Letting others know about your blog is essential to advancing your cause. To paraphrase the old tree question, if a blog lives on the internet and no one reads it, is it really alive?
If you can create a network of 50-100+ friends, family and neighbors who care about your cause and make purchases at leading retailers, you can generate great awareness for your cause and potentially hundreds of dollars in affiliate ad commissions.
To seek donations for your cause, you can create a Network for Good Donation Badge at Networkforgood.org [they are an excellent non-profit that makes it very easy to make donations with minimal processing costs for over one million non-profits].
How to Market Your Blog to Raise Funds for Your Cause
1. Add "Visit my blog at name.mylocalcause.com to help [name] by donating or making online purchases from leading retailers…" into your email signature
2. Email a "Check out my new blog at name.mylocalcause.com" to your friends and family
3. Use the Cool Duels Facebook game to to tell them to visit your blog to learn about upcoming events, and then buy cool music, books and stuff through your blog. [GAME IS COMING SOON…]
4. Post new blog entries and replies to posts discussing ideas about planning activities to advance your local cause. This sustains interest and keeps your page ranked higher in search engines.
5. Build a customized blog business card to promote your local cause. Type in a brief text description of the local cause, along with your name, title and email address. A dynamically generated page with a grid of 10 customized business cards with descriptions of the local cause and the name of the organizer/friend. [COMING SOON…]
Print out 5-10 copies, cut out the individual business cards and hand deliver them to family members, friends and neighbors. Explain how your service will help the community. Say something along the lines of, "Please help my local cause. Visit my blog at name.mylocalcause.com to learn about our upcoming events. If you plan to make online purchases, visit our blog to generate commissions from leading retailers. Same price to you, but it helps our cause." Ask them to tape your blog business card to their monitor frame, and have them visit your blog and bookmark the page.
REMINDER: DO NOT SPAM any messages or announcements about your blog. Sending emails to people you don’t know is prohibited and may result your blog account being terminated. Likewise, we discourage chain emails. If your friends care about your cause, have them copy and paste your text into a new email that they write to their friends.
