Showcase Your Business
Let's start our discussion by talking about showcasing your business. One of the biggest problems a business faces today is how to project an image that differentiates you as being better than the competition.. Face it, people buy from companies and people they like, trust and respect. On top of that, if you can help solve a problem they will choose you nine times out of ten.
Show off Your Expertise and Raise Your Credibility
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| Buying credibility: A look at the FTC's transparency-in-blogging regulations (Photo credit: opensourceway) |
Copy Editor to the Rescue
Most business owners say they would love to blog but have neither the time nor the expertise to do so on a regular basis. So, how do they bridge the gap? A business owner either needs to immerse him or herself in the learning process or they need to hire a copy editor or ghostwriter to help them produce a polished product. Sometimes copy editors not only polish your prose, but they can help you learn how to add blogging to your skill set.
Plenty of Free Help Online
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| Help Authoring Tools that let you create web help (Photo credit: IvanWalsh.com) |
If you don’t want to spring for an editor, you need to use high quality grammar and spelling check programs. Always use the latest version of Microsoft Word, it will help provide the most accurate first draft without any added expense. Two of my favorite grammar checkers are Grammarly and Ginger. These two online applications are powerful and full featured. No application is perfect so don't forget to always get another competent human to lay their eyes on your document before it gets published. (We refer to this individual as a Blog Buddy.)
Getting Distribution, a Well-Kept Secret
One of the little known secrets of blogging and article writing is that a well crafted and distributed blog post or article receives a relatively high ranking. The most important aspect of getting ranking is being read, commented on and shared. Google and other search engines notice this readership and will often give it a relatively high score. Especially if the blog has a high keyword match, is timely, relevant, and has been viewed and commented on by a significant number of readers. It is not unusual for the blog to appear on Page One of Google in as little as a week. Point of fact: Google goes gaga for blogs.
Building an Audience
This is where posting your articles to your social nets comes into play. More importantly, getting your friends, customers and coworkers to comment on them and then repost the
m to their social nets is the magic formula you need to master. About a year ago we created a subscription peer group where like-minded business owners help each other by committing to reading, commenting on and sharing each other's articles and blog post.
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| atelier PRO - The Hague University 13 (Photo credit: atelier PRO) |
Don’t expect overnight success. When you first begin this process you won't have very many readers. This is why it's important to grow your social networks. We recommend that you concentrate on the top five social networks. Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. All of these networks have a minimum of 200 million subscribers and give you a large pool from which to attract followers.
To build your audience you need to follow the principles I have outlined in other articles. Several good ones to check out: "The Six Cardinal Rules for Social Media Success" and "The Twelve Secrets of Social Media Marketing". These two articles and ½ dozen others can be found on our WorkingTheWebToWin blog and on our BlogTalkRadio show at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/workingthewebtowin.
How to Make Money
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| Make Money Online: Roadmap of a Dot Com Mogul (Photo credit: Michael Kwan (Freelancer)) |
Now let's talk about ways to monetize your blog. The simplest way to make money from blogging is to build an audience and then sell ad space. Blogger has built-in gadgets to outfit your blog with Ad Words banner ads. This plug-in will display and track any Ad clicks that occur when people read your blogs. A blog that receives thousands of visits a month is an attractive commodity for a business looking to run their targeted ads, especially if your client base is the same as theirs. Of course until you generate at least 10 thousand views, don’t hold your breath waiting for a check to arrive from Google.
Create a Book from your Blog Articles
If you have been, diligently writing blog posts week in and week out, you are creating a lot of useful content. If you wrote a blog a week, you would have created 52 blog articles in one year. If each article was approximately a page and a half long, you have created enough content to create a book that is about 120 pages long. Becoming an author takes your credibility to a whole new level. You can sell your books on your blog as either an eBook or a regular book.
In addition, Amazon and Barnes and Noble will let you create eBooks with little or no publishing cost to sell on their sites. You can have soft back books published for about $5 each and use them as powerful introduction material. Just think, even if it took you two years to do this, you now have a powerful new marketing weapon to grow your business. Don’t have any publishing experience? Then make sure you have a good copy editor and shop printing companies not publisher. Self-publishing companies normally charge too much for this kind of job. they would take you and your book to the cleaners. Avoid them at all cost.
In addition, Amazon and Barnes and Noble will let you create eBooks with little or no publishing cost to sell on their sites. You can have soft back books published for about $5 each and use them as powerful introduction material. Just think, even if it took you two years to do this, you now have a powerful new marketing weapon to grow your business. Don’t have any publishing experience? Then make sure you have a good copy editor and shop printing companies not publisher. Self-publishing companies normally charge too much for this kind of job. they would take you and your book to the cleaners. Avoid them at all cost.
Sell Direct and Collect
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| I Get Money (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Sell Your Products on your Blog Site
Also, there is no reason in the world you couldn't run ads for your own products. I would suggest that you don't run ads until you reach at least 1,000 readers a month. Then make sure your ads are tasteful and compelling. Once you have a large number of followers, your blog can become a way to sell related products and services to your readership.
Syndication
Many online zines are willing to pay for skilled writers. Top bloggers can bring in 6 figures from a combination of articles they sell to online and print magazines and from ad revenue from blogs they create. The key to being profitable is providing useful, timely and relevant articles tha
t are in demand for industries that are currently doing well. A blogger who has a strong audience in a number of industry categories can write ten articles a week and keep his audience captivated and serve his advertiser base very effectively. Many businesses would be happy to pay $500 or more a month for ad space that provides them with a highly targeted audience with 5,000 to 10,000 impressions a month. How much do you think it costs to get that many impressions on an Ad Words campaign? It costs a lot. On top of that, the Ad Words campaign is not anywhere nears as targeted. Plus your blog audience is "organic."
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| Microsoft's Latest Acquisition (Photo credit: Chris Pirillo) |
In this article I discussed how to showcase your business, build credibility, find free help and learn how to bridge the gap between your first attempt and a polished blog. We have also discussed how to get distribution, grow your audience and how to make money with your blog. If you haven't listened to the BTR broadcast that goes with this article, check it out now. If you found this article useful please pass it along to your friends and co-workers. If you have a comment or other ideas leave them in the comment section.
That's my opinion; I look forward to hearing yours.
If you found this article useful, share it with your friends, families and co-works. If you have a comment related to this article, leave it in the comment sections below. If you would like a free copy of our book, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century", fill out the form below.
If you found this article useful, share it with your friends, families and co-works. If you have a comment related to this article, leave it in the comment sections below. If you would like a free copy of our book, "Internet Marketing Tips for the 21st Century", fill out the form below.
Hector Cisneros is COO and director of Social Media Marketing at Working the Web to Win, an award-winning Internet marketing company based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is also co-host of the weekly Internet radio show, "Working the Web To Win" on BlogTalkRadio.com, which airs every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern. Hector is a syndicated writer and published author of “60 Seconds to Success.”
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Even if you don't make money directly through your blog, the business you can generate by putting out a weekly blog is unreal. We started blogging less than a year ago and generate leads for our business every month from it. Videos are a big help too. We feature a video in every blog we publish.
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