Making money from a business-to-business blog is different than making money from a consumer blog. A B2B blog generally means you’ll have somewhat less traffic than a more generic blog, but each visitor can potentially be worth a lot more to you.

Generic blog monetization methods such as AdSense and affiliate programs just don’t make sense when it comes to B2B blogs. Here’s how to monetize a blog that is targeted specifically at businesses.

The Goal Is the Big Sale

The goal isn’t to make 10 cents on a click or $20 on an affiliate sale. Instead, a better goal is to sell $100-$1,000 products on the front end, plus $1,000 to $10,000 on the back end. To do that, you need to demonstrate that the money visitors spend will generate a positive return on investment (ROI). That’s what’s great about B2B blogs–you’re not selling on emotion, you’re selling on ROI. If you can demonstrate that you will help them make money, and back that with a money-back guarantee in case they don’t make money, you’ll get a lot of sales.

Focus on the Relationship

First of all, don’t expect to make a fast sale. Instead, focus on building the long-term relationship. Get as many people on a newsletter as you can. Aim for 90 percent of your newsletter to be high-quality content and 10 percent to be sales. Post on your blog regularly so your readers can get to know what you have to offer over time, rather than all at once.

Selling Advertising

If you have a blog that is well regarded in a particular industry, you can charge a lot for advertising. You might charge on a CPM model (cost per mille–the ad cost per thousand views), or you might charge on a monthly model. For example, if you’re a recognized name in the online marketing industry, businesses that target people in that industry will be willing to pay a premium for advertising on your website. You can command up to four times what others might pay for more generic advertisements – sometimes even more. These sales will come primarily from building direct relationships with other people in the industry. Once your blog is better known, just put out the word that you’re accepting advertisers and let them come to you.

Selling through Your Customer’s Networks

One benefit of having a B2B blog is that most of your customers have customer lists and relationships of their own. If you create something that they find truly useful to themselves and their customers, that makes it very easy for them to pass your products on to a lot of people.

Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Workweek, put this technique to great use. Although his audience was small, much of his audience was internet marketers. Through his connections with other bloggers and marketers, he was able to go from a no-name to a New York Times bestseller almost overnight.

Put out great content that’s original and truly useful to others. Build relationships with your visitors and aim for larger sales rather than incremental earnings. Your B2B blog can be an incredible source of revenue once it picks up steam.

Before you start your business-to-business blog, it really helps to come up with a rock solid strategy. This strategy will help guide you through the coming months as you build your blog from a newcomer to a resource in your industry. Here are a few tips for building your B2B blog strategy:

Seek to Become a Resource

Nobody likes to read blogs that are meant primarily to promote products or build a company’s image. Instead, the blogs that get real readership are blogs that aim to become a resource. Provide top quality information. This can be in the form of news, reviews, how-to articles, discussions on topics, and so on. Write content that you believe will truly help your target audience.

Know Your Specific Audience

Are you targeting CEOs of companies with revenues between $5 million and $30 million? Are you targeting other small business owners? For a B2B blog to succeed, you’ll need to know who your audience is. Trying to target everyone is a sure recipe for failure. “People in the tech industry” is not a specific audience. “Start-up companies seeking seed funding” is a much more specific audience. Write articles and posts that are relevant to this specific audience.

Create a Regular Posting Schedule

It doesn’t matter if you want to post several times a week or once a month. What is important is that you post regularly. If people come to expect your posts on a certain schedule and you suddenly don’t update for a period of time, they’ll stop returning. On the other hand, if they know that you update every month, they will come back about every month for updates. If they know you update several times a week, they will return more often.

Using the Blog to Boost Business

The ultimate purpose of a B2B blog is to build your brand, build connections and make money. How do you take a blog that is successful and turn it into a resource? First, build an email list. An email list will allow you to stay in touch with the people in your industry who already have a high opinion of you because they read your blog.

Don’t make your blog about selling your products. But don’t be afraid to sell either. If you have something to offer the industry that they will find valuable, use your blog as a resource to make that sale. B2B sales are often multi-step sales processes rather than single step online sales processes. If that is the case, use a contact form to get the people who are interested into a free phone consultation or other freebie that will initiate them into your sales process.

The basic strategy outline for a B2B blog is this: Know who you’re talking to. Become a resource to those people, then use that trust to begin a relationship that will result in you making a sale at some point in the future.

Getting links back to your website is the number one most important factor to getting ranked well in the search engines. What are some link-building strategies that really work?

Get on Twitter and Facebook!

Though many of these links are no-follow links, the exposure will often get you in front of other people who will create permanent links to your website. Have a Facebook group or fan page. Also make sure the like button and the retweet button are both on all the pages that you want people to link to.

Link Bait

Create content designed to spread virally on sites like Reddit and Digg. What tends to do well on these sites?

* Infographics tend to get a lot of attention. Put a bunch of little-known statistics into one infographic.
* Slightly sarcastic content.
* Funny content.
* Content relevant to a news topic that these groups support. They tend to be more liberal than conservative, and also more technologically oriented.

Find Sites that Accept Guest Articles

There are many sites in your industry that depend on outside articles for their success.  Do a Google search for terms such as:

* Keyword + “Submit an Article”
* Keyword + “Guest writer”
* Keyword + “Guest article”

and so on. Try to find websites that regularly host others and try to get an article on their websites.

