a domain name company. You can always use it in the future.

Branding plays a key in the success of your business and personal success. If you brand your name, or your businesss, a blog can do that.

If you have not had any writing experience, I suggest you brush up on writing skills. When you start a blog, you become a publisher. When you become a publisher, you are responsible to write consistently.

I am often asked by bloggers, “what can I write about?” You should look everywhere around you. What is happening in your industry? What is happening on TV that pertains to your industry. What humorous things are happening in your industry. What kind of tips and tricks can you reveal to yuor audience. There is literally unlimited amount of things to write about in your blog.

Remember that your blog is an extension of you and your experiences and dreams and hopes. Share this with your audience and your will get a following and soon, paying customers.

Facebook currently has over 500 million users online around the world. There are approximately over 100 registered users of Twitter and there are over 126 million blogs in the world.

Just with the Facebook and Twitter use alone, you have many possibilities of getting people to come to your blog to visit and become your “followers.” Now it can be a challenge if you are attempting to attract a local following to your business physical location, but that doesn’t have to stop you there.

When I teach people how to blog for their business, I also tell them that once the blog goes online, it becomes “worldwide.” This is something that should get your creative juices flowing with making digital products in the form of info products to sell to your “following” outside your local area.

Just think, if you owned a golf equipment shop. You originally intended on putting up a blog to get an online presence and to drive people, through local search of your blog, to visit your physical location. Well now you can think of serving two types of customers, the local market and the rest of the world!

This marketing of both the local and worldwide audience presents an opportunity to get the attention of everyone who visits your blog from being referred from Facebook or Twitter. With the blog software out there now, you can enable your Facebook visitors to go to your blog, your blog visitors to go to Facebook, and Twitter to do the same. Now at first, people coming in from these social media sites would not be “targeted,” in other words, it will have no value to your business. But eventually, there will be the type of people that will be interested in your product or service. These people will become your recurring visitors and eventually become cash paying customers.

So, although social media is a valuable resource to get customers, remember that, since the internet is always changing, what could be popular today may not be as popular or effective a year from now. Be ready to change when the trends to market your business change.

But in order to successfully market your blog, you must have a plan to implement. For example, start with the purpose of your blog. If your blog is about golf, then give the best golf tips in your blog posts. Promote your blog to golf forums, groups, country clubs, golf equipment stores, write golf articles and submit to article directories, get on sports related blogs, in other words, scour every known source for putting your blog out there. You will find that sooner than later, your visitor count will go through the roof.

And it does not stop there, you have to keep on promoting your blog for the meximum exposure. Once you have hundreds of blog posts up and several years of your blog domain online, you secure a long term high page rank with the search engines.

Blog marketing is a culmination of doing several things consistently and persistently. If you have a solid plan, you can’t help but be a success.