Compared to building websites, blogs are easier, cheaper and faster to build, but can one be enough to earn you a full-time income?
This is the question I often get asked and the answer really is “yes and no.”
A little bit ambiguous I know, but there are genuine reasons for my answer …
If you’re an intermediate to advanced marketer who knows how to
a) get traffic to your blog and b) monetize your blog by converting more of your visitors into paying customers, then I say you have a solid reason for diversifying into other niche markets and build more blogs – so long as you know how to manage all of them.
The problem really comes when you don’t know how to get traffic to your blog, you struggle with keeping it maintained, your blog posts are mediocre and even if people do land on your blog, they hit the back button in seconds … in other words, they escape your blog without even taking note of what you have to say.
This is when I argue that you should think twice before building more blogs unless you really feel that you’re currently blogging in the wrong market … your target market are unresponsive to blogs or to searching for information online generally or, because you just don’t know enough about the subject matter to create an authority blog.
Other than that, this is the strategy I would pursue to get more traffic and monetize your blog before building more of them:
Post at least 3 times per week and make those blog posts informative. Informative could include doing a quality review of a product that you are an affiliate for, giving tips on how to use a particular product and even doing a track back to someone else’s blog post.
Ensure your ping list is up together so that you get the maximum benefit from publishing your blog posts.
Comment on other people’s blogs – particularly those in your niche. I’m sure I wear my blog readers down with this one, but it’s relevant and new bloggers still fail to recognize blog commenting as a credible means to getting traffic and natural links back to your site.
If you read comments on other people’s blogs then you should be commenting because you already know the value. I’ve landed consulting business just from commenting on other people’s blogs. One of my clients read my comment on Stephen Pierces blog, the author of Making Real Money on the Internet, and contacted me to build a blog for him … sweet!
Tag your blog posts. Each time you make a post add your keywords as tags at the bottom of your post as well as to your Wordpress pages. I would use the Simple Tags plugin to do this which, will allow you can categorize your content based on a tagging engine so your posts are indexed by services like technorati.
Syndicate your posts. Once your post is pinged and tagged properly, you should submit your posts to social media sites which will enable you to generate some immediate traffic. It can be an arduous task, but by using something like Web 2.0 Submitter to do this, the task can be completed in a fraction of the time
There are a myriad of other strategies you can use to bring more traffic to your site but if you focus on these five and perform each task with due diligence and you’ll see your traffic stats increase in a matter of weeks.
Once you’ve perfected or at least able to use these strategies comfortably, you can apply them to any niche. Whether you’re able to make a full-time income from just one blog really depends on the size of the target market – hence the reason I personally stay away from tiny niches – but you’ll still never know if you’re able to make a full-time income from one blog if you don’t give it time to start producing from you.
To get you started with your own blog, you can get free instant access to my JumpStart Blogging guide when you visit http://www.jumpstartyourblog.com. I also show you how to get your first 100 subscribers and make your first $1000 with your blog.
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