Making Money from Your Blog - Remember to have fun!

One of the first rules you learn when selling is that “people buy from people they like.” And you can’t like someone unless you know a little about them. That’s why successful salespeople spend time getting to know their prospects, and sharing a little of their own lives with them.

As Web 2.0 practitioners and bloggers we could be accused of thinking we invented this whole concept, but of course it’s been around for an age. How often have you bought from someone simply because he or she was a nice person? I did it yesterday, in fact I do it pretty much every day. Over the years I have made many buying decisions based on the people who are selling rather than the product or price, and I bet you have too.

For those of us who already make our livings on line, or hope to, we need to translate this into our online “selling.” And fortunately we have the tools at our disposal to make that easy!

Be Personable

Your blog, your Tweets, your Facebook profile all need to reflect your personality. Being personable doesn’t mean you have to be Mrs Nice! Perhaps you’re Mrs Interesting, or Mrs Thoughtful, but you do need a consistent personality if people are to get to know you.

Have you been following Frank Kern’s launch of Mass Control 2.0 over the last couple of weeks? I have, and it’s been astonishing. Frank slowly released a series of videos leading up to the launch, full of subtle clues and interesting content. But the bottom line is that he simply comes across as a genuinely nice guy – the sort of guy I would love to spend a day surfing with (he admits he’s addicted but crap at surfing, just like me) and then sink a few beers with. When the final video arrived with the purchase link, I was really looking forward to it, and if there was any way I could afford the $2000 price of Mass Control 2.0 I would have bought it – genuinely. As it happens, he sold out in a day and grossed over $5 Million, which didn’t surprise me in the least.

Have Fun!

Try to inject fun into your online presence. Whilst we may need to blog about such worthies as SEO, Wordpress plug ins and long tail links, we shouldn’t forget to reveal our fun sides. Twitter is great for this too, and it’s usually the funnies which get retweeted the most.

Ryan Wade posted a really funny video on his blog this evening with a call for Mustache marketers to get together. He was sporting the most dubious looking mustache I’ve ever seen in the video – like something from a Spaghetti western, and had me laughing my head off at my desk. He’s gone into my book as someone I could work with in the future, purely on the strength of that video.

Share your life

This may not come naturally, but the more you can share your life via your blog, the more likely people are to buy your advertising and products. It’s back to “If I know you, I can like you.” If I know that you’re a scuba diver, or you enjoy surfing, or that you have a nightmare teenage kid, I’m much more likely to do business with you, as we have so much in common.

Catherine Lawson recently wrote on her blog about her tough choices with a pregnancy that ultimately miscarried. It was a very moving piece, and I now know so much more about her as a person, both through her sharing of the event and through her reactions to what she was going through at the time.

Give your time

Time is the worst kind of bank account in the world. You can only withdraw from it, and never pay in, and you can never check your balance. So when you are giving time to someone, you are giving them a valuable gift. So invest your time in really reading other people’s work, commenting on their blogs, helping people when they need it.

Chris Brogan is a world class user of Twitter. He constantly tweets really interesting stuff, bothers to reply to anybody who addresses him, and never seems to sell anything. I’m not sure he even Tweets new posts on his blog.

In summary, if you want to make money blogging – the more you give, the more you’re likely to get. What do you think?