Blogging for Dollars Blog

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Over the past six months I’ve noticed an interesting shift.

More and more of my blogging students are coming to blogging from small business. They see blogging as a way to increase sales in their online and/ or offline business, whatever that business happens to be: a service business, or an ecommerce/ online store.

Partly this blogging trend is being driven by the ever-greater competition in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. If you have a small business site, you need PPC to drive traffic and sales. But as the cost of PPC goes up, it becomes too expensive to absorb.

When PPC becomes prohibitive, blogging is an alternative. Yes, you still need to hire a blogger, or if you do it yourself it takes time, but blogging is still much less expensive than spending money on a PPC campaign.

So, since small business blogging seems to be a trend, I’ll be spending more time in the coming months talking about small business blogging on this blog. The posts will be aimed primarily at do-it-yourselfers, but I’ll discuss out-sourcing blogging too.

Of course I’ll still be discussing making money directly from blogging by monetizing your blogs, and pro blogging (getting hired to blog) as well.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, pro blogging, how to blog, get started blogging, small business blogging

I’ve heard all the hype around the “work four hours a week” book, and although I love learning new productivity strategies, my immediate reaction to this was: gimme a break.

Yes, there’s out-sourcing, but that comes with its own headaches.

In “The Low Information Diet” John Evans writes:

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

Yes, out-sourcing can be done – anything can be done – but the TRAINING and the on-going supervision required take time and effort.

Blogging in four hours a week

That said, you can blog in four hours a week, in fact if you only have one blog, then an hour a week is ample to add content, do housekeeping tasks, and review and add monetization too.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, pro blogging, productivity

The online world is ever-changing. In 2004, having a blog was newsworthy, and you got readers just because a blog was different – your readers subscribed to your RSS feed in droves.

In 2007, blogs are mainstream. You can’t rely on a blog’s novelty value. Now you need to market your blog to get traffic.

TIP: all the marketing you do is cumulative

In my other life as a copywriter, I always let my clients know that marketing isn’t a one-shot deal. One advertisement, one press release, or one radio spot isn’t enough. People need to hear your blog’s name many times before they buy (that is, before they visit your blog).

There’s a bright side. Yes, you need to be consistent in marketing your blog, but all marketing is cumulative. Every bit of marketing you do reinforces every other bit.

This means that if you send out a series of press releases in mid-2007, they will not only keep getting you traffic for years, but they’ll also reinforce any other marketing (Pay Per Click advertising, articles, sponsorships) you’re doing.

So please realize that there’s no such thing as marketing “not working” – it works, but the effect is cumulative.

What marketing will YOU use? That’s completely up to you. I enjoy writing, so my basic marketing strategy for my blogs is to write articles, and write content for my blogs. I occasionally do some advertising.

You may decide to use various forms of online and offline advertising, if you’re comfortable with that.

Your marketing options are endless: blogs lend themselves to many different and diverse forms of marketing, so go and market your blog.

BTW, I cover marketing in my Blogging for Dollars ebook, the companion to this blog, so if you’re stuck for marketing ideas, reading the ebook will get you started on your own marketing plans for your blog.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, marketing, pro blogging, PPC, advertising, articles