Art Of Money

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I’m arranging these into four categories but it is really more of a continuum. The purpose of this is to demonstrate a variety of approaches to content creation and to illustrate the goals for each of the levels of content.

1. News and Current Events

This can be clip and comment type posts where you bounce off of popular topics in your market.

Purpose: To join the conversation and build traffic.

eg: Can you can work an iPhone angle into your topic?

2. Offer Actionable Tips & Techniques

Can you save someone money? Make them a few bucks, solve a problem?

Do it in a post and tell a few people about it.

Purpose: To establish that you are actually living what you are blogging about and paying attention. Building empathy with your audience.

eg: My Todo List System

3. Establish Yourself as an Expert

Provide information that only a few people have access to.

Despite the massive “make money online” noise on the Internet, there are not that many people who have logged into their AdSense account to see a $700 day, or sold 200 units of an information product, or launched their own blog network.

I can write about these topics in a way that others can’t. These posts should be longer and highly valuable; link bait if you will.

Purpose: To establish your expert status, and to build trust and credibility with your audience.

eg: How To Go From $10/Week to $800/Week (a forum posting, but a great example of providing high quality information based on real expertise or experience).

More on creating article rather than blog posts from Jakob Nielsen:

If you’re an expert who wants to live from adding to the world’s knowledge, you must go beyond the mainstream Web model of single page visits driven by search traffic. It’s easy enough to build a website that freeloaders will use, but that shouldn’t be your approach. You must change the game and create content that’s so valuable that business users are willing to pay for it.

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can’t easily create in their spare time.

Both of these needs are met when you produce in-depth content.

4. Home Run Content - Sell it As A Product

With my Real Blog Videos all I really did was take a topic and cover it extremely thoroughly. I could have written “how to setup a blog” from front to back, as a massive blog article. Rather I took a week and recorded screen captures and sold the information.

Imagine taking a week or more of full time effort to produce a single blog posting! It is worth it.

Purpose: To make big money online!

eg: Any blog driven information product. Besides my videos here are some others:

• Six Figure Blogging - Darren Rowse
• SEO Book - Aaron Wall
• Blog Mastermind Course - Yaro Starak

Content Variety is Key

There are probably only a couple on the list that will be natural for you, but it is the variety and use of all of the “levels” of content creation that can keep your blog exciting for your readers and rocket your earnings.

For me, I don’t do news and current events well at all. But learning what makes each of these levels tick and how to do them all well, will put you way ahead in the world of competitive webmastering.