Blogging

How To Make Money With Your Free Blog Posts And Articles

As a marketer, are you one of those who has a blog or not?

Some marketers don’t use a blog to build their brand or visibility but rather prefer to use more direct response type marketing techniques and have a website to showcase their products with great sales pages and they constantly send paid traffic to those pages.

However, most marketers probably try to incorporate some type of blog into their business to try to gain some visibility using SEO and get some free traffic from the search engines to build the KLT (Know, Like Trust) factor.

Visitors will consume their content, come to think of them as someone they can trust, and will be much more likely to buy from them in future. This takes longer than the direct response marketer but is infinitely cheaper and is a good model for someone just starting out who may have limited capital to put into their business.

It’s the second type of marketer to whom this article is addressed.

By the way, if you are serious and want to take your blogging to the next level, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint. This is a premium level training that takes you through each and every step of setting up your own highly profitable blog and profiting from it. You can check it out here.

I’m constantly amazed at how marketers seem to think free content and paid content are two entirely different things. The fact is your most successful blog posts and newsletter articles can make you more money than many of the products you’ve promoted or created in the past an it is super quick to do this and costs you nothing, so what are you waiting for?

The key is to pay attention to how your content is received.

Repurposing content is hardly a new strategy, but it mainly focuses on creating a video from an article, and then extracting the audio from the video, plus perhaps creating an infographic covering the main points so you now have 4 pieces of content instead of just one.

This works great for building brand awareness across multiple platforms and can indirectly lead to sales.

But now let’s take that strategy and put it on steroids and make it a much more direct way to make sales; after all, you are in business to make money!

So, this content repurposing strategy is designed to specifically make you money from your previous content!

Look back at your posts from the past year and see which ones gained the most attention. Which ones did people comment on and forward to others the most?

And don’t just look at blog posts but look at your posts on social media too; these are great because you get instant feedback if it resonates with your audience.

For example, a little 200-word FB post that people are engaging with and liking the content is trying to tell you that you’ve struck gold.

If it’s a longer article, maybe a blog post and it gets great feedback, even better.

You might choose to expand that article into a full-blown product and sell it or you could use it as a lead magnet that leads to a high-ticket offer (either yours or an affiliate offer).

And talking of lead magnets…

If you are producing free reports as lead magnets (and you should be using these to grow your email list) these are another potential untapped goldmine.

Take your most successful free reports and turn them into paid coaching programs. If you have 4 or 5 reports covering roughly the same topic, it is really simple to bundle them up and sell as a full-blown product.

Add some video and/or audio and some weekly/monthly webinars and you have your brand-new coaching program which has a much higher perceived value than a solely text-based product so you can now charge a premium price, all from existing free content!!

The other good thing about using these lead magnets is that you probably have links to offers peppered throughout these reports, so not only can you now profit from previously free material, but you can still profit from readers clicking on the links embedded into the reports.

Answer a customer’s question and then send that answer out to your list and see what happens. Do you get a lot of response? Bam! There’s another product waiting to be made.

This is such a simple way to do direct market research and you will know that the demand is there from your existing audience.

The point is to monitor the reception you receive on every piece of content you create, whether they’re posts, recordings, videos, launches, emails, reports or whatever.

If you’re not sure how something is being received, ask your readers what they thought of it.

Take the most popular topics and expand them or repurpose them into something else. You don’t have to continually come up with new ideas. Instead, figure out which ideas are working and then get most out of those.

And you can also purposely float your idea for a new product by creating a mini version of it as a post and then seeing how people respond.

Do you have 10 ideas for products? Create 10 posts, see which one is the most popular and start working on that product right away.

When creating the posts, if they are long, let’s say 1000 words or more, then offer the reader to download them as a convenient pdf. This is a type of content upgrade and they will need to give you their email address to get the report.

This way, you can easily see in your autoresponder which reports people are signing up for and start creating your product around those topics.

This stuff sounds simple and it is, but it also works so please don’t dismiss this strategy.

