Most webmasters and online business owners know that a blog can bring you additional revenue from advertising, and more traffic from search engines. Then there’s
additional benefit of having a great way to spark productive dialogue between you and your prospects. But did you know that your blog itself may be worth thousand of dollars to you in its present form?
The day I learned that my blog held such hidden treasure was one of those happy accidents that can make life such a fun adventure. All I wanted to do was find out why some of my newsletter subscribers had not crossed over to my blog audience.
In an informal poll, I found that many of fans of my newsletter were overwhelmed with amount of free information on my site, and felt that they’d never catch up to reading it all.
This led to several discoveries about how I could find a way to make information more accessible to them without disrupting enjoyment of my feed subscribers.
If your blog has export capabilities, you can use any of these techniques to generate revenue from your blog and make both your newsletter and blog subscribers deliriously happy.
Method One: Monitor Your Popular Blog Topics as Ideas for Future Products
As you begin to monitor which topics have most responses, you’ll be able to see a pattern that tells you what your audience likes most about your site. These themes often give you clues about what your next product could be.
For example, as I continue to cover free Google tools, tips and news in my blog on Tuesdays, I’ve noticed that this is day that I tend to have most subscribers reading every entry. With that information I was able to create a free Christmas gift for my audience that they’ll be able to use as a reference guide.
Your next best selling software idea, book or tool could come as a result of watching topic popularity, if you learn how to track audience response.
Method Two: The Subscription Model
When you’re blogging daily, sometimes several times a day, and much of information on your blog continues to be useful months after you publish it, your audience is probably aware of this.
Search engines may be doing a fine job of helping your fans find information they’re looking for at your site, but you’ll also find that a cross-section of them would rather digest a periodic collection of your posts for use at a later time.
Should you find this to be case, instead of purging your archives, you can create a “Best of” compilation on a weekly or monthly basis, and charge for electronic distribution. Or you could charge advertisers to be featured in these periodicals same way you would a newsletter, and offer them to your audience at a discounted rate, as a premium version of your present ezine.
