Bill McRea

Maybe you are not online but have a bricks and mortar business. How can online applications help you? Firstly, virtually everyone seems to be online today. You can use online tools such as Twitter to improve your offline business.

Marketing for offline businesses is not limited to offline selling tools. You might think that since your business is still, you only have certain resources for growing the business. Not so. Your business is good but it can always get better.

Let’s say that you’re a SOHO owner. you are a growing businesses owner. You have done direct selling, viral and used other advertising media like paper adverts to get the word out about your business. You’ve got a decent amount of clients but you can have more. You’ve still haven’t tapped into the online world for customers.

It is a fact that some people don’t read newspapers or visit trade shows. They might be missing your valuable service. Those same folk may stay connected to the world at large with social networking online. They could connect with you there if you have a Twitter account.

As a professional in your field of business, you can provide useful information to other twitterers on your business. More entrepreneurs are using Twitter as a business tool and you’ll be able to find those people to trade business techniques. Improving technique can improve business.

Twitter is also a social network for personal enjoyment. People have interaction with others from their hometown, people with similar interests and others who post fascinating tweets. Any one of these groups could use what your business has to give. Those in your hometown, for example, who have no idea about you, can study you. You won’t be running an internet business but you can create a webpage that tells about your business with contact information for anybody looking to use your services.

Just like an internet business, Twitter can be employed to answer client service queries quickly. Plenty of your customers are definitely online and Twitter is a technique to answer their queries without them having to drive to your business location to get answers. And, you do not have to sit out front of a computer To answer them. Twitter can be accessed from your mobile telephone ( with Internet support) so you can work on the go.

Twitter offers tools that can be employed by offline businesses. The most well liked applications are buyer service and advertising tools but you will find a heap more.

If you’ve read my other articles, you’ll already know how to drive large amounts of traffic to your blog through basic SEO practices and through creating outstanding content.

But what’s the use in all of that if you’re never getting any decent money from your blog at the end of the day?

Sure, some people do this for nothing but poops and giggles, but for the enterprising individual that I am sure you are, we must look at ways to add revenue to our blogs to actually turn blogging into a successful business.

Before we do, it’s important to realize that there’s nothing ethically or morally wrong with monetizing your blog. After all, the products you sell or ads you run from your blog will be aimed to help your readers, and it’s their decision to engage in them at the end of the day.

So, let’s look at the various ways to extract some easy money from your blog:

1. adsense

This is the old classic that still holds true for many bloggers. Because Adsense is so easy to implement into your site, and because the quality of the ads (and relevance) is so high, there’s a lot of potential to get lots of clicks from running this simple script on your site. However, this might not exactly allow you to quit your day job just yet, unless you have a serious amount of traffic coming in to your blog daily.

2. Affiliate programs

There’s no end of products you can promote as an affiliate and in many cases (particularly with digital download sales) you can earn a significant share of the revenue, sometimes up to 100% in a few cases. It’s really just a case of finding a good affiliate network, signing up and picking products to promote that tie in with your blog content. The more you hand pick individual products to promote based on individual posts, the higher your revenue will be. Don’t just slap one product on the sidebar; you need to actively presell the product by talking about it, and the problems it solves.

3. Selling advertising space

Just like making money from Adsense ads on your blog, there needs to be substantial (and targeted) traffic to your blog in order for you to attract media buyers (the people who buy the ad space from your site). Furthermore, advertisers will want to know precise demographics of your average blog readers, such as their age, location and reading habits (how long they stay on your site and what they respond to in terms of your content and other ads). You can get this information by visiting Quantcast.com and using their scripts to gather all of this data from your blog, which you can then present to interested buyers of ad space on your blog.

These are just some of the ways to attract revenue from your site. Each of the above methods does of course require more training in order for you to reach your maximum profit potential and beyond.

If you’d like to know more about making a six figure income from blogging alone, then you should also check out my detailed REVIEW of Blogging to The Bank.