There are two aspects to making money online with your blog: CONTENT and MARKETING.

Content can be filed under marketing, but not the other way around.  This is because the CONTENT of your blog can act as a MARKETING tool in itself.  Great CONTENT encourages return readers, and HOPEFULLY, significant BACKLINKS.

MARKETING is where the real money is made, however.  No matter how great your CONTENT is, if nobody knows about it, you’re going nowhere.  Given that we know how the balance of power lies, it only makes sense to focus more on the MARKETING aspect of our blogs, right?  Right!

But wait!  What if I’m not just a greedy bastard?  What if I’m a greedy bastard who also wants to contribute some great quality content to the internet?  Well, that’s very commendable, as far as greedy bastards go.  However, unless you’re a full-time blogger, that’s pretty hard.  Marketing requires your undivided focus.  That’s where the money is.  Ever wonder why most companies have a separate division just for marketing?  That’s because marketing is DAMN hard.

There IS a way you can still offer quality content while engaged in marketing, though.  I call it the Post Vault.  The concept is pretty simple.  Take a certain amount of time, say, an hour a day.  This is your writing time.  For this one hour, all you are going to do is create content.  If you’re like me, it takes you around 30 minutes to churn out a blog post.  An hour gives you enough time to make two.  Since I post once a day, I can keep the other post I wrote in the Post Vault.  Simple, huh?

If you’re the type to post twice or more times daily, then extend your writing time to two hours, or three, depending on your need.  I think that maybe two weeks worth of posts in the post vault will work really well for most bloggers.  This way, you already have predetermined posts for your blog, leaving you free to concentrate on marketing and making sure that people actually read those posts.

I know a lot of bloggers do this.  Just thought I’d share.  This one goes in my Post Vault.

Boy, you can tell I REALLY want to make money online.

So you want to make money online.  It sounds simple enough, right?  Create a blog, rehash content from other more established blogs, sign up for adsense and watch the money roll in.  Hey, that could work.. maybe.

See, making money, online or otherwise, is a business.  If you’re really serious about going through with this business, you’re going to need a business plan.  It amazes me how people start different projects and just “wing it.”  I used to do that, and TRUST ME, it’s not very profitable.

My personal idea of a business plan is pretty damn simple.  It’s production and marketing.  You produce a blog, and you market it.  That’s the WHAT.  Now the question to ask yourself is HOW are you going to do it?  What would be the most cost-efficient ways to produce and market your blog?  Will you design your layout yourself or would it be cheaper to have an expert do it (TIME IS MONEY)?  Will you create quality content people will keep coming back for, or rely on SEO, or purchase ads for traffic?  These are a few of the things to consider.

A good business plan gives you some direction and stability.  You want to know exactly what you want to do and how you’re going to do it.  Taking a few days to work out a business plan might be the most important thing you can do for your blog.

After two weeks of searching, I have finally discovered what SEO is!

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization.  That basically means you want your website to show up as EARLY as possible in the search engine results page (serp) when somebody Googles for your targeted keywords.  For example, if your blog is about golf, then you SEO your blog so that when somebody googles “golf,” your blog is listed not too far down the serps.

Complicated?  Not really!  Ideally, the higher your blog is in the SEO rankings, the more traffic you’ll be getting.  Yes, I believe in producing quality content, but nothing beats visibility for generating traffic.  More traffic equals more income, and who doesn’t want that?

For that reason alone, SEO may as well stand for Sucker Exploitation Optimization.  Webmasters and bloggers and online entrepreneurs all aim for high SEO ranking websites.  It’s just good business.  In theory, Google (if you’ll notice, I keep using Google as the default search engine because Google is the BIG G.) ranks website according to relevance and substance to their keywords.  However, greedy website and blog owners (all of them more enterprising than I) find ways to SEO their websites and blogs into top rankings in the serps, duping us unsuspecting surfers and making a pretty profit in the process.

So there.  After two weeks of tireless research, I finally know what SEO REALLY means.  And man, we have GOT to make some money off of this!

First off, what is a brand? 

According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

Seth Godin in this article has his own definition, stating that brands are:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation]

Combining those two definitions, let us define a brand as something that differentiates a product from all others by virtue of what is expected of it, and the emotional power of that expectation.  Sounds good, right?

I guess the question to ask now is how it is relevant to blogging.

Let’s be honest for a moment.  We’re all blogging because we want to either be heard or to make money or to do both.  Whatever the case, we need an audience.  That would be our readers, or in marketing terms, our customers.

The current blog economy is extremely competitive.  Save for the blogging giants like John Chow and Shoemoney, we’re all desperately competing for customers to bump up traffic.  With enough marketing, we WILL get our share of visitors on our blogs.  But what can we do to make these customers stay (that is, be regular readers or repeat visitors)?  We BRAND ourselves, that’s what.

Customer Loyalty is the very foundation of successful blogging.  We create that loyalty by establishing a brand that customers can trust and identify among all the other brands out there.  You want your blog to be credible and reliable, but also to be YOU.  That’s because YOU ARE THE BRAND.  There is only so much content going around to blog about.  What makes your content different is in how you present it.

If you provide customers with content that is relevant and unique on a consistent basis, they will return.  You (and your blog) as a brand will have added value to whatever content it is you are blogging about.  The customers are returning not only for the content, but for YOUR content.

So the next time you post something, think about how it’s affecting your blog as a brand.  Lay the foundation for your brand as early as possible, and watch it grow.

Hi, my name is Marc.  Welcome to BlogMarc.com!

I have been blogging for a few years now (albeit sporadically,) and the idea of making money from blogging has always been one that fascinated me.  This year, I’ve decided that it’s time to stop thinking about it and start doing it.

BlogMarc.com will document my experiences as I attempt to make money online.  The general idea is making this blog as profitable as possible, and sharing the journey with all of you.  I’m pretty new to this, so there’s going to be a lot of learning to be done.  Hopefully, you - as a reader - will learn some new things as well.

Again, welcome to BlogMarc.com.  Now let’s start making money.