One of the most inspiring methods I’ve found online is the potential of Blogs as tools to help us sell
online. While blogs have become tremendously popular, this channel of self expression has been successfully turned into a money making tool.

Most money making bloggers often utilize blogs as publicity and promotional tools for their other products. However, with the stiff competition from the millions of blogs online, each of them fighting for attention, bloggers have to work hard to carve a niche for themselves. They need to be creative in their traffic generation strategies.

Pay per click advertisements are often a source of side income for these blogs. While this money making channel may seem puny at the beginning, large volume of incoming traffic has the potential to help the blogger earn thousands of dollars.

A recent great example of this is Shoemoney, who recently shocked the Blogosphere by revealing the outrageous income he is generating from Google Adsense alone. He raked in a whopping $132,994.97 just for the month of  August. This was generated from 125,175 clicks, about 1% of the 13 million page impressions. (Oh, apparently Google Adsense income is just his side income. His blog is
actually his publicity tool for other products that he sells online.)

The question here is:
How can you work your blog to attract 13 million visitors per month?

Shoemoney’s success has apparently made other bloggers realize the income they have been missing out on. Sabahan had reduced his ads after receiving complaints from his readers that he had too many ads on his page.

Nevertheless, with only a line of link ads at the header, and only one column text ads on his post pages, Sabahan still managed to make $262.48 in October 2007. (His ads percentage is only 1.94% as compared to Shoemoney’s 14.69%) After seeing the potential of blog ads, Sabahan has decided to beef up the number of ads on his site!

Another relatively new blogger who has managed to make a  name for herself is Caroline Middlebrook. With only 10 weeks of blogging, she had managed to build her subscriber base to 500 by November 13. She attributes her steep rise in traffic to the posts she received from popular bloggers such as Yaro
Starak and Steve Aitchison. Of course, the quality, her blog commenting strategies and also her Twitter guide.

What do all these success stories tell us?

Blogging is a tool which we can use to help us sell online. These successes indicate that with the right approach, strategies and attitude, we CAN sell online and make a living from the internet.

In view of the competitive landscape however, new bloggers need to work hard to stand out from the crowd. Creative, useful and interesting content is no longer the exception, but the norm. No matter what product you are selling over the Internet, your skills in drawing traffic would be one of your ingredients for success.