I never really thought that I would be thinking of business models when it comes to blogging. As such, I found this particular post detailing the different blog business models quite interesting – even thought provoking. Bryan, on OneMansGoal outlines three different types of business models which can help you make money through your blog (or blogs for that matter).

The Superblogger
He calls this group “super” because the people behind these kinds of blogs run a big operation. They may focus on only one or two blogs but their idea is to operate in the long run and haul in income while they are at it. The majority of their time is spent on constantly improving their blogs, marketing them, and establishing brand awareness.

The Niche Blogger
This blogger type is a bit different from the previous one in that the focus is on more blogs. As such, the effort and activity are not centered on one or two main blogs but more spread out on a network of blogs. The main concept behind niche blogging is to set up the blogs in such a way that they can attract a lot of readers and then not spend too much time in maintaining them.

The Blog Broker
The blog broker works behind the scenes – he sets up blogs or even purchases them. He then develops them in such a way that they can earn money. Here’s the money making point – he then sells the blogs for more than what he paid for them or more than what he spent on them.

So which business model do you fall under?

Everyone recognizes this name brand – Marks and Spencer is a high street retailer that has been around even before the Internet changed the models of many businesses. They have made it big and they know it. Yet the people behind this successful business are not content in resting on their laurels. In fact, they are open to the realization that times change and that with it, they could also make some adjustments.

Take for example what they did early last year – they focused their energies and creativity into strengthening their web presence. They may be a big business entity but they still gave huge importance to the strengthening of their online presence. It is true that they did not really focus on using a blog to do this, but the idea is similar – they restructured their already existing web site in order to increase sales.

What prompted them do work on this project? According to their figures, their online sales increased more than four times above their shop sales! Now this sort of increase cannot be ignored, no matter how big your business is. They, therefore decided to put more effort into online presence as it would translate into more sales for them.

How is this relevant to you? Whatever the size of your business may be, the guiding principles are the same. You want to increase your sales and hopefully one day become like Marks and Spencer. It is always good to look into what the big businesses are doing and learn from them.

Not convinced yet? Well here are more reasons you should work on improving your business’s online presence.

Gather feedback conveniently
Feedback from customers is one of the most important things in running a business. How would you know if you are satisfying your customers or if there are some aspects that you need to work on? One of the most effective ways of achieving this is to hear directly from the users of your product or service. Having a web site or a blog wherein customers can directly voice out their opinions – whether positive or negative is a cost effective way of doing this.

Make extra income
Maintaining a web site or a blog is not all expenditure on your part. In fact, business models have been changing a lot in the past years because of the Internet. You can even earn extra money through your web site or blog through affiliate marketing and ads. Of course, you have to do this right in order to avoid senseless ads that might only annoy your customers.

Educate your customers
An important thing regarding advertising and marketing is the dissemination of accurate information – both to existing and potential clients. Your web site or blog is an effective way of doing this. You can upload all the relevant information to your blog and have it there for the whole world to read.

Again, all these things can be done with much less cost than traditional methods.

Here are some more compelling reasons to improve your online presence.

Save money on printing and distribution costs.
If you are operating “offline,” the chances are that you spend a considerable sum on printing and distribution costs. This is because the traditional method of marketing involves paper and then physical distribution – either through post or manual distribution. Either way, you have to shell out money to get the job done. This happens with each issue of a newsletter or a flyer.

When you decide to maintain a web site or a blog, though, you would considerably lessen these costs. How so? Of course, you would have to spend some money on the setting up of the site as well as the maintenance. The cost is much lower than the traditional method, though. With a blog, you need only to post entries and make use of the existing technology to distribute your new entries without having to spend a lot.

Get wider exposure for less cost.
Information on the Internet is available to anyone anywhere in the world. Think of your blog as a “free” means of getting the publicity that you need and want. All you need to do is work on your blog and make sure that you reach as many people as you want to. This means crossing physical boundaries – the potential is limitless!

Operate 24/7.
Business hours offer limitations but they are necessary. You can open a hotline which customers can reach 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but the costs may be beyond your reach. With a web site or a blog, however, customers can seek the information they need anytime they need it.

Decision paralysis is something that should be avoided at all costs when it comes to business. This is the situation wherein a manager, or any person in a position, finds himself unable to make a decision at a crucial time. This can happen to anyone, anytime, at least once in his life. No one is totally exempt from such an occurrence – even the most competent of managers may find himself paralyzed when faced something of big import.

So what do you do when this happens in the business sense? Perhaps before this can be answered, it would be better to take a look into the reason behind the paralysis. More often than not, decision paralysis arises from the fact that something negative had occurred in the past – a decision gone bad.

The result is understandable, of course, but it is not an excuse to permanently stay in that crippled state. There are things that could be done for the better. Believe it or not, your business blog can help you out when it comes to making decisions and you feel that you are incapable of making them!

Think about it, what is your business blog for? Some reasons may be:

-to get the word out about your company and your products or services
-to communicate with your customers
-get feedback regarding your company and your products or services
-create a network
-others.

What do you need to make decisions? For every situation, there will always be something different but I do believe that one thing that your blog can help you with is information. You can go back to previous posts and comments and garner information that can be very helpful in making your decisions. More so, you can even gain some confidence when you see what you have written in your blog and what your readers have written as well.