And because it is mainly using pre-existing content, you can be up and running in a matter of hours.

If you are just starting out and are building out your first blog, bear this in mind for the future.

And if you want to know the best way to get started with blogging you can check out Rapid Blogging Blueprint, a premium training on creating and monetising a blog the right way.

Or you can simply click on the featured resource below for a free Blogging Fundamentals report; download, read it and take action 😊

How To Make Your Blog More Appealing

Every blogger who earns income from their blog knows that the only way you can make money is by getting and keeping the traffic coming. Without your readers, you wouldn’t be making money at all.

There are lots of ways to get them there, but the question is – how do you keep them returning? If a reader isn’t impressed by your blog at all, then they’ll leave your blog, never to return again.

With them goes their blog’s traffic that you could’ve benefited from if they’d linked to you. Here are some tips to make your blog appealing enough to keep the traffic there to earn you some money.

Design

The most common mistake some bloggers make is in their blog’s design. Blog readers not only look for interesting and informative content – they also want to come to an inviting space to read it.

The blog’s design needs to be inviting to them and comforting. It’s crucial not to have anything that would annoy them to the point of leaving because they can’t stand it. Make sure you’re not annoying them with colored font that’s hard to read or a bunch of graphics that are too distracting.

A few animated graphics are fine, but don’t have flashing ads and glittering graphics detracting from your blog’s message – or your strategically-placed advertisements.

It’s fine to use colored font for your posts, but make sure it’s easy to read. A pale yellow font color against a pure white background may be too difficult for the visitors to read. They shouldn’t clash with the background color either. Clashing colors can give visitors headaches, so they’ll leave your site without bookmarking it for a later visit.

Content

The other common mistake bloggers tend to make is with their content. Some bloggers don’t update very often. If you only post once a month, your readers will forget you’re there and won’t return to your site.

Post to your blog at least two to three times a week to keep human visitors and search engine spiders coming back.

Some bloggers also make the mistake of only providing text content to their blogs. Text posts are great, but mix it up a little every once in awhile with multi-media formats. Provide some interesting pictures, audio files and videos. Offer a little variety and your visitors will come back to check and see what else you’ve been up to.

It’s also important to stick to your blog’s niche topic. If you’re blogging about Homeschooling, then stick to that topic. Providing information about a celebrity’s latest excursion will turn off your readers unless it somehow relates to homeschooling.

To make your blog successful in bringing you money, make sure you make the blog appealing to your readers. If your readers keep coming back, your chances of making money from your ads and offers will increase.

Of course, having a good looking blog is only part of the puzzle. You have seen that you need great content to share with your readers but how do you go about finding and creating that content? Let’s take a closer look…

How To Find Great Content For Your Blog

In order to make your blog a successful money making entity, you’ll need to get traffic to it and keep them coming back.

The best way to do this is to provide the best content you can in your niche and make it interesting to your blog readers.

Even the most successful bloggers start to run out of their own original content to post about. Some resort to scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things to discuss, but that ultimately loses them readers, which means less money streaming in.

Ideas

Where do you find great ideas to post about? There are actually many different things to use to get you out of your stuck-in-a-rut mode. These may be simple techniques to use, but they can be effective if used right. Here are some things to try the next time you get stuck for something to write about:

Scour the news sites – Search the news sites like CNN, MSNBC, and FOXNEWS and see if you can find a top story that you can blog about. Instead of just linking to the story, add your own accounting of it.

You can post about your personal feelings toward the story or ask your readers what their thoughts are on it. Just make sure the story somehow relates to your blog’s topic.

Check out your fellow blogger’s sites and see what they’re blogging about – It may seem unethical, but as long as you’re not stealing content, it’s perfectly acceptable to see what the community is interested in.

Is there a post that catches your eye? Is there something you can add to that post? A new spin you can put on it? Media outlets always have an eye on the competition to see what others are doing – and you should, too!

Research

Internet research – Do a search on the Internet for your blog’s topic. See what information you can come up with concerning your niche.

You may become inspired by something you’ve read there or you may think of some comments to post about it.

