When you’re first starting out in the world of blogging it can be confusing as to whether or not you should be treating it like a mere blog, or something more that could potentially someday make you some money, or perhaps even replace your offline income altogether as mine has, thus allowing me the freedom that comes from working from home, and owning my own business!

If you happen to be fine with keeping it strictly as a creative outlet where you can express yourself and you have no intention of adding in ads like Google’s AdSense, or banners or anything of that nature, and you really don’t care if anyone other than yourself reads it then by all means treat it as a blog.

If on the other hand you’d actually like have the posts you write read by as many people as possible, and you might one day like to have this exciting hobby of yours start contributing to your income then you should start out early on treating it as you would any other business, with goals, plans, budgets, and clear ideas about what it is you are trying to achieve with it.

While the decision to treat your blog like a business should be started at the very beginning in order to maximize the effect on all aspect of your blog from the domain name choice and theme topic, it is really never too late in the process to start. By making a conscious decision to treat it as you would any other business you are effectively telling yourself you are going to take it more seriously.

Here are some things you can do to start treating it like a business and get yourself rolling in the right direction, don’t worry you’ll add to this list as you and your blog grows into something of its own. We all have similar but different lists because we all want different things where our blog is concerned and we all bring different skills to the table. Build on your strengths, develop the skills you’d love to have, and outsource the ones that you couldn’t be bothered with, or have no aptitude for. Just because I’m bad at coding html or php doesn’t mean I can’t find and use someone whose passion happens to be coding websites.

Passion for your Topic

The very first thing you should have, and I’m assuming you do so I won’t spend much time on it, is passion for the topic you are looking to write about. Hopefully it is something you bore the relatives with during the holiday meal because you just can’t seem to stop talking about it, and the excitement you feel comes out in your voice. It is this passion that you will tap into when things are tough, progress slows down, or halts all together, and you wonder what you were thinking in 6 months when you realize you still only have 100 readers coming to visit on a daily basis. Passion is an amazing revitalizer, and is great to have on your side.

A Clear Focus

You need to set out exactly what it is you wish to achieve with this blog of yours. By having a clear set of ideas in hand in the beginning, you’ll know just where it is you are trying to go with this blog business of yours. You’ll need a clear focus before you move onto the next one.

A Roadmap or Checklist

Ok so you know what it is you want, and where you’d like to see your blog in five years, now what? Well we need to map out the steps you need to take in order to get you there. If you said you want 1000 visitors a day reading what you write then you know you need to focus on traffic generating techniques each and every day alongside of writing that great content you intend to write. This will quickly branch out into other areas as you’ll soon see, such as developing a social network, and setting up a Facebook fan page, or Twitter profile in order to capitalize on the traffic they can send. Your roadmap will be long and daunting to look at, and in the beginning it will seem impossible and overwhelming. Don’t worry though, with each step you take forward you’ll be one closer to your goal, and you’ll soon realize that it isn’t arriving at the end result that is the best part, but the journey along the way.

Tracking Methods

I don’t know too many businesses that don’t bother to track progress on the different metrics they’ve deemed important to their business. If traffic is important to you (as I’m sure it is) then programs like Google Analytics are a great help, but you’ll need to dig deeper, and take a look at where and why these visitors are coming to your site in order for you to tweak and improve it in order to make that 1000 visitor goal you set out for yourself.  Tracking keeps you focused on what’s important and allows you to see if you are making progress, stalling out, or perhaps slipping behind and need to redouble your efforts, or perhaps explore new options regarding that particular method.

I recommend using a calendar to track when you need to enter your tracking data. It generally isn’t hard, but is often forgotten or left to slide. Adding it to your calendar will help keep you on track, and also make you more productive at the same time!

