Get paid up to $6000 a month to market your blog

An online startup or small business needs a few things in order to start driving traffic and building up a base of customers - namely, "good content" and "reach". Ultimately, this means that you must generate new and engaging content for your business blog right from the start.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that blogging is a peripheral business function, not a core one. This is a mistake because blogging is marketing. The more widely read your blog is, the greater your reach and the more effective your online marketing becomes.

Blogging as marketing

Writing a blog on its own may not be enough to drive high traffic volumes to your site - at least not until you've increased your reach. At some point, assuming you stick with it long enough, your blog will enjoy sufficient popularity and reputation that people follow you directly, until then, it's important to build a reputation by contributing great content to other sites.

Guest blogging, press releases and expert articles are all standard ways of going about building some online visibility and establishing yourself as an expert in your chosen niche. You might want to consider becoming a technorati writer or even post some articles to ezine articles.

The problem is that, initially, you might not want to expend so much time and effort on writing content that is going to enhance the SEO and PageRank of someone else's site. In general, you really want all the best quality original content to appear on your own site, so that Google begins recognizing your blog as a source of quality content. But in reality, you have to give up some of that SEO and PageRank goodness in return for exposure and reach.

Paid blogging as marketing

Because high quality content is really valuable, why not earn some cash for writing great content instead of simply giving it away in a guest blog? Realize, of course, that no-one is going to pay you to directly market your own products or services, but they will pay you for writing relevant, useful and engaging content that establishes you as an expert in your industry.

I recommend that every small business owner becomes an expert content creator as a part time job. There are a number of reasons, including:

• expose yourself to new potential customers
• leverage the reach of the host site
• establish skills and knowledge in your industry
• become recognized in your niche
• generate an income stream

You have to write content because that is how you market a blog or business. In addition, you should also be writing content for other sites in order to gain a wider degree of exposure. There are quality content sites who will pay for this content. Since cash flow is one of the major causes of startup failures, you do the math.

I recommend you apply to become an author/writer/guide at the following sites:

• About
• Gawker
• eHow

Incidentally, the monthly earnings cited in this post's title comes from the About guide compensation page.

I'm sure there are more sites out there that pay well for quality content. Drop a comment and share those with us or let us know what experiences you've had with paid writing and blogging and how this has impacted on your own blog traffic and business revenue.