Check the video sites – YouTube has a zillion different videos out there that you can add to your blog. See if you can find one that relates to your blog’s topic. Post the video to your blog and have your readers share their thoughts on it.

And what about podcasts or audio sites? You could try searching sites like Soundcloud to find audio to add to blog posts to enhance them for your readers.

Reviews

Consider doing reviews – Reviews can be a good filler to use while you try to get inspired again. Choose some articles, websites, books or whatever you can think of that’s related to your blog’s topic and post a review of it. If it’s a good review, add your affiliate link and make some money from your opinions!

Daily activities – Think about what happened within your day that you might be able to work into your blog as long as it’s relevant.

If your blog is about flowers and you happened to go for a walk and saw some flowers on the way, use that as your post. Let your readers know what kinds of flowers are seen in your neighborhood and if possible, take come pictures to add since visual stimulation enhances the reader’s experience.

You can easily get back your inspiration for your blog posting if you look to other sources. They can help you come up with ideas of what you can share with your readers or they can give you a nice filler until your personal inspiration comes back. Don’t lose readers just because you’ve lost your blogging muse!

If you really want to know more about the power of blogging, you can take a look at the Rapid Blogging Blueprint training course or if you just want a few pointers for now you can grab the featured resource below for a free blogging report; download, read it and take action 🙂

Why You Should Write Blog Posts On A Regular Basis

If you are a blog owner, you should post articles and other content on your blog regularly. How often you should post depends on your niche and your following.

Of course, this doesn’t mean substituting quantity for quality; your content should always be top notch and be useful to your readers. Ideally this content should be something they would be willing to pay for!

You need to keep track of your visitors, where they are navigating to on your blog and how often they return. You do this by getting subscribers. Keep track of the percentage of subscribers and un-subscribers and this will be an indicator of how often to post to your blog.

If you notice there are a lot of people who unsubscribe from your blog on a daily basis, this is usually an indicator you are posting too much.

Keep an eye on this for a while and change the frequency at which you post to your blog. Not posting often enough is usually the problem blog owners have though.

Another problem bloggers run into is creating content that is intriguing and “draws a reader in” to want to read more. Sometimes it is hard to think of ways to do this and bloggers continue to just post information about their niche, products, or services.

You are supposed to do this, but there are other techniques to grab a reader’s attention. For instance, you want the blog to be personable and write in such a way it is like you are talking to the reader.

Tell A Story

You can write a story of something that happens to you each day, or a current event that is happening in the world.

These stories are great to add to your blog but do remember you want the content to be evergreen. If you are not sure what that means, you create content without mentioning specific dates.

You also write it as if it just happened. This will make the content seem very current.

All you really need to do at this point is create a bunch of stories of events in your life and have them scheduled to post on your blog.

You can also schedule them to be announced on your social media accounts.

Schedule Your Content

The best results come from having your content scheduled a week or more ahead of time. It is recommended to create about seven to ten articles beforehand.

Then when you are ready and have content prepared and edited, schedule the dates they should be posted. WordPress has a feature where you can do this.

Now as your content gets published, it will post at the selected date and time you scheduled it to. When your readers look at it, they will see content being frequently posted and know you are constantly updating your blog.

But just posting to one blog may limit your audience. There are many other people who use other blog software such as Blogger. It is a good idea if you only have WordPress to have a blogger account.

Having more than one blog can seem like a chore; however, there are a variety of tools out there to help you keep both filled with content.

You will find some tools that can be set up to post to each blog simultaneously. You also have plugins in WordPress that will allow you to do this as well. It cuts down the time it takes to post to all of your accounts separately.

Spread The Word

Now that you have this established and set up, you will find you need to let people know you are posting to your blog and also let some people know that you have a blog in the first place.

Using tools and plugins available on the web and on WordPress can do this. There are tools when you make a blog post, it will automatically Tweet the announcement or update your status on Facebook.

