Micro-Entrepreneurship For Dummies
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Your primary goal with a blog is to market your micro-entrepreneurial business and sell its products or service. With a business blog, there are two marketing strategies you can use to make money: direct-selling or indirect-selling.

You can basically directly make money with your blog, or indirectly use it as a stepping stone to other venues that can make you money.

Make money directly with your micro-entrepreneurial business blog

As a micro-entrepreneur, you’re offering goods and services, and your blog can strategically help you do so. Although some people write blogs for the love of the topic, in this case, you’re writing and doing your blog because you love the topic and want to make money.

To make money with your blog, you basically package or self-publish your knowledge, information, experience, research, and so on as information products (ebooks, audios, videos, and such). If you’re creative, you make products (in the form of arts and crafts) and sell them on your blog.

You might have either products or services that you offer, or you can create new products and services to market. You then use your blog to promote your offerings so prospective customers will buy them.

Consider these examples that show how you can use your blog to make money:

  • A corporate security expert does a blog to cover the world of security and may include articles and news items related to the world of security. Doing so draws an audience so that he can raise his profile and his brand and find customers.

  • An interior designer does a blog to showcase both good and bad examples of interior design. The blog showcases her knowledge and good taste in a public venue.

  • An author writes, speaks, and consults about business and financial matters. The author packages her knowledge as ebooks and audio programs for sale, both online and offline. If the author writes a blog post on investing, for example, she places links from that post to an appropriate audio seminar at her ecommerce site.

Packaging or self-publishing your knowledge, information, experience, research, and so on as information products (ebooks, audios, videos, and such) isn’t that difficult. If you’re creative, you have the ability to do a variety of arts and crafts that are fun to make and profitable.

Making money indirectly with your micro-entrepreneurial business blog

You can certainly make money without offering your own products or services on your blog. In fact, you can earn great money by selling what others offer. Plenty of sources, such as Amazon, ClickBank, and Commission Junction offer commissions when you place their affiliate links on your blog posts.

Why it’s worthwhile to market directly and indirectly

Just because you offer your own stuff doesn’t mean you should limit your ability to make money with other people’s stuff too. Consider doing both direct and indirect marketing on your blog to expand your ability to make money.

For example, if you sell nutritional supplements and you see a merchant that you trust that offers exercise equipment or a weight-loss program, the merchant’s offering can be a good fit with your nutritional supplement.

Just check out the merchant to see if it offers any other items that may compete with you. Then when you do a blog post on nutrition (along with links to your sales page for your offering), you can offer that merchant’s stuff in several possible ways.

You can also use the merchant’s affiliate program in co-marketing or in follow-up marketing. Co-marketing means that you include the link to the merchant’s product or service with your product. When folks buy your product, they can see a sales page (say, for the exercise equipment or weight-loss program) with the affiliate link.

In follow-up marketing you can send a “thank you for your purchase” message along with a sales page with the merchant’s affiliate link. This all flowed from your initial blog post on your topic.

About This Article

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About the book author:

Paul Mladjenovic is a certified financial planner, micro-entrepreneur, and home business educator with more than 25 years' experience writing and teaching about financial and business start-up topics. He owns RavingCapitalist.com and is also the author of Stock Investing For Dummies.

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