lemonade
Who are you selling
lemonade to?

Is simply building a community of bloggers enough to make you a nice profit from blogging?

The last few posts I wrote dealt with some concerns I have and misconceptions out there about what it takes to generate income being a web entrepreneur. Those posts were:

  1. Building A Business Through Social Media Vs. The Old-Timer’s Way To Business Success - A post expressing my concerns that with the idea of social media marketing entrepreneurs might become lazy.
  2. The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing and Does It Teach Us Bad Habits As Entrepreneurs? - It takes more than sitting at home everyday in your PJs authoring a blog to become highly successful.
  3. The Unplugged Entrepreneur - Taking yourself offline and building your business.

To be successful in generating profits in business, you need to create something that solves a BIG PROBLEM for your potential customers (which might be your blog readers). Let’s look at an analogy.

Let’s say one day you decided to set up a lemonade stand at the end of your street and sell lemonade to people who pass by. You figure this will be great, it’s 110 degrees (F) out and everyone must be hot.

Even if you only charged $.10 per cup, you’ll probably still make a lousy profit. Why? Because the people passing by can get what you offer anywhere and they don’t need what you’re selling.

Now let’s say you set up a lemonade stand near a busy construction site with lots of hot thirsty workers who would gladly spend a couple bucks through the course of their shift to down an ice cold cup of thirst quenching lemonade.

Yes part of the problem you’re solving for them is providing them something cold to drink during the course of their hot day at work, but the added benefit you’re providing them is a mini break. A break from work and the hot day. It’s that mental rejuvenation you are providing them. That’s what you’re selling to, not just lemonade to a thirsty worker.

The First Thing You Need To Do

The first thing you need to do if you want to generate any real kind of income from blogging is figure out who your target customer will be. Then you may want to consider writing a business plan.

Are they other bloggers? If so, go back to our lemonade stand analogy. Are you going to offer them something they can get anywhere and offered at nearly every other blog out there?

Or are your potential customers average Joe’s looking for a website that will solve their problem?

So your first step then is to make a plan.

AdSense, Affiliate Links, & Some Feedback

Many of us focus our efforts on generating income through blogging. Google’s AdSense, affiliate links, and ad hosting seem to be the favorite among bloggers because they are easy to set up. But again, let’s go back to our analogy above.

If you plan to generate income through blogging solely through affiliate ads, content links, and AdSense, realize you’ll be setting up your lemonade stand next door to another lemonade stand whose next door to another lemonade stand, whose next door to . . .

This is not to say you can’t make a profit through using such services - it just means you’re going to have to get a little creative and you probably won’t generate tons of cash.

Barbara Swafford had an interesting discussion on her blog this last weekend, Just A Click Away - Open Mic, where she opens up the comment section of her blog for feedback and questions. She had asked how ads on blogs affect you? Keep in mind that most of her commentators are bloggers.

If you’re curious what bloggers think about ads on blogs and if they click them or not, I highly recommend you read through her comment section. From what I gathered, it seems most bloggers skip ads most of the time.

Keep in mind why bloggers come to your blog.

Do you think they are looking for a problem to be solved or do you think they’re there to read your content and what you have to say?

These days even the Internet itself seems to be fighting ads and working to block them from your view (ok, maybe not the Internet itself). FireFox, for example, has a browser add-on which you can use to block many ads from displaying in your web browser. Sheesh! The playing field is getting rough!

Other Ways Bloggers Make Money

Ok, so nearly everyone is using AdSense, content links, and affiliates to put a few extra pennies in their pockets, but how do you really make any money blogging?

The key, I believe, is in creating something that people want and/or need. If your goal is to make money through blogging, you need to use it as a tool as a means to get what you want - and yes, you can still create a community around it. It does not have to be a cold business entity where nothing matters but profits, far from it!

Look at Dave Navarro of Rock Your Day. He maintains a blog which helps him generate profit not through affiliate links and AdSense, but through products and services he provides to help people get “unstuck”.

James Chartrand of Men with Pens said in his article Do Blogs Really Earn Business?

But we didn’t get a break – we made our breaks, and that’s the difference. We used our blog as our gateway to building a business, and we seized every opportunity we could to make it work.

I love that quote because it sums up the point of my last few articles. Among other things, James and Harry use their blog to:

  1. Promote their services of copywriting and web development
  2. Build a community

*While writing this article up to this point I decided to do a search for other bloggers who make money aside from ads and affiliate links when I ran across the article 10 Innovative Blog Business Models on Problogger. There, Skellie highlights 10 blogs where the authors generate an income from blogging aside from affiliate and AdSense links. Therefore, I’ll just provide the link and let you explore other examples from there.

So Is Building A Community Enough?

The cold hard fact to generating money in any platform, blogging or otherwise, is you have to build some kind of product or service that is going to either make someone’s life a lot easier or you’re going to solve some kind of problem they have.

Starting a blog, slapping up some ads and affiliate links, and swapping comments with other bloggers most likely is not a great path to wealth. Not even the big time A-List bloggers rely on that alone (see the article on Problogger).

I admit, I’m not a full time blogger. I typically post around 2 times per week and don’t comment on many blogs out there, though I read through many. I currently own two businesses and at times flip houses.

But I know a thing or two about how the Web works and my business ventures have taught me a thing or two about marketing and customer behaviors (oh yeah, I suppose 6 years in college might have helped, too! LOL).

For me, the best way I can see to make a profit in blogging is you have to think of it as a real business, otherwise it’s just a hobby and a place to go for discussion among like-minded individuals. Your blog then needs to be a tool used to help promote a product or service which will help people get what they are looking for.

And if the only way you plan to generate income through your blog is by use of AdSense, affiliate links, etc., then it might be helpful to realize your target audience probably isn’t your fellow bloggers, but average Internet users who probably don’t even know what a blog is and are looking for something.

Hopefully through your marketing efforts then (probably Pay-Per-Click), they will stumble over to your site and find it filled with useful links to information and products they believe is the link that will solve their problem.

Here at eVentureBiz, we solve problems by helping people get online, providing a little extra help for our customers which larger companies don’t typically do, and structuring their business. My blog is a tool I use to generate traffic to our website as well as build a community of like-minded individuals who want to explore ideas and grow as a web entrepreneur.

If you’re looking to make money from blogging, what problems does your website or blog solve for people?

Do you have a plan?

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