Nothing is exactly automatic, but there are tools out there, which allow you to schedule your posts ahead of time. So as you plan your business and what you are going to write, you can add these posts to a tool and schedule the date and time you want people to see it.

On a side note, you want to schedule the times to reflect the time of day at which most people will see your posts.

Always remember, people want instant gratification. Depending on your view, some people believe there is no way to have it while others know there is.

You want to be the person who always finds a way to satisfy this part of our nature as humans. Those are the people who see much success as in sales increases, more fans, and even more ideas.

Initially, everything you do to keep your blogs and social media current is a lot of work. Once you have a system going and have all your tools are set up you will then be able to spend less time on your blog and social media as the tools will work for you and not against you.

You will also notice you have more time on your hands to create awesome content your fans will love.

Remember that planning ahead of the game will allow for the smoothest experience running your own business.

Being consistent and updating everything from your blog to your social media accounts on a regular basis pays off handsomely in the end.

You will shortly begin to realize how often to post to your account by the number of fans you gain and even the amount you lose. And once everything is set up to work for you, you will see how well it pays off.

Use Blog Challenges To Coach New Online Marketers

If you’re an Internet marketer who teaches Internet marketing to others, it’s important to help the readers of your blog learn how to adapt to a blogging ritual seamlessly.

Blogging is one of those tasks that many new marketers jump into without understanding how it works. They know they need to blog (because all of the top successful marketers do), and maybe for a few days – or even weeks – they stick to it religiously.

They blog like clockwork, logging in every day, knowing just what they want to say. And then the day comes when it all fizzles out. One day they log in and they’re stumped.

They sit there staring at the screen, unable to decide what they’re going to blog about. Sometimes they start swiping other people’s content because they don’t want to lose the momentum of posting daily.

They might grab something from an article directory or buy some PLR content and use it as is. This is where they start getting lazy, not because they want to be, but because they’re simply lost on what topic to discuss.

Others don’t want to neglect their blog – but the formidable task of trying to juggle a myriad of Internet marketing items on their to do list prevents them from getting to their blog – they’ve backburnered it and soon it’s forgotten and stagnant.

You can host a blog challenge for your readers that will help them in any niche! Whether they’re marketing bloggers, or they have a blog on gardens, insomnia, or dating – your challenge will help them take action, stay committed and view you as a leader.

OK, let’s crack on…

What Blogging Challenges Do Your Readers Suffer From?

You should be able to listen to your subscribers and see some common themes among them when they come to you with blog problems. If you don’t have subscribers yet (that you know of since many are lurkers), then you might have to read other blog comments or look in forums to see what issues people have.

Finding topics is a common problem for many bloggers. People sit there staring at their screen, or they go to someone else’s blog to see what they’re talking about.

They key is to help them learn how to find topics – how to dig up new slants and fresh ideas and give commentary on them.

Understanding how to review products is another basic issue for marketers who are inexperienced with blogging. They don’t know how to review products so that they will be interesting to blog readers.

Making an engaging connection is a big deal – and so many marketers falter with this. Everyone wants to see blog comments or get emails about how amazing their blog post was!

Monetizing their blog post could be an issue. You wouldn’t believe how many bloggers are sitting there wondering why their blog isn’t making money, when the only problem is, they forgot to add links!

Consistency is probably the number one problem, though. People get sidetracked and for some reason, their blog – what should be their “home on the ‘net” – is what usually suffers.

Preparing Your Blog Challenge Ahead Of Time

Hosting a blog challenge is a great way to get a ton of branding for your blog, as well as traffic and comments for it, too. You want to go into this well-prepared, not floundering right alongside your readers – they’re expecting you to guide them!

First, announce the date ahead of time. Get everyone geared up to participate. Have them sign up – either simply by announcing their participation in the comments section of your blog, or by having them sign up to your email autoresponder list.

You should give them approximately two to three weeks’ notice so that they can wrap up their projects or get organized. Sometimes they simply want to motivate themselves to participate, or be talked into it by fellow marketers.

