Making a Blog Profitable

The first step to making a profitable blog is to understand the internet writing system that most bloggers never see: a blog is like a diary where a teenage girl reveals her deepest, darkest secrets and desires. A blog is NOT advertising. It's not like a sales letter where a professional copywriter writes pages of articles about all the product benefits, and then red-hot prospects click the "Buy Now!" button.

You will never make money by writing sales copy for a blog. Instead, reveal yourself. That will attract the audience you want. And if, along the way, you also talk about some very educational or enlightening ideas in your market, your visitors will fall in love with your website and become part of your community.

People want to shortcut the online profit process. Will not work. You must build relationships and build trust. People buy from friends who support & help them. They buy from people they have confidence in. That takes time. Prospects run for the hills when they see a salesman coming. Choose your category.

Once you have that relationship mindset and create your blog post content with that in mind, then you can focus on monetizing your blog with paying customers. Two easy-to-execute possibilities:

1. Advertise When you attract visitors who trust you, and when you offer them relevant, useful content, they stay longer and they are more likely to click through on ads. You usually make a few cents for each click, but over time and as your traffic increases, it adds up.

2. Create an ebook of your articles. Once you've been blogging awhile, you'll have enough material to put together an ebook. Just re-purpose your current articles. In fact, you can actually start out with a series of article titles designed to be compiled into an ebook ... and then write the articles. Sell the ebook for $9.95 or $19.95 or whatever you think it's value is.

To make money, you need to blog smart.