Monetizing Your Blog – Why you owe it to your readers
Image by Josh Bancroft via FlickrThere are standard ways to make money from your blog. Basically, there are three monetization strategies.
1) Advertising
2) Affiliate Links
3) Sell products
If you are just starting a blog, you do not want to implement monetizing it because you cannot get advertisers or sell anything until you have an audience.
But you do owe it to your readers to make money from it if you become passionate and good at it.
I have seen several very popular authors do a great job of blogging, only to post less and less frequently (although still occasionally.) There are exceptions to this, such as Seth Godin, but many people become victums of their own success. They become popular, sought after speakers and they focus on that and leave the blogs for slow days.
I do not think you have to post every day. I prefer quality over quantity. However, it is really good to know how your blog effects your income. Is it creating buzz for you? Is it generating income?
I wish that a few of these bloggers would generate income directly from the blog and hire a virtual assistant to help them write more frequently. I do not mean creating the content from scratch, but instead taking their ideas, doing additional research and writing up the article for them. I know it is a point of pride that the authors can say they write every word, but as long as they are steering the ship, I don’t mind them getting some help and monetizing the blog. Just don’t turn off the great information spigot.
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I don’t think there’s anything wrong with monetizing your blog. I don’t think that you “owe” your readers to get a ghostwriter though… as however that does manage to create filler content… it rarely manages to make the “killer” content we all want.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the comment. I certainly did not mean filler content.
I like to use writers to help research and take my general outline and idea and flesh it out more. Because I rarely use other writers, I rarely produce the best possible content I could.
Do you think Oprah writes all the O magazine articles? It is clearly branded as her magazine, but she is the visionary, not the daily writer.
You are certainly right that killer content is 1000% better than filler content, and that takes a lot more work and time no matter who is writing it.
If you have a blog, It is important that the content of your blog attract more visitors to your blog, A good content and some good marketing strategies can make more traffic to your blog.
Social Enterprise
[...] little while back, I wrote an article that you should make money with your blog.? You owe it to your readers.? It is very unlikely that you will keep blogging long term if you do [...]