Reach out to your audience and monetize your blog
Blogging is simple. Blogging for profit is harder. I will not go as far as to say it is hard to draw a secondary income from blogging, but it is definitely harder than most individuals think. It is not just about creating material and slapping up some advertisements from respective companies or affiliates. Good writing, proper tinplating, advertisement placement, developing an audience… there are a lot of skills required to make a blog fruitful, all of which you will need to learn.
You need to blog for the long run or not at all. A vast majority of blogs bomb in the first few months, falling under neglect and disuse. A Couple blogs see earnings during the first few months. Unless you are able to stick with it for at least a year, you will probably never see any return for your effort, although there are some exceptions. Pick a niche that you enjoy and stick with it. General purpose or multi-topic blogs have difficulty developing a readership. Brainstorm the topics that you care about most, then pick one and blog about it exclusively.
Start with one blog. If you have a lot of items on your list of possible topics, don’t give in to the temptation to start a different blog for each one. By dividing your effort between several blogs, you increase the likelihood that all of them will fail. Put all of your effort into one blog to start. Once you get the hang of things, then you might consider branching out with additional blogs.
If you’re unsure, test drive it. The fact is that many people do not have the drive or stamina to blog for income successfully. If you are not sure, try a starter blog on a free service such as Blogger or WordPress.com: Create a Free Website or Blog: Create a Free Website or Blog. Feel it out for a few weeks. If, by the end of this time, you have stuck with it and find you like blogging is right for you, go ahead and commit to the effort. This advice applies equally well to test driving new topics if you’re unsure what to write about.
Place advertisements wisely. Some individuals recommend not placing advertisements on a blog until its matured somewhat. Others advocate putting them up right away. There are rewards and risks to both approaches. Just make certain to place your advertisements tactfully so as not to overwhelm your readers. Put the user experience in the first place and don’t flood them with buy this, buy that!
Enjoy yourself. This is the real key to successful blogging. If you pick a topic that you enjoy and blog about it with passion for months and years on end, your blog will build a readership, generate income, and generally be a success. If, however, your blog becomes a chore to maintain, it will inevitably fail. Thus, if you keep up with your blog and you love it, it will succeed and generate profit. If you do not do your research, write about things that are not of interest, and generally don’t keep up with it, your blog will inevitably fail.
When clients buy your product or service for the first time they really make a trial purchase. If they’re gratified they’ll keep coming back to you. Making a beneficial product isn’t the end of the story. A lot of business owners make the same error. As soon as a product is purchased they forget the buyer. If you want to hold a customer for repeat purchases you should improve your customer service. Provide great service to a buyer who’s bought a product or service. They’ll certainly come back to you as everyone prefers safe, familiar and quality products.
Providing good quality product or service is just the start of the story. Don’t try to fool the buyer. When a emptor gets a good product from you at a fair price they develop certain expectations. Now it’s your responsibility to live up to that expectation by keeping up the quality. If they don’t get good products in the 2nd or 3rd purchase they’ll switch to another brand. Remember that your competitors are there to draw in their attention. Brand loyalty not only earns you prompt profits but maximizes your revenue in the long haul.
So How Do Blogs Make Money?
Advertising — Advertising networks such as Google AdSense will pay to show ads to your visitors. You get paid a commission for the clicks you earn.
Affiliate Marketing — is a pretty standard operating procedure for blogs at this point, so instead of explaining how it works, let’s just say that affiliate marketing can generally make a lot more money than display ads, so it’s a smart option when you’re ready to jump in.
The key to affiliate marketing is partnering with affiliate programs that are aligned with your readers and the goals of your site, and to offer value to your audience.
Lead/Demand Generation — You can always use your blog to promote your own business whether you provide a service, run an ecommerce store, sell digital products such as online courses, or run a subscription/ content model for exclusive content.
Blogs that sell eBooks-An eBook is a great first product to create because you’re already in the business of creating content — often, selling an eBook is simply a matter of repackaging and branding your content.
And if you think people won’t pay for your information, think again. Bloggers often give away more information for free than they need to, and you’d be surprised to know how many people will gladly pay a few bucks for valuable info, especially if it impacts their health, finances, relationships and so on.
Blogs that sell physical products-When done right, e-commerce is a great way to monetize your blog, though it doesn’t work for every niche or blogger, so testing here is key (ie don’t place a wholesale order from overseas if you don’t know how the stuff will sell). If you’r blog’s on WordPress, you can use a platform like Woocommerce to create a store, or use Shopify on a subdomain.
Blogs that offer services– If products aren’t your thing, it’s more than possible to offer services on your blog. If your blog’s about Pinterest, for example, you can offer Pinterest management or other social media services.
The key, as always, is to ensure you’re offering services that your audience is actually interested in, otherwise your traffic won’t convert to customers.
Get Paid to Write Reviews-The process for doing this can be similar to getting sponsored posts. You’ll want to review products that are relevant to your niche, that your audience would be interested in.
You can approach companies on your own to ask about doing paid reviews. There are also websites like PayPerPost that can help to connect you with businesses who may be interested.
Earn Money Online by Flipping Websites-If you know how to build a WordPress website, then you’re way ahead of most people. Sometimes entrepreneurs like to buy already established websites that they can use for their own businesses.
If you can build a WordPress blog and start getting traffic to it, then you can sell it and make money for your efforts.
This requires knowing the type of websites in demand, and how to price and sell them. There are websites like Flippa that serve as auction sites and brokers for selling websites.
Final Words
Remember, advertising doesn’t have to be a long hard cognitive process. Even on a minor scale, personal blogs can definitely generate revenue. The internet and social networking sites now make this easier than ever before. Advertising on your blog can be fun, and more significantly, very rewarding.
The amounts of revenue will differ from niche to niche and also the demand for ads and products will differ as well. However this is still not to say that you can’t your blog to the top in any respective niche online. If you command page 1 of Google for your niche, you can create products, advertise and ultimately create customers and revenue.
Thanks for reading and good luck with your future blogging ventures.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through these links I will receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). I personally hand-test everything that I promote, and I only link to services and products that I know are of high-quality and good use for marketers.