As a new blogger, you can make money talking with your readers on the phone. Do you truly have expertise to offer? Charge for your personal time. It's the simplest, most straightforward way to monetize when you're new :) It sure as heck beats what you'll make with Adsense!

Making Money with Services

As I described in the last post, the traditional methods of producing cash flow from a site are things I usually avoid. So if I’m not going to put ads up and monetize that way, what are the alternatives? Making money with services is a no-brainer way to get started. This is where the bulk of my income from Next Level Blogger comes from currently. The thing about offering a service is that there’s no set up time. Simply put up a page describing your service, and voila, you’re in business.

I have a caveat about doing consulting, and it is this: it takes a lot of time. It’s not really scalable, so it’s not a long term focus for me, but it’s a great way to get income started right away. I’m a big fan of my time and value it highly. This is probably true for you also. As a result, I do not consider consulting an ideal long term business model. This is why a lot of consultants charge $250 an hour, $400 an hour or more. It minimizes the time commitment and ensures that the time you spend ear to ear with clients is as hard-hitting, focused and as valuable as possible. That said, working for an hourly rate is a way you can get off the ground quickly and getting some income going right away.

There’s an important point here that I don’t want to be overlooked. Many of you think this doesn’t apply to you, but it does. I know some of you have already written this off as not applicable to your business. If so, you’re wrong :) Hear me out. A lot of you are small business owners. A lot of the people I’ve consulted with are network marketers, Realtors, attorneys, etc. You already have a business, and it’s not a consulting business. So therefore, this method of income generation doesn’t apply to you, correct? I’d argue no…you’re dead wrong.

One of the beauties of blogging is that it can open up entirely new income streams that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Creating a service is certainly an example of this for many businesses.

Right before creating Next Level Blogger, I was doing affiliate marketing exclusively for income (granted, my own flavor of affiliate marketing…I tend to do very little by the book), so does that mean my blog needed to be about affiliate marketing exclusively? Does it mean I can only write about affiliate marketing and only continue making money through affiliate marketing? Of course not! I have 10 years of sales experience and have been selling online in different capacities (PPC, Ebay, Yahoo Stores, ghost writing to name a few) for over 6 years. So why put myself in an affiliate marketing box? I can cover a lot of ground when it comes to marketing.

How does this relate to YOUR business? I see a lot of small business owners put themselves in a box unnecessarily. One of the industries I’ve worked with most heavily recently is real estate. Real estate professionals are really good (no offense guys!) at viewing their business in only one very limited way. List a house, find a buyer, get a commission. Go list another house, find another buyer, get a commission. No problem with that model I suppose, but what the heck is wrong with opening up your opportunity a little bit? Create some new income streams for yourself! I’ve written about many ways to do this, but a great way is by offering a service via your blog. What’s wrong with offering your real estate consulting over the phone? What’s wrong with knocking out a call or two with your blog readers before going on your regular appointments for the day? To me, making $150 an hour (my current rate at the time of this post) is no way to get rich, but it sure is a fine way to fill in some gaps :)

What is your niche? Where is the area of your true expertise? Who can you really help in a targeted way? Don’t underestimate yourself!

A lot of professionals I speak with get locked into just working out of their office and ignore the fact that the people reading their site who don’t necessarily even live in their state, could use their help also! Don’t ignore that opportunity!

If you’re truly an expert in a certain area that is valuable to others, you not only have a perfect foundation for starting a great blog, you have a perfect foundation for starting a powerful service. Do you have to do this? Of course not. I’m just sharing what’s worked well for me, and offering a service got income coming in the first month for me. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. I got an email from a guy that wasn’t even a subscriber. He’d never left a comment on the site or anything. I was barely up and running, and he hired me for a few hours. I was so excited I made something like $500 my first month blogging :)

Do you think I would have been hired for that job if I hadn’t made an offer? No way. All I did was put up a page with a service offer, and bam. It’s not a lot of money admittedly, but very few blogs make $500 their first month. And it sure beats putting up some Adsense like most bloggers do. That would have made me maybe $3.

I will write a more in depth article shortly covering some basics tips on creating a service for your blog, so keep an eye out for that.

I’m also not quite finished with this make money from blogging series. There are a few more points I will be covering in the next post or two. In the meantime, I encourage any questions or comments, and I’ll make sure to include any questions in future content :)