A Blog with no purpose

Met a fabulous person some day in the past who had been blogging for three years intermittently but never bothered to give the blog a purpose. She was surprised that a blog could actually be purposed. In her words “The purpose of the blog is that I write and people read”. But what do you get out of it, Alice? (not real name) I mean other that ‘satisfaction and happiness’? Alice had no words.

So, I had been given this herculean task of finding purposes for blogs. 

Needless to say, you need traffic flying into your blog on a regular basis or you need a very strong paid advertising strategy to make money on your blog. Join me on my course “Blogging for Business” where I teach a few tips and tricks. Well, it’s a hands on intensive workshop where you’ll actually create a course and do stuff around it to get it ready to make money.

Once you have sufficient traffic coming in to your blog, you can get started with one or more of these income streams.

Sponsored Posts: When you have sufficient readers on your blog, you can charge people in your niche to guest post for you for a fee. Most guest posts stay up for a year or two according to the contract you sign before the posting.

Social Collaboration: Grow your social media audience large enough to create social collaborations with businesses in your niche. Social accounts with less niche will appreciate your wider reach and pay you to collaborate with them.

Sell Merchandise: Some blogs become so popular among readers that they start selling fan merchandise or other merch that resonates with them. Cute mugs, t-shirts, plush toys, home accessories and dress accessories and such always have a demand and people will buy them if it is appealing. If your blog is about fishing, sell “gone fishing” sweaters and t-shirts, sell tackles, rods and such.

Online Courses: Like this blog for example. I have 3 workshops going on right now and I intend to add more with time. Is it really about fishing? Teach people to fish. How to choose the right rod, how to gut a fish.. go in depth and people will appreciate the extra mile you go with your courses and be happy to part with a few dollars.

Memberships: If you have really good membership perks, whatever your niche is, people will join. Charge a monthly membership fee for members and charge non-members extra for activities that members don’t pay for.

Google AdSense & Other Ad Networks: Google Adwords is a world in itself. All you need is a google account and a bank account to sign up. You sign up for free and set up once. You cannot make a lot of money with this element but you get paid a few cents every time someone clicks on your ads. Choose your ad niche carefully. Depending on how much ad is going on at your blog, you can make about $5-$20 every month. There are several other ad networks that offer PPC advertising in more or less the same capacity

eBooks: Sell eBooks, You could write your own or get someone to ghost write them for you. You can also sell books for your peers if they will offer you a commission.

Digital Products: Sell software, licenses, music, eBooks, themes and plugins for WordPress, art, posters, and all these downloadable content which you don’t need to keep an inventory of and you don’t need to ship away.  People can download over and over again while you can go laughing to the bank.

Coaching Services: Be a coach, there are coaches coaching in a hundred niches these days. And there are coaches coaching coaches to coach coaches. So you’ll figure this out. Coaching services are lucrative and depending on how efficient you are, you can amass a lot of wealth.

Banner Ads: Banner ads are wonderful. Businesses create banners to post on your website. Charge them for the advertisement. Most blogs leave a banner on for 3, 6 or 12 months. So, people can buy space on your blog for short periods of time and you can always recycle your ad merchants. Blogs charge anywhere between $30-$500 a month depending on how busy and established their blog is.

Affiliate Marketing: Needless to say, this is my favourite. Affiliate Marketing is an online strategy that involves promoting a vendor’s product in exchange for a commission. I teach affiliate marketing in detail in my online hands on workshop. The workshop is offered in 6 sessions that stretches over a period of 14 weeks. The gap between sessions is carefully planned to give you enough time to do the homework you are asked to do. I offer support via email for three months after the course is complete and then over my Facebook group.

So there, we found 10 purposes for your blog. This is not a complete list. If I have the time and energy I can find 10 more purposes. Until then…