While everyone else is preaching about how to use blogging and SEO to gain and maximize revenue from AdSense, Kontera, TLA, Chitika and other related programs, I met a few newbies who are into the blogging business or what I’d call blog brokering.
Blog brokering (and this is my own made up definition) is the creative use of a blog to market products and services online to gain revenue. This is like affiliate marketing with the main difference that the blog brokering involves making sure that the sale pushes thru offline. This is not like CJ or Share-a-Sale where you just drive traffic to the affiliate network in the hopes that it will convert.
Let me share to you these blog broker stories.
I met these guys after they called up and said they needed help in moving their WordPress.com blogs into a hosted blog. We offered them our services at plogHost and set them up right away. After a few rounds of drinks at the Pier One in Mall of Asia, they told me how they got into blogging. Basically, they had a car blog and it was mostly all about second hand cars for sale.
And even if they only had just around a hundred visitors a day, they were able to rake in hundreds of thousands of pesos in monthly revenues from their blog.
How? Well, they get commissions between $200 to $1,000 per car sale. How’s that possible? Instead of putting AdSense or Chitika on their blogs, they prominently placed their names and contact numbers on their blogs. People call them up as far as Canada wanting to buy second-hand cars (the high-end models). They help broker the sale and once the deal pushes thru, they get their commissions. All that from a few phone calls here and there. No ad network whatsoever, just people network.
With an average of 2 to 5 sales a month for a fairly new blog, it’s already an impressive feat. And these bloggers don’t like AdSense because it drives the customers away. In fact, they like AdWords instead. Classic entrepreneurial feat truly worthy of being called six-figure bloggers.
In the Philippines, I only know of a few ones doing this purely online. I believe IslandRose has an affiliate program so if you want to try your hands in affiliate marketing, this coming Valentines day would be great time to practice those blogging and seo skills.
Interesting, and while it’s an old article we can see the evolution, but the underlying point is still the same: getting leads. I don’t think getting leads online is a big issue these days, but more on the side of the sales team to convert them.