These businesses all build on your Internet marketing/blogging/MMO blog. As long as your blog has an online presence it can be used as a platform for launching other related businesses from, which have the potential to earn far more than the blog itself due to their scalability and cutting edge principles.

1. SEO, social media and blogging consultancy. Consultancies are often launched by bloggers when their expertise and reputation have reached a certain threshold. Examples of bloggers who are also consultants include Patrick Altoft, Chrisg and Glen Allsopp. Setting up a basic consultancy is extremely easy to do (finding clients is another), by simply creating a new page on your blog with details about your services and previous experience you can get started with this.

2. Mentoring membership site. These are slightly more complicated to set up and so have a higher barrier of entry resulting in fewer being created. Examples in the blogging niche include Blog Mastermind from Yaro Starak and Teaching Sells from Brian Clark.

3. E-Book selling. Giving away an e-Book for free in order to build an email list is one thing, but publishing e-Books (not just selling then as an affiliate) that can be sold is another beast entirely. The barrier for entry here varies as there are different strategies available for selling the e-Book (such as using affiliate networks or selling it yourself). E-Book selling is a revenue stream many bloggers have not explored because the natural progression is to start a blog, then build an email list using a free offering. The abundance of free e-Books means a paid for one has to be exceptionally good.

4. Launching a clone of a popular social site for a specific niche. For example BloggingZoom is one of the more popular pligg sites for bloggers. Launched by Courtney Tuttle and Blogger Unleashed. An example of this in another niche is Health Ranker which was launched by Israel from FatManUnleashed.

5. Email courses. These are very easy to set up with Aweber and a paypal account. However, these are also quite rare because it isn’t hard to make the extra leap to a full membership site which unlike an email course can more easily can be sold at a later date.

Conclusion

All those options have been, or are currently in existence. There are plenty of other expansion options such as creating a blog network or adding a forum, but they are just different sections to the same Website.

The only other option is to innovate!

What other business opportunities do you see for blogs?

Photo by susanica

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1. Keep adding to your portfolio of sites. This is a way of continually investing in future ventures. That is what working online is all about so that you are never stuck “trading hours for dollars”. This doesn’t mean you always have to be thinking creatively and writing content. For example I simply bought several domains and installed Wordpress a few months ago and now they already have decent rankings in the SERPS even without any proper content or links. It is easy to forget that time is one of the most important factors in the Google algorithm.

2. Keep learning new skills. Perhaps the first online skill you learned was setting up a blog with hosting and your own domain, then it was learning your way around Wordpress, then SEO and other blogging skills. Perhaps the next skill should be web design or programming. Growing your skills adds more flexibility to your working day, making it more profitable and also more varied and interesting.

3. Always have something productive to do yourself. This sounds obvious but it’s a problem I’ve encountered during scaling my niche blogging network. Never leave yourself in the position where you have nothing to do because you are waiting on someone else.

4. Grow an email list. I’m sure you’ve heard top email marketers say the phrase, “the money is in the list“. They are right, an email list makes easy money compared to blogging. Not starting an email list sooner is the single biggest regret I have about blogging. It can seem daunting to get started with an auto responder and finding out how to increase subscribers, but it is all very simple and as long as your blog has a little traffic people will join your list - especially if you offer an incentive such as a free e-book. I strongly recommend starting your email list right now using Aweber.

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While registering domains is pretty much always a good thing, it can be easy to slip into the routine of registering domains and not actually building them up to make some money. This habit is formed out of an odd combination of impatience and laziness. On the one hand we want to get as many sites going as possible and for the money to be rolling in, but on the other, writing content all day long about topics you only chose because you like the competition/search ratio can get tedious.

What Does Scalability Mean For Blogs?

Scalability is about expanding without increasing the workload on any individual, or as Wikipedia puts it “handling growth gracefully”. Blogging is harder to scale than many businesses because it requires fresh content to be churned out, without that your blogs traffic will decrease down to a certain low plateau and stay like that.

Ways To Scale

4. Keep building new niche blogs while not updating your other niche blogs.
The other niche blogs earnings will decrease, but still exist and eventually you will have a network of many seeming dead blogs (that earn a very little each day) and a few “living” ones, earning round the clock.

