Using Your Blog As a Source of Revenue

Although you can set up your blog to charge subscription fees for reader access, its true potential for revenue generation lies in its ability to reach readers on a deeper level than casual browsing. Since your readers are more likely to trust in your advice than the average person on the street, they are also more likely to listen to your recommendations when it comes in the form of advertising.

The greater the number of people who read your blog, the higher the amount of traffic that passes through your blog, and the higher the rates of conversion of visitors into regular readers, the greater the marketing potential of your blog and thus the greater your potential revenue. Although you can use this marketing potential to sell your own products and services, the more common and sensible solution is to rent it out to relevant businesses and other organizations that might be interested in making use of your influence.Means For Actualizing Potential Revenue

For the most part, there is no single magical solution that you can use to turn your blog into a revenue-earning machine. Instead, your efforts should focus on picking up small revenue streams here and there so that those streams can combine into a respectable river. Building that revenue takes up a lot of time and effort, meaning that you should not become discouraged if you find your progress slower than desired and less impressive than that of more established competitors.
Here are some tips to help you get started on turning the marketing potential of your blog into actual revenue:

• Draw up a list of businesses and other organizations that you believe might be interested in using your blog to spread their messages. If you find yourself unable to think of enough potential sponsors, head on over to blogs sharing the same conceptual space and check out their sponsors.
• Create a form email selling your marketing potential, tailor it to each of the organizations that you intend to target, and then send the emails to approach them about sponsorship. Be clear about your intentions. Similarly, lay out the intended focus of your blog and provide them with some useful information about your target audience. Explain why you think your blog and their marketing goals coincide and how your blog can help them reach their goals.
• You also have advertising possibilities other than direct sponsorship. Google Adsense is perhaps the single most famous example of these services, but there are also other services that use different advertising methods. For example, Vibrant Media offers advertisements tied to certain keywords in your blog content and then show those advertisements if readers pass their mouse over the keywords. Other than advertising, these services are also useful for providing you with lists of organizations to approach about direct sponsorship.

Other than directly approaching potential sponsors, you should also try to build up your blog’s influence as much as possible. After all, the greater its marketing potential, the greater the fees that you can command and the more sponsors that you can attract. In time, your potential sponsors might even come to you rather than the other way around.