Blogging for Dollars Blog

Although your blog has major benefits that your static Web site doesn’t have — you can broadcast your latest blog posts via RSS automatically for example — you nevertheless still need to market your blog.

Start your marketing campaign by working out where you fit into the blogosphere. What’s unique about your blog? When you work out your unique quality (your Unique Selling Point in marketing-speak) you’ll get some ideas on how to approach marketing.

For example, Blogging for Dollars‘ USP is: “make money blogging” by becoming a professional career blogger, that is, someone who blogs for others, and who also uses blogs in an entrepreneurial fashion.

Don’t sweat your USP. It’s enough that you know what it is; your USP doesn’t have to be completely original. There are dozens of “make money blogging” blogs of course, but I put my own spin on it because of my own experiences, and you’ll put your own spin on your blog topic too.

Need help marketing your blog? Subscribe to my weekly ezine, Top Words.

Technorati Tags: marketing, blog marketing, make money blogging, blogger, professional blogger, career blogger

Hooray! You’ve been hired by a business as a freelance blogger. OK, put down the champagne glass: let’s do some clear thinking about this job you’ve taken on.

Because blogging is so new, the chances are that you’ve been hired by a company where only one or two people champion blogging. Very few at the company will have any idea of how blogging can impact their bottom line.

So it’s up to you to show them that it does. When you start blogging, make sure that you keep your employer informed of how it’s going. Write reports every week, describing what you’re doing, the links you’re getting, and the blog items which are indexed in Google and the other search engines.

This is VALUABLE information, not just to your employer, but also to you. If you keep a tally of this info, you’ll start to get an idea of what works, and what doesn’t. If your employer isn’t using an analytics package, encourage them to install one, and to send you the information. You want to know how many of your blog’s visitors are clicking through to the various product pages.

Ultimately, the results of your blogging matter as much to you as to your employer. When you can show clearly that your blogging results in more sales and other benefits, you can parlay this to a rise in pay.

Technorati Tags: freelance, career blogger, blogger, blogging, make money blogging, get hired to blog, blog ROI

In the past year, podcasting (audio blogging) and vlogging (video blogging) have become mainstream.

They’re great as blog-additions and extras. Of course, if you just can’t see yourself writing blog posts every day, you can create podcasts or vlogs.

I don’t have extensive experience with these alternate forms of blogging, so I won’t be covering them here for the moment, but there are many sites online to get you started.

Try:

* How to podcast

* Podcast Tutorial

* How to get started vlogging

Technorati Tags: podcast, vlog, alternate blogs, career blogger, freelance blogger, blog entrepreneur