What are effective ways to turn a blog into a business?

What are effective ways to turn a blog into a business?

First, let me say that I think there should be a word to describe industries where people who have spent years doing it try to dissuade everyone else from getting in the industry because they know how horrible it really is. For example, musicians, lawyers, and authors will all tell you, straight up, "Dude, this sucks. Do something else. Anything else. But for the love of god, not this."

And indeed...

For 99% of people, starting a blog is a terrible way to make money. You might as well take your money, shred it, spend a year sewing it back together by hand, and then light it on fire. You will still have saved time and heartache.

The most common way to monetize a blog is through ads, but anyone who does that will quickly see that ads don't provide a very lucrative revenue stream until you are extremely large (plus, it's not really under your control). Dan's answer is a terrific example of why an ad strategy sucks for most blogs.

On a personal note, I know several bloggers who have been able to go full-time using ads, but it is extraordinarily difficult to scale and you start to run into big incentive problems (i.e., should I write crap to get more pageviews).

You have other options:

• Affiliate marketing
• Develop your own products
• Use your blog as a tool to get speaking/consulting/book deal/etc

I have tested all of these. 

Consulting/speaking actually works out pretty well and is a great choice for many people. You will see LOTS of blogs (especially in the self-development space)  who do coaching calls, affiliate marketing, and a little speaking. With a  year or two of extremely hard work, you may be able to make 6 figures  with this approach. 

For me, I started my blog as a cool hobby and actively resisted monetizing for about 3 years because the revenue I would have gotten was just not exciting (plus, the freaking name of my site is "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" and I have to be extremely careful about people thinking it's yet-another-scam site...which it's not). During that time, I treated my blog as a laboratory for testing ideas and techniques, and turned it into some consulting, a book deal, and speaking engagements. I also tested ads, but even at the peak, the revenues were not particularly compelling.

Interestingly, from a revenue perspective, developing my own products has been far and away the best ROI for me. For example, I sell information products that range from a few bucks to several thousand/month. However, this is an extremely competitive way to make a business and most people fail. Keys to succeeding are understanding your niche, deep customer research, quality traffic, an interesting/differentiated viewpoint, building an extraordinary product that you can offer unbeatable guarantees for, knowledge of pricing/funnels/copywriting/optimization strategies, etc. 

In other words, it's not easy to charge for content online, especially at premium prices.

Bottom line:

- Do not try to turn your blog into a business. It's thankless and will take you way longer than you think and you will contemplate suicide every day. Better to freelance or do something else.

- If you ignore me and decide to do it any way, the easiest way to earn money via blogging would be a combination of affiliate/speaking/consulting

- Ads suck on blogs as a monetization method until you get really big 

By : Ramit Sethi

XianYeng @ 16:26

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