HOW BLOG MAKE MONEY

Print magazines make money by selling advertising. The larger their circulation, the more influence they exert over people, and the demographics of their readers dictate how much money they make.

Blogs are essentially the same. The more traffic (circulation) you have, the type and quality of that traffic (reader demographics) and the influence you have over your audience, determines your profitability.

This is why bloggers are obsessed with building traffic. It really doesn’t matter how you make money – it might be a contextual ad program like Google AdSense, affiliate marketing or direct ad sales – the more raw readers you have, generally, the more money you can make.
Quality of traffic plays an important part too. If you have a strong influence over your readers, when you ask them to do something, such as recommending they buy a product you promote as an affiliate, more of them will do so.

If you break down the process of blog monetization, the following events occur:

1. A person (blogger) creates a web destination point (blog) that people want to visit, possibly on a repeat basis, because of the value it offers. Initially they find the blog by following a link from another blog or website, through a referral from friends or colleagues, or they come across the blog when it appears in the results of a search-engine query.

2. A proportion of that audience is funneled on to other sites that “pay” to buy the traffic.
Payment might be in the form of a per-click fee, a monthly rate, an affiliate commission, or profit on a product or service sale.

The blogger works to attract attention and then sells that attention to advertisers for a fee or uses the attention to profit from their own product and/or service sales.

The key variable here is “attention”. Attention is traffic, influence and the potential to make money from blogging.

So how does a blogger attract attention?

Two Key Ingredients For Attracting Attention

The first part of creating attention (traffic) to a blog, is the age-old advice you will have read over and over again if you study successful blogging:

“Write good content”

So yes, the foundation of a great blog is good content. Where people go wrong is deciding what good content is, given their goals (usually the error is made when determining exactly what the goals are and what strategies will be used to meet the goals) and assuming that just good content is enough.

The other key ingredient is marketing.

Did I mention that all professional bloggers need to have business skills? Yep, that’s right, marketing – the fine art of attracting attention and THE key component for successful business – is a paramount ingredient for successful blogging. It’s through marketing that people find your good content.

I’ll discuss how to market a blog in a moment, but first we have to make sure you avoid the first error I mentioned – not having a strategy in place for producing the right type of good content given your goals.