Have your CAKE and eat it, too (or “Unconventional Tips for Making Money With Your Blog”)

October 25th, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Uncategorized

When it comes to making money blogging, it seems everyone has his or her own formula for success.  For some, it’s all about creating good content.  For others, it’s about savvy marketing.  For still others, it’s about highly-targeted SEO, or connecting with a community of readers, or… the list could go on and on.  Fortunately for you, the reader, I’ve taken these ideas and combined them into my very own formula for success, and I’m going to share it with you right now, free of charge!

Okay okay, so while this may not be a “breakthrough” formula for success or anything (it’s more or less a paraphrasing of some great tips I try to keep in mind when blogging), it does condense some useful reminders down into an easy-to-remember (and tasty!) acronym.  Here we go:

• Contribute good content.  As Steve Pavlina has stressed time and time again, content is (almost) everything.  Without good content, you’ll never have a loyal readership.  Without a loyal readership, there’ll be no profit.
• Aspire.  Don’t be afraid to set lofty goals for yourself.  When the going gets tough, you’ll need to think about these goals for motivational purposes.  Want to be able to relax on the beach every day while your web ventures are earning you passive income?  Visualize this dream when you feel yourself sink into a lazy, unproductive mood.  Think about how lousy you’ll feel if you never achieve this goal.  Realize that you can make it happen, if you just put in the effort.  That’s sure to make you get back to work!
• Kommunicate with your community.  (Umm, so I think I may have spelled that incorrectly, but CACE wouldn’t have been a very meaningful acronym… )  Remember, communication is key.  Your goal should be to build a community for your readers–a place to which they’ll be comfortable coming back over and over again.  In my opinion, this is really how a blog creates value.  Anybody can pick up a magazine and find advice on any given topic.  The power of blogging is that each and every post creates an open forum for discussion from your users.  Utilize this!
• Educate the community.  Tell them how your blog is doing.  Tell them what kinds of posts are generating the most interest.  Tell them what kinds of ads are generating the most revenue (IF this doesn’t violate your TOS).  Tell them where the majority of your readers are coming from.  You’ll see several examples of this on wealthitself.com, especially when I do things like post earnings reports.  This is how we learn from one another.  I really believe that this kind of “open” approach to blogging adds considerably more value than one would initially expect.  This is the same principle upon which open-source software is based, and it works.

Well, there you have it–four tips for creating an online community that will be mutually beneficial to you and your readers.  Remember, if you’re not creating value for your readers, you’ll never create (monetary) value for yourself.  That’s easy as, well… cake.

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