Over the last couple of days, my mind has been on websites, blogs and income! This is all thanks to day 13 & 14 of the Suitcase Entrepreneur 30 Day Blog Challenge. With websites and blogs, the thoughts have revolved around making them sticky because you apparently don’t have a lot of time to convince visitors to stay on them. When it comes to income the thoughts have revolved around how to monetise a blog once it is setup in a way that attracts and keeps visitors on it.
I like to keep things simple and I try and apply that to everything I do including my sites/blogs. That said, simplicity means having a design that is easy on the eyes, doesn’t have too many colours and doesn’t have too much going on. Navigation should also be a simple and easy process where visitors can find the information that they need to find and also explore with ease. In the world of social media that we now live in, shareability is something that also comes into play so that visitors can easily share the content with their communities with ease.
All of that might sound simple enough to do but I find myself tweaking my sites here and there, now and then just to see what kind of impact the changes have. Yes, I do make some changes albeit minor ones myself. My sites run on WordPress and the themes I purchased are relatively easy to customise (this is after teaching myself how to make the necessary modifications).
Once a site is up and running and attractive, it may make sense to monetise it. I wrote a post a couple of days ago about my focusing on trust marketing (affiliate marketing) and advertising as online revenue streams. But, after listening to the day 14 podcast, something I had pushed to the back of my mind is coming more to fore.
Without going too much into it, it is based around social media education. I would not classify myself as a social media guru. There are so many people out there in Auckland let along the world who do social very well and have made a good living from it. But, one thing that I have come to realise as my knowledge has increased is that there so many people who want to get onto social media but find it daunting! This is something that I will be exploring over the next few weeks.
As far as existing revenue streams go, the podcast gave me a lot of food for thought on a couple of things I can do over the next month. One of my sites contains a lot of user generated content but the amount and quality varies from month to month. There are times when it can be challenging because low quality updates do affect revenue and without a word of al lie I don’t have much drive to progress it further at those times. But after listening to Jaime Tardy talk about the “lunch pale approach” and continuous forward motion, that is the approach i’ll be taking regardless of the situation.
I will try not to make any excuses that hinder progress and work more on building the site and attracting sponsors and/or advertisers.
It’s time for me to get cracking. What are your thoughts on what I have just discussed?
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