In the last post, we talked about how important it is to befriend other bloggers. We talked about the importance of building your own social network of bloggers. For this post, let’s look at some details on how you can achieve this.

Communication
This is important in most any undertaking, but most especially when it comes to building your own social network. Bloggers always welcome comments. When you do get comments, however, do not just sit there and enjoy them. Make sure that you reply to these comments. You can do this in two ways – either e-mail or reply to the comment through the blog. You can even go one step further by writing a post on the comment. The important thing is that you make your readers know that you appreciate and value their comments.

Link, link, link
I am sure you browse other blogs a lot. If you stumble upon a blog that catches your interest and is, at the same, relevant to your own business blog, link! This will encourage to link to your blog as well.

List ‘em down
Actively look for blogs that are relevant to your own business blog. Do this on purpose – aimlessly surfing the Net is not the way to do it. Search for specific topics and then list down the blogs that you want to link up with. Make sure you visit them regularly and be active as well. Post comments, interact with the bloggers, and build relationships.

Small or home-based businesses face the seemingly insurmountable problem of getting the word out there. Though they may offer a good product or service, if no one knows about them, their business is not going to grow the way they want to. Are you facing this kind of issue in your small or home-based business?

I know that you have probably heard that one of the best ways to advertise is to build a web site. These days, having an online presence is a must if you want to get ahead in the game. Having a site wherein people can find out more about you and your products from the comforts of their homes or offices is on of the most effective ways of advertising.

Yet have you ever thought that you could actually use your business blog as your web site? If you don’t have a web site for your business yet, you could start a blog for the business and generate traffic and potential customers as well.

Blogging is a cost effective way of communicating to the world what your business has to offer. Think about these advantages:

-You can start with a free blog hosting platform.
-You don’t have to know HTML and those things with most blogging platforms.
-Blogs are (generally) search engine friendly.
-Readers cum customers will find your business blog more informative and interactive with comments and responses from you.

You don’t have to start big and spend money on a hi-tech web site. Start simple and reap huge rewards with a business blog as your web site.

Have you ever heard of the buzz word “thought leader”? Wikipedia defines this as:

a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among their peer mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights.

Extending this definition to apply to your business as a whole, your business can become a thought leader in your field if you become recognized as an entity that comes up with innovative ideas and promotes these ideas to the rest of the industry.

Now who wouldn’t want to be recognized as a thought leader in their field? I sure would want my company to be recognized as such!

Have you ever thought about the fact that your business blog can help you gain thought leadership?

This is actually similar to becoming an authority in your field. By showing people – existing customers and potential ones – that you know what you are doing and that you are coming up with new ideas all the time through your blog, you can establish your company as a thought leader.

More than being a small or medium sized company with a human touch, being a thought leader will give people the impression of stability as well as a potential for growth, which is the edge that big companies have over smaller companies.

Establish your blog and establish it well. Show – not merely tell – what your company is capable of and your customer base will grow as you become a thought leader.

If you are new to blogging, then you may be wondering what this post is all about. If you aren’t, then I am sure you have a pretty good idea about what I am going to talk about. For the benefit of those who are not familiar with the term, a blogroll is merely a list of other blogs which you post on your on blog.

So if you are browsing through a specific blog and you see a long list of links to other blogs on one side, you are actually looking at the blogroll. This is one way of letting your readers know that you are recommending the blogs on your blogroll to them. In the same way, if the link to your blog appears in other blogs, you have a form of free advertisement.

With that said, you should pretty much get what I am saying at – blogrolling is good. At the risk of being repetitive, using blogrolls means that you are promoting someone else’s blog and at the same time, your blog is being promoted by others. Seeing it from a business point of view, being in other blogs’ blogroll will enhance your presence on the web.

Imagine if your readers like your blog that much and they link to your business blog in their own sites and blogs? That means higher incoming links and that in turns translates to being in good terms with search engines. In addition to the human factor – people actually seeing your link in other sites – being in the first few pages of a search result is what you are looking for.

So if I were you, I’d get into blogrolling now.

Another aspect to Google’s blogging protocol is that the blogs of each product team is focused solely on Press Relations. That means that comments are turned off for the blog posts. This in turn means that readers cannot voice their opinion and bloggers cannot respond. In short – conversation is not possible.

How can this be beneficial?

I have always stuck to the belief that one of the strongest aspects of a blog is the fact that you can encourage readers to comment and share their own ideas. Gathering information from readers in this way is quite efficient and effective – both in terms of time and money. So how does Google do it without allowing people to comment on their posts?

Perhaps Google already has an advantage of, well, merely being Google. Despite the fact that they do not allow comments in their blogs, their posts serve a purpose similar to that of a pebble being thrown into a placid pond. A tiny pebble thrown into calm waters gives off ripples that have a far reaching effect. Same thing with Google posts – they incite such active discussion in the blogosphere such that their ultimate aim of making their presence even more felt online is achieved.

How can your business benefit from this strategy?

I think that you can adopt a similar policy of using your blog as a venue for press releases. Though you may not feel comfortable letting go of the traditional press release as of yet, you may want to ease into this pattern little by little and see how it can benefit your own business.

Image from: Drawn