Business Blog Wire

For over a year I've been blogging about how businesses and individuals use blogs to make money.  I've studied several of the most popular blogs and read some of the best blog posts that explain how to make money with a blog.  Now I want to give you a cheat sheet to blog money-making.  (Psst - if you've already got a blog, feel free to add your tips and experiences below or post a response at your own blog.)

Note: I'm addressing this post mainly to new bloggers - folks who are interested in learning how to make money with blogs.  If you already know a lot about this subject, please read this anyway and let us know what you think and what other tips you've found to help people earn money via blogs.

Now then - here are the most fundamental blog money tips I have learned - first the truly condensed cheat-sheet version, then the "eat one nibble at a time" version (update: changed the all-caps to normal writing here - thanks Thord!):

1. As you sow, so shall you reap.

2. Have a backup plan before you begin.

3. Time is money.

4. Develop an unquenchable thirst for improvement.

5. Connect yourself to others in meaningful ways.

6. Start with proven revenue-generating sources.

7. Attention and traffic correspond to higher revenue.

8. Be different.

9. Focus.

10. Do as profitable bloggers do.

11. Maintain as many good blogs as you can.

12. There is no exhaustive guide to blogging for profit.

Now for the long version (bonus challenge included!):

1.  As you sow, so shall you reap.  It's easy to make a few pennies every month with a blog.  Just start a blog and add a few simple advertisements by your content.  You'll likely see a little revenue within days.  (Very little.)

It's not so easy to make a lot of money or earn a full-time living with a blog.  Others around you are sowing their tails off every day, preparing to reap bountiful monetary harvests from their persistent blogging and smart blog monetization practices.

How serious are you about blogging and how much money do you intend to make?  For the most part, you will get out of it what you put into it.  If you want to make blogging a part-time or full-time living, you'd better be prepared to work very hard to achieve that goal.

2. Have a backup plan before you begin.  If your blogging efforts fail to make any significant amount of money, you should have a plan B that you can try and some emergency cash saved up to get you through in the meantime.

3. Time is money.  A penny saved is a penny earned.  A second saved is also like a penny earned.  We all get 24 hours every day.  You have just as much time to work with as anybody else.  The faster you can learn to work, the better chance you have of turning blogging into a cash machine.

4. Develop an unquenchable thirst for improvement.  You can always improve your blog.  Your writing can always get better.  Your images and videos can make more of an impact.  Your links can be more helpful.  Your design can be more intuitive.  Get really thirsty for improvement and stay that way even when you start seeing money accumulate in your blogger bank account.

5. Connect yourself to others in meaningful ways.  By now you may have noticed that most of these blogging tips aren't just for blogging.  Think of blogging as a means to many good ends, rather than as a mere end in itself.  Life is much bigger than a set of posts organized thematically and chronologically.  Friendships and lessons are more enduring and rewarding than dollars and cents.  Yes, work hard to get blogging to pay your bills; but work even harder to use your blog to benefit and connect with others.  Doing so will make the money flow more easily because you'll be more likely to get human help with that.  And you'll feel happier about yourself as a blogger and a person.  And feeling happier about all that will help you think more clearly and work more efficiently, thus increasing your money-making potential.

6. Start with proven revenue-generating sources.  Try these blog money-makers first: Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls, and ReviewMe.  These are some of the best blog monetizing resources out there.  There are lots of others, of course.  Do some research, ask other bloggers what works and what doesn't work for them, and do some experimenting.

7. Attention and traffic correspond to higher revenue.  While it's not an absolute certainty that popularity will lead to riches, it's still a good general rule.  The more people visit your blog, the better.  Particularly, the more people who visit your blog and engage meaningfully with your content, the better - because that means it should be easier for you to find advertisers that are willing to pay well in exchange for the chance to promote their products and services in front of an audience that's highly interested in a given subject.

8. Be different.  Take whatever's unique about you and incorporate that into your blog.  Maybe you have a knack for sniffing out fakes.  Perhaps you're really interested in an unexplored corner of a popular niche.  Or maybe you're just good at asking questions that get people talking.  The more unique the blog, the more likely it will get repeat visitors.

9. Focus.  A blog is most likely to generate high levels of income with low traffic if its posts address the exact same subject every time.  I'm sticking my neck out there a bit with this one, but I'm pretty sure that it holds true in almost every case.

By "subject" I simply mean some common theme.  For example, you might choose to focus your blog on graphite tennis rackets.  Every day you could talk about a different racket and analyze its strengths and weaknesses.  You could talk about the professional tennis players that swear by a certain racket and the ones that hate that same racket.  Over time, you could build a great repository of valuable information focused tightly around the subject of tennis rackets.  And thus it would be naturally very easy for advertisers to decide whether to sign up with you: either their ads would appeal to readers interested in tennis rackets or not.  This would take a lot of guesswork out of finding advertisers for your blog.

10.  Do as profitable bloggers do.  Talk to others in your blog's niche.  Ask 'em questions.  Be polite.  Watch how they behave and follow their examples.  There's a delightful quirkiness and depth to blogging as a cultural phenomenon, and there are many who attach a lot of meaning to the idea of themselves as "bloggers."  Immerse yourself in the culture.

11. Maintain as many good blogs as you can.  If a blog is a hedge, try to make the biggest garden you can without letting all the hedges get ugly.  Keep them well-trimmed and always rewarding to visit.  It's up to you, though - how many blogs you are able to maintain simultaneously will depend on your areas of expertise and the relative likelihoods of earning money via advertising, donations, direct sales or other means.

12. There is no exhaustive guide to blogging for profit.  It would take days for me to tell you all my thoughts about a host of things not covered in this little blog post - search engine optimization, optimal post length and frequency, hyperlink format, screencasting, text interviews, audio and video publishing, blog article promotion, blog networks, and so on.  There are many excellent books, e-books, CDs, conferences, websites and (of course) blogs that cover the subject of blog monetization very well.  But among them there is no single one-stop source of all knowledge and wisdom on this topic.

My point?  Take what you've found here, respond to it (in a comment below, in your own blog post, or just in your own thoughts) and continue on your journey of blogging for money, always searching for more nuggets of wisdom and holding dearly to the ones you've already found - and sharing them with others along the way.

Remember - professional blogging doesn't work out for everyone, but it's just one of a million ways to make a living.  I wish you the best in whatever endeavor you decide to tackle!

Okay, one last thing -

Bonus challenge: This is especially for seasoned bloggers to answer, but anyone is welcome to take a shot at it. 

Suppose you are given 30 days to create and make money with a new blog or assortment of blogs.  Your objective is to (legally) make as much profit as possible through the blog(s) in those 30 days.  The general theme of the blog(s), which you cannot change, is knots - yes, the kind you tie!  You are free to blog about anything, so long as it relates to knots.  You may promote your blog(s) however you wish.  Here's $1,000 - you must spend it all toward your objective.  The question is, what do you do with the $1,000 and the 30 days?

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