6 Ways That Blogging Can Save You Money
Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

Even though I ve had several personal blogs for years, I ve only been officially business blogging since 2003. So in going back over expenses for the last quarter, you can imagine my shock when I realized that my overall business costs were down about 19%. What saved me so much money? Surprisingly, blogging.

How can you save money with your blog? It’s pretty simple, so I’ll be brief.

Attract search engine traffic without paying the big bucks

If you want Google, Yahoo and MSN to pay attention to you, blog.

It doesn’t have to be a whole new site, just add a directory to your existing site and start blogging. Most blog software solutions are either cheap or free.

And you can find out most basic blog information online for free (really, sometimes just typing your question into Google will do it.) by people who’ve actually done it. For less than $100, you can build a small library of blog tips and secrets, written by successful business bloggers.

Instead of buying links, get one-way links from blog search engines and directories, as well as getting your RSS feed content displayed at other sites.

Linking is a great way to get search engine attention and click traffic. Some people get links by trading; others by including their links at the end of freely distributed articles. Others pay to be listed, or to get linked.

In each of these scenarios, some type of trade takes place, money, free content, or a link back.

When you blog, you’ll find plenty of search engines and directories that are willing to list you free of charge. For the most part you won’t need to link back - you’ll get a one-way link from site favored by search engines, often using text that you select yourself.

If 90 or more of these free, legitimate links back to your site is worth your time, then get you blog in motion.

Not only that, if you update frequently, other sites may want to display your RSS feed content on their sites. To encourage them to do so, put a link on your page with instructions on how to do so. Ever since I put one on the front of my site, various feeds from my main site have turned up in the most unexpected places.

Cheaper way to study your audience.

As your blog gets more popular, you may start to find that on any given day, you have a representative cross-section of prospects and clients at your site. If you have a question for them, you can just… ask.

True, you can post a link to a survey in your newsletter or on your site, but these are not as interactive as the ability for your audience to comment. They will comment, and you can reply to ask them to expand, or clarify. Conversation gets going and before you know it, a bond is formed, a much stronger bond than occurs in a one-way conversation.

Cheaper (and faster) way to start a resource or authority site.

Five years ago, if you wanted to start an authority site, your best bet was to build a portal with a specialized directory at its core. Three years ago, you were better off starting a forum with a resource section attached to it. Last year, your top bet was a feed-enabled content management system, especially as more parts of content management systems began to have content feeds related to them. (I have 12 feeds for each of my PHP-Nuke based sites, though they don’t work as well with Google Tap.)

Now, if you want to be the expert, you want to start a blog.

If you’re blogging consistently, you have a hub of information collected that will inspire return traffic. You have a collection of links to articles, sites, and tools. You can constantly write up your own opinion editorials on each of these items, as well as fact-based analysis of news and events that can help your audience make better choices.

As blog software matures you can now categorize, and alphabetize your links, and with the ability to ping multiple sources as well as leave trackback links to other sites, you can send your readers through a ring of related, freshly updated information that ultimately leads back to you.

Spend less money on advertising as your blog becomes more popular

I can t promise you that you ll never spend another red cent on advertising costs. However, the amount of free advertising you get from having your blog link or RSS feed listed in dozens of search engines and directories, and popping up in feed readers is not to be underestimated.

You ll probably still want to do some ezine advertising when your new ebook or software release is debuted. But you may not need to buy as much advertising or purchase as often.

Then there is the fact that many newsletters that are also published to RSS feeds have wider reach. I ve found that it s worth the extra money to appear in both versions ask your favorite publisher for details. For publications that allow this, it s normally only 20% extra

Save money by retaining visitors

You ve probably heard a thousand times that it is easier to sell repeatedly to an existing client than it is to find a new one. So how do you get that visitor to come back, and possibly buy again?

A constant stream of new information on a particular topic work is enough to keep people buying a daily newspaper, subscribing to a magazine or viewing a television series.

Frequent updates can work the same way for your site.

With bloggers being named People of the Year by Time magazine last year, if you re not blogging in 2005, you re going to be left in the dust by other sites in your industry that do. It doesn t have to take up a lot of extra time, and the time it does takes is made up for in the money you can save.

About the Author

Read more about how a blog can help you get spidered by search engines within 24 hours at http://www.freetraffictip.com/gbc .

