Monetizing Yourself in the Internet Age: Make Money Blogging & Socializing

What are you passionate about? Knitting, dancing, SEO, rock climbing? The first thing to keep in mind is that there are two audiences for your small business’ social media policy: your employees and your social media team.
By Jay Berkowitz
What are you passionate about?
Knitting, dancing, SEO, rock climbing?
The first thing to keep in mind is that there are two audiences for your small business’ social media policy: your employees and your social media team. Sometimes these are two completely different groups (like if you have an agency running your social media) and sometimes there is a lot of overlap. Let’s start with the social media team.
It’s easy to set up a ‘home base’. It only takes about 15 minutes to set up your own blog website on WordPress.org. And, if you can do email, you can manage a blog website using this simple platform. Make sure that the blog points to your own domain name (website address) so that you own the site as the links to it build value over time. For an example, see my blog based home-base website at www.JayBerkowitz.com. If you’re not sure what to blog about, a great place to start is to answer the 10 – 20 questions you get asked the most. People ask questions when they search on engines like Google and if your answers get picked up, you’ll have free search engine optimization traffic to your blog.
Once you have 10 or 20 blog posts (answers to the top questions you get asked) you can start making money blogging by signing up to include Google AdSense ads. These ads look like Google search ads and Google matches the ads to the text on the page. Then they share revenue with you for clicks on the ads. Other monetization strategies including running affiliate ads (sign up at www.shareasale.com or www.cj.com ) and sponsorships.
Facebook Fan Pages are the business equivalent of your personal Facebook profile. Building them is a great brand-building and social media marketing strategy – as you grow your fan base, you’ll have a chance to promote to more and more people. Post interesting articles, funny stuff, and great ideas to grab the attention of your fans and their friends. Facebook ‘candy’ is a term for square images with funny or interesting slogans you post on your Fan Page. When your fans like, share and comment on the ‘candy’, their friends see your brand message. The Nurses Rock Facebook Fan Page has some great examples of Facebook ‘candy’ with hundreds of thousands of likes. Another great example is iTunes web celebrity JB Glossinger, whose Facebook Fan Page for MorningCoach.com has grown to over 71,000 fans.
YouTube is another great source of free social media marketing for your brand. Examples of great video content for YouTube include how-to videos, promotional content, and viral videos. Will Hamilton is a tennis coach with over 40 million views on his YouTube Channel. He directs all of his YouTube viewers to go to his main website www.FuzzyYellowBalls.com for more free video training and online courses. On his website, he encourages people to sign up with their email address to get more free tennis training. His email list has grown to over 100,000 opt-in subscribers, and most of them come from YouTube!
Information Marketing is another cutting edge strategy for monetizing your expertise. Jeff Walker, creator of the Product Launch Formula, developed a powerful strategy to build followers with free content to sell your information and expertise in online video courses. Just create great free content, build out an email list, create relationships, create a limited time offer, and then create your product. This surefire strategy is a great way to build rapport with your community to create repeat customers.
With these strategies under your belt, it should be easy to do what you love for a living. With some elbow grease and internet marketing savvy, you’ll be on your way to monetize yourself by following your passion. For more information on monetizing strategies, be sure to visit my SlideShare presentation ‘Monetize Yourself’.