Let them know what the basic challenge will be. Create a list of rules, but don’t make it so stringent that people feel like labeling themselves failures. You want to inspire them and encourage them to keep going even if they miss a blog post.

Map out your helpful blog posts that you’re going to create along the way. You will be blogging daily to give tips and ideas, share your own entry to the challenge, and create a space for them to discuss it and encourage each other.

Some people might want you to create a forum for the discussions. Keep it on your blog. As the host of the challenge, your blog will benefit from the traffic and conversations taking place.

Give them any tools and tutorials you think they’ll need. If your blog challenge is to have them get comments, then you might steer them towards something like Disqus and give a tutorial on how that works.

This is not only a good way to be a leader, but it can help you make affiliate sales of certain links for people’s blogs, like paid plugins or WordPress themes, for example.

Supporting Your Challengers

As the host, it’s your job to support the people who are following you and participating in your challenge. Now if you have hundreds of people, it might be more difficult – in that case, you can just encourage people to support each other.

Allow them to share their blog post link. You can let them leave it in the actual comment as a live link, use a tool like Disqus, or just have their name hyperlinked to their website.

Visit their blog post and see how they’re doing. If you have tips, you might provide those to them, but not in the blog comments – do it privately using their contact form or email.

Leave a comment for them to show them they have traffic and encourage comments and sharing by others. By the time the challenge is over, they will have a thriving community – many will stay and at the very least, it shows search engines and new visitors that this person has an active blog!

Check in with those who stray. When everyone signs up, make a list of the name and email of the people participating. If you notice someone falling by the wayside, shoot them a friendly email of support. Sometimes they just need to be nudged.

Challenge Idea #1: Encourage New Media Formats

Blogging isn’t just about text blog content, although that is the most prevalent for of blogging that there is.

You can host a challenge that urges participants to get used to multiple media formats.

You always want them to have text as a staple, but you might make an “Audio Blogging Challenge” or a “Video Blogging Challenge.”

This will get people out of their comfort zones, but it will help them learn how to cater to many of their subscribers across the board. When the challenge is finished, they’ll be able to use more than one format and switch things up for their audience.

Challenge Idea #2: 1-A-Day Affiliate Marketing Reviews

Because affiliate marketing can be so profitable through the use of a blog platform, it’s important that you help your readers learn how to master this.

When you review a product, you should personalize the review, share the specifications of the product, and add some consumer commentary.

For your affiliate blogging challenge, have some guideline steps like this:

Pick one product over $25 (or $50 or $100 or whatever)
Make sure it’s rated at least 4 stars
Write a review of at least 500 words per blog post
Each blog post should have specs, pros, cons, and consumer insight
Blog posts should have at least 2 hyperlinks to product (*Optional – 1 hyperlink to a top competitor product)

These kinds of details will help them from getting stuck trying to decide between one product and another. It also gives them guidance on the structure of the blog post.

Challenge Idea #3: Thought-Provoking Shareable Content

These are fantastic challenges to do on your blog. The concept of this challenge is pure 100% quality. You’re asking your readers to create blog posts that knock the socks off of their readers.

This isn’t about monetizing the exact blog post – but it can result in increased income because they gain a loyal following. This is definitely one you’ll want to give them time to map out a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.

This should be their very best work. It can be a combination of media formats, any length – or a length you require – but it should definitely provide lots of value for their own readers.

The goal here is to make sure they have their social networking buttons working. You want their visitors Tweeting, Google + sharing and Facebook sharing these blog posts because they’re that good.

Challenge Idea #4: Curated Blog Content

Curation is a buzzword in marketing circles, but it’s a fantastic way to build a blog readership! First, you need to explain to your readers what curation means. You don’t want them getting confused and swiping other people’s content and plagiarizing it.

Curation is when you act similar to how a museum curator acts – gathering pieces to represent a concept as a whole. The curator then provides commentary about the pieces to pull it all together.

Your blog curators won’t be lifting entire pieces from other bloggers. They’ll be taking one or two sentences as quotes and linking back to the original blogger. It doesn’t have to be a blog post that they’re curating, either.

