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No matter what you think of your blog, the government treats your blogging venture as a business. That means you are going to get taxed on the revenue that you make from your efforts. You will most likely have to pay local and state taxes on your income too. Those of you who are dedicated to improving your blog should keep investing in it to take it to the next level. There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to write off your business expenditure. Of course, you do not want to make up expenses to reduce your tax liability (being dishonest will come back to haunt you when you are audited). At the same time, it may not be smart to save everything you make when you can spend money on tools and products that can boost your blog while reducing your tax burden at the same time. Here are just 6 blog-expanding expenses that you can probably write off:

• office tools: in order to blog and run your business more effectively, you are going to need your own office and some tools to go inside it. You may need a printer or a camera to produce content and complete your daily tasks. Most of these costs can be written off (as long as they are reasonable of course).
• computers & laptops: I have seen many bloggers who use their personal computer for their blogging efforts. There is nothing wrong with that. If you want to treat your blog as a business, you should probably try to keep your personal and business assets separate. Bloggers do need a decent computer or laptop to develop their content on. There is no reason not to invest in one.
• your design jobs: paying for a custom design job for your blog is another way to boost your business and bring more credibility to it. Custom logos and themes are not cheap. The good news is you can write these costs off and reduce your tax liability in the process.
• web hosting & domain fees: this is a no brainer. In order to keep your website running, you will have to pay domain registration and web hosting fees. Those of you who have more established blogs probably have to pay a significant amount of money to your web host. These are legitimate business expenses.
• advertising: so many bloggers are afraid of advertising their blogs on Google and through other ad networks. These costs can be written off too. You do not want to go insane with ads. But don’t be afraid to spend some money to test different ideas.
• outsourcing costs: no matter how dedicated you are and how many nights you can go with only 1 or 2 hours of sleep, at some point you will need help to further grow your business. Outsourcing costs can be written off too. Many of these services won’t cost you a whole lot anyway.

Having an accountant to help you out with your tax issues is a smart idea here. You should not make expenses up for obvious reasons nor do you want to invest in things you don’t need. At the same time, don’t hesitate to take into account your legitimate business costs.

• Are there enough players in your niche who are willing to spend money advertising online?
• What products could be attractive to your audience?
• How are you going to find advertisers for your blog?
• How much should your charge per ad?
• Will you be charging per click, action, or 1000 impressions?
• Where are you going to display those ads?
• Do you know how to measure the performance of each ad?
• Are you getting the best EPC from your ads?

There are plenty of other questions that you may have on the topic. While there are general ways to find out about how get advertisers on your blog, most bloggers won’t tell you how they go about doing it themselves. As a rule of thumb, you need to have a decent amount of visitors to your blog before thinking about selling your ads. Once you start getting 25,000+ unique visitors per month, advertisers will start finding you. But what if you have less traffic than that?

There are ways to get around that issue. First of all,  you need to have an action plan. If you want to make sales on your blog, you need to have a decent media kit. There are plenty of companies that will share their media kits with you, so you can always learn from them. You also need to keep building your online assets so you can use them to lure advertisers. For instance, you should keep adding RSS subscribers and building up your Twitter presence. These small little details do make a difference.

How Much Should You Charge and Where To Get Advertisers?

These are the main questions that I get from new bloggers. How much should your charge for your ads? You should always take a look at what your competitors are doing, but you should use those numbers as a guideline. If you get a lot of traffic on your blog, you may afford to ask for a decent amount of money. But if you are just getting started, don’t go for unreasonable numbers. You can always start with a fixed fee and then graduate to “per 1000 impressions” model as you get more visitors to your blog.

How do you find advertisers? There are plenty of ways to do that. You can always contact the ones that are advertising on your competitors’ sites. You can also get aggressive and start calling and e-mailing businesses that can get some value out of advertising on your blog. You certainly don’t want to be passive here. Waiting for advertisers to come to you is not a good idea either.

At the end of the day, everything you need to start selling direct ads on your blog is available on the Internet and through your competitors. By watching what others are doing in your field and comparing their strategies, you can pick up the positives and ditch the negatives. Of course, when you get your feet wet, you are going to figure more things out by experience.

Your take: how would you go about selling ads on your blog?

Many bloggers struggle to make money from their blogs in the first few months and even the first couple of years of their career. There are bloggers who get lucky or find a way to make more money before then. But if you have just set up your blog and haven’t had enough content to get proper exposure on search engines and through the social media, you are going to struggle to make any real money from your ads. Google Adsense is a very good place to start, but it is not as flexible as most people would like. Let’s not forget that services such as Adsense do not exactly let you maximize your profits from your ads either. That’s why serious bloggers need to plan ahead and graduate to an ad server service such as OpenX.

OpenX is an open source ad solution that lets bloggers and portal builders to monetize their work without too much hassle. You set up the system, add your own ads or get others to buy space on your blog, and you are set to go. It’s almost as simple as that. You will need to figure out which type of solution works for your the best and whether you want to sell ads directly or through a market place. Whatever the case, OpenX is there to let you do just that.

OpenX comes in two forms. You can let the company host your ads or you can download the open source solution and host it on your own website. The hosted version is for those who want to outsource the process and take advantage of OpenX’s premium services. You can easily sign up for OpenX service and start working with their team to get your ads live on your blog.

You can always take advantage of the standard package available on OpenX.org to display ads on your blog for free. Unless you own a very popular blog, you should be fine with 100 million impressions that you get for free. Of course, the enterprise edition has more features that you can take advantage of to track and analyze the performance of your ads, but most bloggers should be fine with the standard edition. Regardless of which version you choose, you can always rely on OpenX market to sell ad space and make more money on your blog.

Adding campaigns and your ads to your hosted account is very simple. The interface is so intuitive that anyone with any level of computer knowledge should be able to create campaigns and add ads to them easily. There are a few more advanced ways to control how often your ads are displayed, so when you are ready to take your blog to the next level, you’ll have the tools you’ll need.

Ultimately, if you are tired of playing with services such as Google Adsense, you can’t go wrong with your own ads. You can sell your ads or display affiliate banners on your blog easily with OpenX. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series where I will discuss how the self-hosted OpenX service will work.