You blog, blog, blog, blog, blog and you’re not making any money. Or maybe you are making money but you’d like to make more. A lot of the suggestions you see involve writing eve more content, like for article marketing, or building up some Web 2.0 properties. Is there some way to get paid using your existing content so you don’t have to spend the rest of your life writing?
Put it all together in an ebook to sell on Amazon
Go through your blog, gather up all your “How-To” posts and put them together to form an ebook. Add picures or screenshots to spice it up and use some nice formatting for a professional look.
In the past, bloggers would sell these ebooks on their blogs for $7 or $17, whatever the market would bear. But these days, you’ll make more of an impact if you self-publish your book with Amazon.com’s CreateSpace service.
Using Createspace to publish your ebook gives your book a little more of a sense of authority than it would if you just posted a PDF download on your blog. Plus, millions of Amazon affiliate bloggers send their readers to Amazon every day. You’ll have much more exposure than you would if you kept your book on your own blog.
Once you’ve published your first book, rinse and repeat until you’ve built up a whole library of ebooks, all taken from the content of your blog.
Put some of it together into a small guide to sell on your blog
Go back through some of your older, more popular blog posts and pull two or three that you can put together into a small guide of some type. This, too, can be sold on Amazon, or you can post it on your blog as a freebie or inexpensive download and include links to your full-size Amazon ebooks.
Add in some affiliate or contextual links
Unless you’re running several dozen tightly SEO’d blogs that all get huge amounts of traffic, you’ve probably already seen you’re not going to get rich just running Google Adsense on your blog. Time to add some affiliate links and there’s nothing that says you have to stick to one item.
I have a news-type blog where I cover different trending news topics every day, but the idea would work with just about any blog. The next time you’re writing up a blog post, think to yourself, “What can I link to that would make some money?” It may be a book that you can find at Amazon. It may be a product you can find at Clickbank or one of the other affiliate networks. Just include a contextual link to something that can increase your earnings.
At the very least, consider some of the contextual ad networks like Kontera or InfoLinks.
Publish it somewhere else first
It’s tricky, but you can also publish your blog content somewhere else first, before you use it on your blog. This is especially helpful for newer blogs that don’t have a very high page rank.
Instead of publishing that killer blog post on your blog, publish it on a Squidoo lens or a HubPage, which you can then monetize with affiliate products for extra income, or you can simply link back to your blog and send visitors there for more information.
The benefit is – Squidoo lenses and HubPages rank very well in the Google index, most of the time they rank better than your blog. So they’re good for grabbing the top index spots. You can monetize these pages and use them as little satellite sites or you can use them to send people back to your blog.
Plus, once these pages are published and indexed, you can then use the exact same content on your blog. Keep in mind, though – the search engines will give preference to the original posting site when it comes to rankings. Still, you want to make sure you publish killer content, no matter where you publish.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!