Why Most People Don’t Make Any Money From a Business Blog

If you believe all the hype that’s out there about blogging, every blogger should be rolling in the dough. The truth is most business blogs don’t make any money for their owners. See “Growing Rich by Blogging Is a High-Tech Fairy Tale, by Daniel Lyons, Newsweek.”

Affiliate marketing is probably one of the most popular uses of a business blog. However, the current business model of posting product reviews with your affiliate link may have to change thanks to the new FTC ruling.

I don’t think the new ruling will kill affiliate marketing as we know it but neither is it going to be business as usual. There is a lively debate going on online about the FTC ruling since it seems to have added to the confusion instead of clearing up things. One of the best posts I’ve read is titled, “Is This The End of Affiliate Marketing?” by Michel Fortin.

Using your blog to generate AdSense revenue is another popular business model. You are not going to get rich or make a comfortable living doing this either. Probably one of the best examples of this blogging model is “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.”

The blogger created a fake persona and posted 10 or 20 items a day without much success until The New York Times ran a story revealing his identity. On that day, more than 500,000 people hit his site-by far his biggest day and earned him about a hundred bucks.

Over the course of that entire month, in which 1.5 million people visited his site, he earned a whopping total of $1,039.81.

Now you may be thinking that’s not bad from one blog. And you’d be right.

You could build a whole network of AdSense blogs, generate a few hundred dollars from each, and eke out a healthy monthly income. However, it takes a lot of hard work and time to build traffic for just one blog let alone running a network of blogs. This is definitely not something that will let you quit your day job anytime soon.

Despite the failure of blogs as income generators, they are still extremely popular for marketing an online business. So what exactly is a business blog good for?

The best use of a business a blog is to think of it as your sphere of influence. Use your blog content to do the following:

• Attract traffic
• Build a following
• Capture qualified leads
• Pre-sell your products and services

To truly attract repeat visitors and build a community, your content needs to provide solutions to real problems that are of interest to your readers. If all you are doing is reporting the latest news, you’ll get one-off visitors who’ll read your blog and move on, never to return. That is not the kind of blog traffic that will make you much money.

IMO, using blog content to build a sustainable online business leads to generating a steady income.

Are you using a blog to market your business? Share your experiences by leaving a comment.

To learn more about business blogging and content marketing, check out my eBooks “The Business Blogging Handbook” and “Content Marketing Roadmap.”