Transform Your Business Blog into a Money Making Machine

It’s no secret that professional bloggers can create a comfortable livelihood for themselves just from blogging. Their activities include promoting affiliate products, generating advertising income and growing their subscriber list to retain their captive audience. In this post we’re going to look at how a business blog can also be turned into a money making machine.

Business blogs that were originally created and designed to support your business can be turned into profit-making entities without too much trouble. It just requires some thought and keeping in alignment with your audience. Just as long as you stay within your boundaries in terms of your content and subject matters, you should be able to transform your blog into another form of income.

I’d like to say that in my experience, a paid membership or subscription model is not a blog model that works very well. Most people aren’t keen on paying out for content when they can usually find it elsewhere online for free. Unless you have very specialist content to share that cannot be found elsewhere, then other income-generating methods are likely to be more fruitful.

Here’s a few ideas of income-generation approaches that work for professional bloggers and have the potential to be applied to the blog of your business:

Selling branded merchandise for your brand with logo such as mugs, calendars, books, hats etc.
Selling your services or products directly from your blog
Asking for donations from readers
Taking part in affiliate programs – some of which offer high commission on a pay-per-sale or pay-per-click basis
Advertising other complementary companies in your blog. This may take the form of text ads, banner ads, video ads or display ads.
Premium content offered on blog with either a subscription or a paid membership model

Here’s what you need to know about some of these models:

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs pay you to place an advertisement of some type on your blog. This might be within a blog post where you recommend the product, or a visual ad. When the visitor clicks through the ad, and makes a sale then you receive a pre-determined commission payment on that sale and in some cases, in future sales.

There are thousands of companies offering affiliate programs. Even companies such as Amazon offer a percentage for each sale.

Merchandising

Offering merchandise with your logo on it can be a lucrative way to bring in another income stream. Branded merchandise may include mugs, umbrellas, mouse pads, t-shirts and more. It will also help with marketing.

You can approach selling your own merchandise in a couple of different ways. You might want to go to a t-shirt shop with your logo and have them print up several boxes of garments.

Another way to go about it is to use an on-demand branding service. Operating as an online shop, your web visitors will be able to buy a range of items with your logo printed on them. For example, bumper stickers, mouse pads, aprons, clocks and t-shirts. Each item that you choose to sell will be displayed on a branded web page which will fit in with the look of your site. All you need to do is set up the store and then collect the money. The service will handle everything else for you.

On-demand branding services that are well established are:

Selling Display Ad Space

A typical and most dependable way to earn income from your blog is by selling advertising space. If you have the right environment for an advertiser, they will pay a lot of money to gain access to your audience. If you draw in thousands of targeted traffic, then advdertisers will be watning to reach them and will pay you to place an ad on your blog.

To gain the attention of advertisers, you will need to have a reliable traffic flow and content that is in line with what the advertiser offers. Many text-ad networks scan sites for keywords and will display ads that are relevant. There are other ways you can earn income from advertising.

As you get your blog started, consider signing up to ad networks such as Google’s AdSense or those offered by Yahoo! Or Bing! They may bring in some money to get you started then you can look into the following ad networks:

Ad Networks

There are plenty of choices for you to look through. They operate in a similar way, but have their own methods of how, when and how much you will be paid.

Here’s some you might want to take a look at: