How to make a profitable blog with under $20 (and brand yourself in the process)

This is a great post by Jun Loayza on Brandon Mendelson’s blog for Newby internet marketers, existing bloggers who are not monitizing their efforts, and jobseekers wishing to brand themselves as experts in their field in order to get noticed and recruited.

How to make a profitable blog with under $20 – The Graduate Student Survival Blog – Graduate student Brandon Mendelson – Albany NY – Times Union#comment-772

December 2, 2008 at 12:19 am by Brandon Mendelson

If you’re a graduate student, you’re probably broke. How can you make some money to help pay for school? How about blogging? With a budget of less than $20, what steps would you take to build a blog that would turn a profit in 90 days? I asked the experts, and they answered. Want to tell us your thoughts on making a profitable blog for under $20? Write a guest post.

How to make a profitable blog with under $20

By: Jun Loayza, jun[dot]loayza[at]gmail[dot]com

I was challenged by Brandon to write a post about how to make a profitable blog with under $20. I of course cannot turn down a challenge, so I excitedly accepted. Here are the assumptions of this blog post:

* I will give advice that is concrete and actionable. All of these tips should be things that you can immediately start doing tomorrow. You will find no generalities here
* Domain names cost $10 to register
* Hosting is $200, so you will be unable to host your own site
* The blogger is starting from absolute zero personal brand and equity
* For the purpose of this post, we will assume your focus is Fashion
There are several ways to make money with a blog: advertisement, consulting services, eCommerce, or speaker events. If you honestly think about it, it all boils down to one thing: traffic. If you have the traffic, then you will be able to leverage it to make money.

This challenge really isn’t as hard as you may think. It’s going to take A LOT of extremely hard work, but you CAN do it. Let’s go ahead and dive in.

Step #1 – Control your personal brand online

The first thing you’re going to do is sign up for every single social network, bookmark, and micro blog out there. Furthermore, you’re going to buy your domain name for $10 and build your blog on top of that domain name using WordPress

Social Networks and Micro Blogs:

* Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Social Bookmarks

* Digg, Stumble, Mixx, Delicious

You do not have the money to host your own account; therefore, you’re going to have to find a friend or contact who can host the domain name for you. If you must, give him the other $10 you have to make it worth his while.
What if you do not have a friend who you can bum hosting from? Then what you do is go to every single blog out there and build a relationship with each of them. Once you have found someone who you have become great friends with, ask her if you can use her host to host your domain name. Hopefully she’ll say yes. We’ll talk more about how to build relationships with bloggers below.
Recommended blog network to start at: Brazen Careerist

Step #2 – Create your identity and thought leadership
Blogs that are profitable focus on one topic and one topic only. Just take a look at ZenHabits. Leo focuses purely on personal development. He focuses on it religious, to the point that he lives and breaths personal development. This is what you’re going to have to do.
Take a moment (a week or month if you have to) and really find that one thing that you absolutely love and have the deepest passion for possible. I’m talking about such a deep passion that you could talk about this one topic for the rest of your life and never get sick and tired of it. This is what you need to find.
Found it? Ok, lets get moving. (Remember, for this post, I am assuming your focus is Fashion)
Set up every single online outlet that you have to reflect your expertise in Fashion. Take a look at Dan’s Personal Branding Blog. I dare you to google personal branding or his name. This guy lives and breaths personal branding. Everything from his Facebook, Twitter, to LinkedIn all reflect personal branding. This is what you have to do.
Every single link, picture, about me, and status update should reflect your expertise in Fashion. Great, so now we have found your thought-leadership. Lets keep going!

Step #3 – Blog your life away
You now have all of your social networks set up and your thought-leadership figured out. You want to make a profit blogging right? Well, it’s time for you to blog.
Don’t write great posts; write posts that are TO DIE FOR. I learned this from my good friend Derek who writes Prevential. In the next step I will teach you how to market, but if the content is not to die for, then people will not subscribe and keep coming back. Worse, if your content is not to die for, then they won’t tell their friends and promote it all over Twitter.
Write a post every single day. You said you want to make money right? Well, you better be blogging a to-die-for post every single day of the week in order to build the traffic you need to make money. If you take one single break, then you’ve lost it.
Guest write on every blog out there. Yes, you should write a guest post for blogs that are about Fashion, but you don’t have to necessarily stick to just Fashion blogs. Write a guest post for a Tech blog by writing an article about the new Web 2.0 fashion style. Write a guest post for a marketing blog by writing about how Fashion companies can use social media to promote and brand themselves. There is a way to write a guest post for every single blog out there. Go out there and do it!

Step #4 – Evangelize, Evangelize, Evangelize!
After you write a post each day, you’re going to go out into the blogging community and comment on every single blog out there that has written about a very similar topic.
Use Google Blog Search to search recent blogs that have written about a very similar topic. If you wrote a blog post about Paris Fashion, then write those exact keywords on Google Blog Search. Now go to each of those posts and write a very relevant comment that adds value to the post and tell them about the blog post that you just wrote. Tell them that you feel your post is similar to the post that they just wrote and that you would value their feedback on it. They WILL go to your post, read it, and comment back.
Use Twitter Search in the same way you use Google Blog Search. Search for the keywords “Paris Fashion” and @reply to each one of the Tweeps who Tweeted about it. Tell them that you love Paris Fashion as well, and that they should definitely read your blog post. Tweep
s are super friendly! They will @reply you back and hopefully follow you as well.
Build relationships on Stumble, Digg, and Mixx. This can be an extremely time consuming process, but if you do it very well, then it’s very worth it in terms of growing your traffic.

Step #5 – Generate Revenue
With enough hard work and amazing content, you can build your readership to 100K+ a month. Once you have this traffic, you can leverage it in any way you want to generate revenue.
You can of course, lay out ads all over your site. But isn’t that just so boring and messy? Here are some exciting ways that you can generate revenue:

1. Fashion Consulting. You have proven to be a powerhouse in the world of fashion. So what if you didn’t go to FIDM. So what if you haven’t worked in the corporate world of the fashion industry. You have 100K+ people following every word that your write about the fashion industry. You can leverage this following to become a fashion consultant.

2. Speaker Events. People want to read your every word about Fashion; therefore, organizations and companies will want to hire you to speak at their events. This works double time for you because you make money, and more importantly, you reach a new group of people who you can turn into your evangelists.

3. Sell an eBook for free. Yes I said it: “Sell it for free.” Why? Because I don’t believe you should sell an eBook for money. However, do ask for Donations. Write on the bottom of your eBook: “If you loved this eBook, I would greatly appreciate a $5 donation.” Trust me, people will give you money if you have high quality content.

And there you have it. In under $20, you just turned your blog into something profitable. You turned your blog into your career, and you did it by building your personal brand and spreading your thought-leadership.