Advantages:

• You can do it all yourself, no need to spend resources finding bloggers to run it all for you.
• Once you are bored with a niche you can move on to the next one. You niche abuser.
• You end up with a very large number of sites, which means stability.
• If you took time off your earnings would only decrease slightly

Disadvantages:

• You are potentially wasting money that could be earned if you kept updating all the blogs.
• Your earnings will only increase if you keep starting new blogs
• Repeatedly starting new blogs and installing the same plugins and going through the same routines all the time is boring!

3. Build new blogs at a slower rate while maintaining them all

Your earnings keep increasing as your group of blogs becomes more and more popular. Once your time is filled you continue to blog on the same group of blogs (rather than starting new ones).

Advantages:

• You can keep the select few blogs on topics you enjoy blogging about. With a larger number more of the blogs will be forced over to be based on keywords rather than your hobbies.
• You can do it all yourself.
• A few well groomed blogs means a community can build up around the most successful ones, making it much more fun and satisfying.

Disadvantages:

• You have a less diverse portfolio of blogs. If one suffered an SEO penalty in some way it would make a large impact.
• Taking time off results in a dramatic decrease in earnings (not passive income)

2. Hire bloggers to run the blogs and pay them per post

You are hiring free-lance writers who are (hopefully) specialists on your topic.

Advantages:

• Your blogging business can run and grow independent of you
• If you have the budget you can ensure quality content by paying for more expensive writers

Disadvantages:

• Very high expenses!
• Your writers are not incentivized to promote the blog. They are very much writers and only writers. Part of their pay could go towards marketing, but their value there is hard to measure because one blogger could really make an effort but fail to bring much traffic and another could get lucky, how do you price that?
• You are risking much more money than in previous scenarios, which is unnecessary
• Most people can’t afford to start a blog business this way in the first place

1. Find bloggers to blog on a revenue split.

One way to do this is by inserting their adsense ID into the adsense units on the posts they write.

Advantages:

• Money is not risked
• Your bloggers are incentivized to do their best
• Runs and expands independently of you (passive income)
• You can keep expanding endlessly like this while risking very little money
• Your bloggers earnings should increase over time, which is satisfying for them

Disadvantages:

• Harder to find bloggers willing to work like this and they may be less experienced
• If the site isn’t earning enough they will leave

Conclusion

If you want to get into blogging and have a big budget, but are inexperienced I suggest trying to run a profitable blog yourself with a small budget, in order to gain experience in marketing and growing the blog; rather than simply spending lots on freelance writers wondering why traffic isn’t coming and then spending more on advertising (which is also unnecessary for the vast majority of blogs).

For most bloggers on a small budget, the best option is to go with option 3 until your time is filled and your blogs are earning enough for it to be attractive for other bloggers to blog on a revenue split arrangement there. Then you can gradually make the shift to to finding bloggers to blog on a revenue split while you get new blogs started and eventually hand them over to a revenue split system as well. Rinse and repeat.

I know I’ve previously written in at length about using social voting sites like sphinn and digg for driving traffic and networking, but in the vast majority of niches there is either no social voting site or it is too small to bother with. There are 3 reasons social voting sites don’t cover every niche:

1. The niche isn’t suited to the web and it doesn’t have passionate “users” e.g. Household Furniture.
2. The niche is too small.
3. The Website just hasn’t been built yet (becoming increasingly rare)

Unless your blog is in a niche that is commonly discussed by geeks online, the chances are you wont find a social voting site to promote on. I believe Stumbleupon is the only voting site that can drive traffic for every single niche and that is only because it is so different from other social voting sites. Note that by driving traffic I mean getting traffic from being vote to page 1, not from spamming.

Is This A Problem?

Social voting sites can often be more of a time waster than a useful tool. If you are anything like me you have spend countless hours reading blogs about social media and going out and “contributing” to these social sites like a good little marketer should. I’ve been doing less and less of both recently, and as a result found myself making much more money than before. Not having a social voting site in your niche is probably a good thing.