They can curate a video from YouTube, a news story, or an audio file quote. Make sure they understand that it’s not about sharing someone else’s work – it’s about adding their own insight about that work and giving the original creator credit with a link.

Curation doesn’t always have to be positive. It can be a negative curation, where they’re showing poor examples of something. Just make sure they understand they might get some heat for this from the first author.

Challenge Idea #5: One Idea Fits Everyone

This is a good twist, but only if everyone is in the same niche. If you’re teaching other marketers, then this would be a viable possibility. If you have one in the gardening niche, another in dating and one in smoking cessation, this won’t work.

So let’s say you’re teaching the marketing niche. You would want to create an editorial calendar for the challenge. One each day (actually the day before), you would announce the topic for the next day.

Everyone in the challenge would write about that topic. It’s interesting to see what slants people have on issues. So for instance, you might have these on your list:

Top 5 Conversion Tips
Review of the Plugin ThriveLeads
Is JVZoo Better Than ClickBank?

Whatever topic you want to choose – see what the slants turn out to be after they are published. Don’t tell them what to write, just give them the basics. Your group will love being in these blog challenges and seeing their productivity soar!

By the way, if you want to know more about blogging the right way, why not check out the featured resource below for a free blogging report. Download, read it and take action 😊

Monetize Your Blog Using These 5 Proven Strategies

If there’s one mantra that every beginner marketer needs to repeat every single day, it’s this – “I only make money when I sell!”

It’s a simple truth, and yet, it’s often forgotten by marketers who miss the point as they bog themselves down with a myriad of inane details which are part and parcel of running an online business – but are not the MAIN THING.

They do their best to overdeliver insane value in an attempt to build trust and credibility with their audience. They’re in a constant content creation race as they try to outdo the competition.

They check off all the required boxes except the one which puts money in their pockets – selling.

They fail to keep ‘selling’ at the forefront of their minds and end up failing miserably at it. Now what they have are blogs with lots of content, but which are about as useful as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

Why are blogs an effective way to get started online anyway? Well, they are easy to set up and cheap. All you need is a domain name (use Namecheap) and hosting (use A2 or Siteground)

The secret to avoiding this problem will be to monetize your blog effectively. You have to sell, sell and sell some more to be profitable. How else will you make money?

Even if you’re displaying sponsored content on your blog, you’re still selling space on it for ads to appear.

Now, there are many monetization methods with varying degrees of efficacy. But ultimately, someone has to buy something (or click on an ad) for you to actually see money landing in your bank account.

And that’s what this article is all about. You’re going to learn 5 ways to transform your blog into a money-making machine with traffic pulling content that works round the clock for you.

Selling Products As An Affiliate

This is probably the easiest monetization method of the lot because all you’ll be doing is selling other people’s products and collecting commissions from the sales you generate.

You don’t need to worry about the tech details or customer service. Your focus is only on pre-selling and creating persuasive reviews.

There are several platforms that allow affiliates to promote products. The most common ones are Amazon, ClickBank, ShareASale, Rakuten and so on.

Once you’re registered with these platforms, it’s just a matter of adding your affiliate links (on your blog) to RELEVANT products in your niche.

There must be congruence with your niche and the products you’re recommending. You wouldn’t want to promote a herpes cream on a toy blog just because the cream has a high pay-out.

Ideally, you should promote a mix of both tangible and digital products. It’ll also be wise to promote products on different platforms. This will ensure that all your eggs are not in one basket.

Far too many bloggers rely entirely on Amazon Associates (with its paltry commission rates). Then they see their earnings dry up overnight if Amazon bans them from the platform.

Unfortunately, this happens all the time and the affiliates are not even given a reason as to why they were banned. The sheer indignity of it all.

Your takeaway?

Diversify, diversify, diversify.

Sell Your Own Digital Products

This is a highly lucrative way to generate an income from your blog. It’s more technical because you’ll need to set up a sales page, funnel, etc. You’ll also need to create a product and have good sales copy so that your sales conversions are high.