Separate your Income and Expenses

Most people don’t see the need for this in the beginning because the blog either isn’t bringing anything in, or it has such low expenses it doesn’t warrant the time needed to keep track of. Nonsense! It takes very little time, and gives you an accurate reading on what your business is costing (or making) you in a day, week, month, or year, and goes a long way toward making you feel like this is an actual business rather than just a hobby to be financed out of your back pocket. While some people will go as far as opening a separate business account specifically for their blog you don’t have to go quite that far (unless you want to) and can easily add $1000.00 into the running of your business, and track the results that way.

This also focuses your attention on the income streams that are most profitable to you and perhaps warrant a little extra attention in order to provide you a 3% return over a 2% return which can be huge at the end of the year. I personally recommend diversifying your income into at least five or six streams, and preferably into ten or twelve in case anything ever happened. People were making killings off of single websites until Google made a simple change in their algorithm that dropped their traffic, and hence their earnings down to zero. Those people were left scrambling to find a new method of earning money while they had to then learn a new way to drive traffic, and make money online.

Here are some example income streams for you to focus on. Now depending on your chosen theme, or topic these may or may not fit, but they should give you an idea of what you can expect.

Advertising

If your blog receives traffic then you can make money with advertising other people’s products and services to the people visiting your blog. If you have higher traffic levels this can result in this being your primary source of income as it is for many of the top blogs out there. Also if your blog is quite specialized you might be able to fetch a higher than normal price based on that fact alone. If you blog about the Bugatti Veyron (a high end car) then chances are you’ll be able to ask a higher price of a local Bugatti dealer looking to advertise on your site than if you were discussing something more common such as 4×4’s or pickup trucks!

Affiliate Income

Affiliate marketing is where you earn money for promoting someone else’s product or service. This is different than advertising in that you will seek out products and services that fit in with the topic of your blog, and also have an affiliate program in place. Then you can promote those products or services to your visitors, e-mail list, Fan page members etc. in exchange for a commission on the sale. Affiliate marketing is great because it allows you to choose the very best products from the very biggest names in any industry without having to create the product yourself, or even build the relationship for that matter.

Affiliate Income (as a vendor)

Having your own product goes a long way toward establishing yourself as an expert in your field and allows you to showcase your knowledge while also making a profit. Even better if it’s a product you can sell through an affiliate network. Digital products such as e-books, software, audio recordings, and video courses work extremely well, but can be just about anything you can think of.

If I have a $20 dollar product and I sell one a day then I can make $600.00 a month. If however I have 5 affiliates selling one a day at a 60% commission (leaving me 40% or $8.00) then I’m able to make double that. If I want to increase my sales it is now a simple matter of adding more affiliates to my network, or by adding more products for them to sell for me!

E-Mail Marketing

You’ve heard people talking about the money being in the list for a long time now, and it’s because it’s true. Having a group of people who are interested in the topic you write about and promote is more valuable than you can believe. One of the hardest things in business is to acquire the customer in the first place, and having a pool of people that you can access whenever you want will go a long way toward the profitability of your blog/ business. Growing your list and developing a relationship with them should be something that you start right from the beginning. I personally use Aweber and love their service and will be a customer for life!

Here is a special discount if you’d like to sign up. (Affiliate link)

www.plrinternetmarketing.com/aweber

Selling a Service

If you have a specific talent that you can market to your peers, or others who might be interested then this will probably be one of the quickest sources of income you’ll experience. You can literally hang out your shingle this morning, and be working this afternoon if you try hard enough, and there are enough people needing your service. Say you are a better writer than marketers, perhaps offering to write quality articles at a discounted price for other people would be a great place to start. People are always looking for quality writers. Even if you haven’t yet developed your writing skills to the point you feel you’d like to start selling them you could offer a blog commenting service or something similar where you go out and write relevant, quality comments for blog owners on blogs within their industry using their website as the backlink. I know I don’t have time to do as much blog commenting as I should, and I’m sure there are millions of others out there!

These are just a few sources of income and there are many more out there waiting for you to implement them, and develop them into being profitable. Even the one’s listed above can be broken down further. There are thousands of affiliate programs out there with even more products. Instead of focusing on finding just one or two to promote, you could develop ten or twelve of these into their own separate income stream sources.

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