Internet Business Blog

These are the million dollar questions of todays blogging community. Our topic for today sparks a lot of interest in our industry whether it be via the forums, post comments, emails, or even at keynote speaker conferences - and we’ve all asked it ourselves at one point in time or another. When is the right time to start monetizing your blog? And if the time is right now, how should you monetize it to reap the highest rewards that the internet has to offer?

When to Monetize

This is something that can be debated over and over, but I truly believe that you can and in most cases should start to monetize your blog or website from the the very beginning. However, you need to be extremely careful about the type of advertisements you display. Different advertisements give off different vibes (some good, some bad) so you need to make sure that the advertisements you’re displaying are both relevant to the visitor and mesh well with your blog design, or you will have very disappointing results.

Whether your blog receives 50 or 5,000 visitors per day, there is a common pattern involved. If your advertisements are targeted toward your audience you have pretty solid chance at making some real money. If your advertisements aren’t targeted, you will make next to nothing. You’ll also find that different forms of advertisements will perform better than others, which I will tell you about next.

How to Monetize

Here are some popular methods of blog monetization to get you started. This list is in no particular order, and I’m trying to be as unbiased as possible, so please bare with me until the end of this post (then you will see my honest advice).

1. Going Contextual. This is seemingly still the most popular form of blog advertisement circulating in the blogosphere. The biggest player in this market is undoubtedly Google Adsense, though there are many, many others as well. I’ve run many successful campaigns using contextual publishing, and their piece of the pie is still growing at a rapid pace.

2. Affiliate Programs. Affiliate programs are all around us, though most surfers never notice them for what they actually are. With proper masking, you can recommend products to your visitors, and they won’t even recognize the commi$$ion that you’ve just made. Furthermore, if you whole-heartedly believe in the product it’s a win/win situation. There are many excellent affiliate programs out there, just be sure that the products you choose could be of real value to your visitor demographic.

3. Consulting. You’ll notice a pattern when surfing many of the more recognizable blogs in various industries. The blog authors are generally available for consultation. This can be a very lucrative source of income assuming you have the expertise that others may be looking for.

4. Please Donate. This technique is sometimes frowned upon, but often misunderstood. Not every blogger likes to plaster their perfect design with advertisements. Some prefer to take donations. The WordPress “Buy Me a Beer” plugin comes to mind. After all, bloggers deserve a beer after a hard day of typing - correct?

5. Text Links. Selling text links is nothing new, in fact it’s been around for a very long time. The only difference is that now there are middle men who can do the leg work for you. Depending upon some key factors such as your PR and Alexa Rating, you can do quite well from selling text link advertisements alone.

No matter what sort of traffic your blog pulls in, advertising placement is crucial. Think about it. If you have an advertisement at the very top of your blog, many visitors will skim right past it due to banner blindness. Likewise, if you have an advertisement running in the bottom corner most will never even see it. For advertisements to be truly effective, they have to be within your visitor’s area of focus.

My Advice

You want my honest advice? Don’t put all of your eggs into one single basket. Use multiple methods of monetization. For blogs, I highly recommend affiliate programs, text links, and consulting (assuming you have the skill). If you have enough traffic, directly selling advertising space is also a very real option. I advise to stay away from contextual advertising when possible. I say this because not only does it look unprofessional, but I feel that the market has seen better days for this form of advertising as it pertains to the serious blogger.

A blog page on an online home business website is one of the best ways to increase the traffic inflow. Organization websites discuss topics related to there service and products where as banks website blog page discuss about banking issues i.e. tax credit, bad credit loans, chase credit card etc. Different professional have there personal blog pages to increase there awareness i.e. a banker may have blog related to credit card in which the topic under discussion could be secured loans, business credit cards etc.

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Stubsy from Financial Independence had the distinct pleasure of inflating my ego a little bit on Tuesday by publishing an interview he did with me earlier in the week. He runs a solid blog with great tips and advice in regards to gaining your financial independence. I encourage everyone to check it out!

- Also, you may notice me tinkering with a new commenting system here on IBFTM. A big thanks to Intense Debate for letting me beta test their software!

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In the last three months, this blog has grown very quickly so I’ve decided to pull the plug on the news and article portion of ePursuit.net. Originally, the news and article section had been the intent of this website, but then I discovered blogging and my client list grew much quicker than I had anticipated, swallowing up most of my free time. Besides that, there are literally a million websites you can go to find internet related news and articles so why re-invent the wheel when I don’t have to?

For my loyal readers this is not a bad thing. In fact, this is a Great thing. Expect me to focus more of my time on this blog, Paul Bradish: Internet Business for the Masses. Since I will be spending more time here, 3 major things will happen:

Longer, well thought out posts

Gone are the days of quick blurbs about next to nothing. Instead of having to construct a blog entry within 20 minutes, I will now have 2 hours. You may have noticed the quality of my posts having gone up over the past week – that is by no coincidence! I’m definitely raising the bar so expect higher quality on a daily basis.

Better design

This blog has always been all about KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) – and I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about its sharpness and ease of use, but let’s be realistic. There is always code that can be re-done and widgets or plug ins to make life easier. I will now have more time to dedicate to such design aspects and now I can finally redo the about me page.

Side projects galore

The Google Co-op search engine has been a big hit and I’d like to play around with more technology, especially anything that is web 2.0 related since that appears to be the present and future. I have many side projects on the back burner and I can now put more focus on them. This includes but is not limited to:

1. SEO Tools
Aaron Wall creates some amazing Search Engine Optimization (SEO/SEM) tools. I would love to integrate such tools on this blog as well – and think that my loyal readers and casual visitors could really benefit from such a side project.

2. Job Board
I’ve been playing with a fun and promising job board script that many other sites have been using around the blogosphere. Many bloggers do not have the luxury of writing content full time so I think that having a technology related job board could be a success if done correctly.

3. Link Directory
Link directories can be a lot of work to set up but once the hard part is done you can set them to auto pilot in many ways. I would like to set up a link directory as a side project here to possibly collect many of the greatest blogs as well as the undiscovered gems hiding in the blogosphere.

4. Social Network
I’ve always been intrigued by social networks. I would love to integrate a network into this site that can tie into the commenting system. This is highly debatable whether or not it is a feasible idea or a recipe for disaster – but I’d love to give it a shot at some point down the road.

5. Blog Store
E-Commerce is in my blood. It’s only been four months since I sold off my first e-commerce venture, and I’m already getting that ‘itch’ to go for it again. I would like to channel this energy into a web store that runs alongside this blog selling digital content (such as e-books and audio) as well as ePursuit.net coffee mugs and the like.

As you can tell, much of this is only in the earliest of concept stages and when I do a project, I tend to take my time and get it done right and see it through completion. Who’s to say what this “blogging” path will bring, but one thing’s for sure – Business is good and I love sharing what I have learned to make it this far. Couple that with the past few weeks of blogging higher quality content and networking with new friends in the blogosphere and I have been having a blast.

Just to reiterate: The ePursuit.net article and news site will no longer be updated, but the blog and side projects are still very much alive!

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