All this may seem like a lot of work… and it is… but the rewards are great.

You could do a lot of it yourself by using page/funnel builders such as Thrive Themes (now part of Thrive Suite), ClickFunnels, Optimizepress, Convertri etc. These types of software will help you immensely because they’re relatively simple and intuitive to use.

The truth is that you don’t need to do it all. The good news is that you can outsource the different parts of the process to freelancers on sites like Fiverr and/or Freelancer… while you only focus on what you’re good at…

… and when it’s all completed, you just put the moving parts together and VOILA! Your very own Frankenproduct that you can sell on your blog.

After all, with all the content you’re posting and the credibility/authority you’ve built, it’ll be much easier to sell a product created by you than by someone else, because your audience likes and trusts you.

When you’re creating and selling your own products, you’ll have a lot more flexibility and be in control of:

Product pricing
If it’s a one-time fee or a recurring monthly/yearly membership
The depth of the sales funnel (upgrades, downsells, etc.)
What the product will be about
Customer service

It’s more work, but it’s also more freedom from a business standpoint… and exponentially more profit, if you’re good at it.

Selling Physical Products

This is similar to the earlier point, but now you’re selling physical products. You’ll need a store with a shopping cart that calculates shipping and so on. This is slightly more complicated because you’ll need to fulfil the orders.

You’ll have to decide if you’re selling print-on-demand products or dropshipping which are relatively hands-off processes… or will you be maintaining inventory and mailing the products yourself? Or will you use Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA).

There are several options here and you’ll need to do your research and see which method is best for your business. You don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re making lots of sales but the post office has become your second home.

Email Marketing

It looks like no online marketing article can ever be complete without paying homage to email marketing – and that’s because it really does work. Unlike social media marketing which can be blocked by your audience, most people check their emails – and you want to show up there… to sell!

Yes! Don’t forget the selling… but always remember to deliver value in your emails. You’ll have to find the right balance here.

But first things first – you need to build a list from your blog.

The easiest way to do this will be to use software like Thrive Leads (now part of Thrive Suite) or Conversion Gorilla to display opt in forms, pop ups, scroll mats and so on. This is a fantastic software that most marketers will benefit from.

Another excellent plugin is Post Gopher. It allows your site visitors to download your blog posts as PDFs which they can read later – in exchange for their emails.

Now it’s just a matter of connecting your opt in form to a reliable autoresponder platform like Active Campaign and you’re good to go.

Active Campaign is one of the best autoresponders in the business and is one of the most powerful autoresponders out there for the price, and has powerful tagging and automation tools. As an alternative you could also check out Aweber.

All tech talk aside, just ensure that you have a way to collect emails on your blog and you have an autoresponder sequence in place to nurture the audience on your list.

Do remember to promote your own products (if you have any) or affiliate products in your emails.

Why?

Because you need to sell, sell, sell! That’s why!

Sell Your Own Skills As A Service

This point was saved for last because it has one downside.

As long as you’re providing a service which requires your direct involvement, you’ll be trading your time for money… which in itself places an invisible ceiling on your earnings, unless you have special royalty/commission arrangements in place with those who hire you.

Common examples of services are content writing, copywriting, graphic design, video creation and so on. These are time-consuming tasks. You could make top dollar, but ultimately, it’s still a job and not passive. But it’s your call.

You could also provide software as a service and still make a hefty chunk of change without much involvement.

Alternatively, you could be a middleman and use service arbitrage to sell services that others deliver. You’ll charge a higher rate and hire a cheaper freelancer to do the job for you.

You’ll then deliver that job to the person who hired you and you’ll pocket the difference. Of course, you’ll need to ensure that the freelancer did a good job before delivering the work, so that your reputation is intact.

Arbitrage is perfectly legal and people do it all the time.

In conclusion, the 5 methods above are really ALL you need to make six or even seven figures with your blog/s. You can apply 2 or 3 of the methods above and skyrocket your income in a couple of months.

Start working on them today… and remember to… SELL SELL SELL!