In a post in my blog, The Webquarters (www.webquarters.blogspot.com), I talked about blogging s future. Here we will try and arrive at a measure” for how successful blogging has become, and how much more it is capable of achieving.

It is pertinent to note that we are not talking about measuring the success of a specific blog, but of blogging as a phenomenon.

Before tackling the admittedly difficult question of measuring its success, let s pause and ask, What is blogging? At one level, it is a tool which individuals use for communication and self-expression. Indeed, this was the only use conceived initially. As its usage soared, it also emerged as a tool for on-line ‘communities’ to interact and disseminate news or useful information. The most recent emerging use (completely unancticipated in the early years of blogging’s existence) is for commercial organizations to interact with various stakeholders.

Thus, a reasonably general definition of blogging would appear to be, a technology that lends itself for use by individuals, communities or organizations as a means of communication, information dissemination or interaction.

How do we go about establishing a measure of the success of anything? One way is to identify its “potential”, and measure what proportion of that potential has been achieved. For example, if your company sells flat-panel TVs, the potential market would probably be equal to the number of households in the world having a household income of more than a certain figure. If you are trying to popularize a new ‘world language’ that you have invented, the potential probably corresponds to every human in the world speaking the language. If you sell beer, the potential sales would probably correspond to each adult in the world drinking 150 liters a year!*

However, it is frequently difficult to assess potential in this manner. A surrogate, more practical approach would be to identify the ‘best’ achieved by anybody so far. If you are an athlete, your ‘best achievable’ may be the current world record in your event. In the TV example above, the best achievable may be the sales volume achieved by the market-leading company.

Thus, the problem reduces to discovering the ‘best achievable’ usage of blogging. To do this, we must stretch our imagination a bit and ask, what are the “best” technologies** that meet roughly the same needs that blogging does, and what is the usage they have achieved? The best technologies we have that allow communication, information dissemination or interaction are probably telephones, email, and conventional web sites.

The number of telephone lines (fixed and mobile) in the world is estimated at around 2.1 billion. Similarly, the number of email users is in the region of 600 million.

How many websites exist in the world? Yahoo indexes 19 billion web pages, while Google indexes about 9 billion. Taking the smaller of the two, and assuming the average website has around 20 pages, the number of websites may be approximated as about 500 million.

Let s be conservative, taking the smallest of the 3 figures (for telephones, email users and websites) which is 500 million. To be play it even safer, let us assume that many websites represent uses that blogs just cannot. So let us say that the figure of 500 million overstates the figure we are looking for by 90%. This leaves 250 million (assuming many websites are defunct, etc.). It appears safe to say that this represents the usage that blogging must achieve. Thus, the best achievable number of blogs is, at the very least, 250 million. The current number of around 80 million thus suggests that blogging has covered about a third of the distance to its best achievable usage.

Of course, we will be shortchanging blogging if we end this analysis without considering time frames. While telephones have taken 20+ years to reach their current usage (counting only from the time mobile phones were invented), email has taken 15+ years, and the web 10+ years, blogging has been around only 6 years or so.

To dwell a bit on how technologies evolve over time, let us look at an elegant concept, the ‘S’ curve. What this says, very simply, is that every technology has an initial period during which it grows very slowly. As it improves and gains usage, it crosses an ‘inflexion point’, beyond which growth takes off rapidly***. Further down, the technology reaches a maturity stage where growth once again slackens. Metcalfe’s Law, which holds that the usefulness of something goes up exponentially with the number of its users, applies during the high growth section.

Thus, in S- curve terms, blogging can be thought of as having crossed the inflexion point, and being about 30% of the way to the peak. In other words, 70% of its potential is yet to be achieved.
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* If that sounds high, the Czech are reputed to drink 167 liters per capita per year!

** As is clear from the context, we use best not as an indicator of quality but to mean the one that has achieved the greatest or most widespread use .

*** Not all technologies, of course, actually cross the inflexion point - many (indeed, most) die out well before they reach that point.

About the Author

Dr. V P Kochikar has published widely and serves on the editorial advisory boards and review panels for several international journals and conferences. He has lectured in a guest capacity at business schools and industry fora worldwide. Dr Kochikar has been profiled by Knowledge Management Review magazine, and interviewed by, among others, BBC, Business Today magazine, and the Economic Times. Views expressed in this blog are entirely his own.

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it’s the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger’s focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google’s spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog’s content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

About the Author

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for the NotePage http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com product lines. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com , and http://www.small-business-software.net