Get Listed in Directories

Directories are one easy way to build a bunch of backlinks quickly. You can submit them by hand, or hire out the process very affordably in internet marketing forums.

Submit Press Releases

Send press releases to news services like PRWeb, PR Newswire and PR Leap. Some offer free press release services, though typically you will have to pay a small amount of money. These releases will almost definitely generate a handful of backlinks to your website. If your story is especially good, you may even get picked up by news media or a prominent blogger and get a high profile link.

Chamber of Commerce

One easy, high quality link is to get a link from your chamber of commerce. All you need to do is visit at your local chamber and register as a business. They will then put a link to your website from their high authority, high PR website back to your website.

Forums and Blog Comments

Forums and blogs are two easy places to get links. The most important thing to keep in mind with these link sources is that every post you make should be a high quality post, not a junk post designed just to get a link back. Write high quality responses in forums and blogs and include a link back to your website. You’ll build both your backlinks and your credibility in the field as you get more well-known.

There are many link-building techniques. While some work more than others, they all work to some degree. The most important thing is that you get out there, take action and start building links today.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “The money is in the list.” This phrase has gained in popularity as more business owners realize the value of an opt-in list. Your website subscribers are people who have expressed an interest in receiving your information. They’re practically asking to buy your products or service. They just need a little more convincing. That’s where your email messages come into play.

Grow your list, grow your business. Here’s how to build and maintain a profitable opt-in list.

1: Create a compelling offer

The very first secret to building a profitable opt-in list is to create a compelling offer. Now a compelling offer might be a brand-new television. However, if you’re marketing to pet owners, then you’re not targeting them with the right offer. A compelling offer needs to be related specifically to your targeted niche, or area of interest or focus that you want to sell to (read more about niches by clicking on the link on the right if you need more details).

You want your compelling offer to be something that appeals specifically to them, not to everyone in the world.

A compelling offer also has to be valuable and unique. If you’re marketing to pet owners, then it might be something like an e-book or report on “How to choose the right veterinarian for your pet.” It must offer value and quality information. In this way you will position yourself as an expert worth listening to, and someone who can help make their lives easier by solving their problems.

2-: Market your offer

Once you’ve decided on your offer and have created your product or giveaway, it’s time to market that offer. You can market any number of ways. The goal, however, is to drive targeted traffic to your opt-in form or offer page, also commonly referred to as a ”squeeze page”.

To drive traffic, you can use a number of different strategies, including:

* Article marketing
* Social networking
* Co-registration
* Advertising

* Pay Per Click

* Blogging

Whichever strategies you use, make sure they are suited to your niche. Go where they go. Listen to what they have to say. Then target their main issues.  Also make sure your marketing efforts support each other. Create a comprehensive marketing strategy and send each prospect to your opt-in offer page.

3-Make it simple. We do suggest you use a double opt in to make sure you are not accused of being a spammer, but otherwise, keep your whole ‘sales funnel’ clean and simple, without a ton of extra links on the page. List the benefits of your offer and give them a registration coupon and stated privacy policy. Make sure you TEST the order flow to be sure it works, namely, that they get their free download and first couple of editions of the newsletter they are registering for (you will want to follow up with them on a regular basis, so this is the easiest way to get permission to do so).

Now that you are building your opt in list, it is time to maintain it. We will look at that in part 2 of this article.

Link building is one way to increase visibility for your website. If you have never tried this tactic, here are some steps you can take to try it out.

There is no technique that is foolproof. All take trial and error, but, if you do your homework first, the results are almost guaranteed to be better than going in unprepared. Give it a try and see how it works for you.

What Is Link Building?

This is a way to build backlinks from other websites on the internet to your website. Backlinks are the links that you are allowed to place on those websites that others can see and click on and then be transported to your website. Once there, hopefully they will buy or sign up, or whatever the call to action of your website is.

There are several considerations when building links. For one, all websites are not the same. You can contact hundreds of websites and get links from all of them, but if they are not good quality websites, you could be in for trouble.

Check out the pages first and see if they are even relevant to your niche market. Some websites may not be popular, or have the type of traffic that can make a change in your business. Bad links are not worth the effort that you are putting into getting them. Also, poor quality websites may sink your site instead of increasing its ranking.

Ways to Build Links

Start with article submissions. Using your expertise and knowledge to draw traffic in is an easy shot. If you are having trouble writing your thoughts in a coherent and cohesive manner, then hire a ghostwriting service to do it for you. They can also rewrite articles for you for multiple submissions at the same time. Be sure to include search engine optimization (SEO) with relevant keywords that will be picked up by search engines.

Be a consistent and reliable blog commenter. You can keep up with your favorite blogs using an RSS feeder. Leave truly relevant comments for blog posts. Allow your website link to lead other readers there back to your website.

How about forums? Anyone can post a comment of one or two words. Get involved with the conversation. Forum moderators can tell if you are just posting to have your website link seen. Most forums prohibit blatant advertising, but a bio line is allowed.

Trackbacks are links that refer to your blog posting on another relevant blog site. When someone reads the comment by the blog owner and clicks on it, they are taken to your blog entry on your website, building a link.

Want to increase your presence in the right places on the internet? Think about link building.