People blog for different reasons, but many of you out there are blogging to earn profit; trust me, even when I was just getting started I immediately wanted to earn revenue from my blog. It is nice to be able to earn money doing something as fun as blogging. Before you can actually earn profit from your blog, however, you need to know how to mark your blog for profit.
It Starts with an Idea
One of the main things to keep in mind when you want to blog for profit is to start with an idea. It is very tempting to write about everything, but the most successful blogs focus on a particular topic or set of subjects.
You don’t even have to be THAT specific. If you love technology in general, for instance, you can write about anything that relates well to technology. In today’s world, that’s virtually everything; there are technologies behind every part of our lives.
It always starts with an idea. Once you know what you want to focus on, marketing your blog for profit will be so much easier to do.
Expanding Your Reach
The only way your blog can make a large amount of profit is by having a lot of traffic. With great articles and other resources for users to enjoy, getting a lot of traffic is just a matter of expanding your reach. For that, here are a few tips to follow:
– Connect with other bloggers, especially those in the industry. If you are running an web hosting blog, getting in touch with other web hosting bloggers is always a good idea. You can write guest comments, explore the possibilities of collaborating and even write guest posts on other blogs to expand your reach further.
– If you are not on social media, you are missing out on millions of potential users. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, Snapchat and even LinkedIn are all great for connecting with your users as well as millions of other potential users. Keep in mind that they are called social media, so you need to socialize when you are on them. Reply to questions, post questions in order to garner your followers’ responses and interact with your users directly.
– Don’t forget to keep your site SEO campaign in check. Search engines are still the primary sources of traffic for blogs and websites. We naturally search for the information we need on Google or Bing, so having a blog – and content – that is easy to find is a huge plus. SEO is not as complicated as it used to as well. You can do everything generically and still get good SEO performance in return.
Making Money
The actual task of turning your blog into a business is easier to complete than you think. There are a lot of moneymaking opportunities to explore. Older, more conventional ones such as writing an eBook or creating a paid membership site still works, but the more modern approaches can be just as rewarding.
If you want to make money from your blog, here are a few things you can do:
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very good source of income for bloggers. By promoting products that are already on the market, bloggers can focus more on creating quality content that relates to the products. Product reviews, tutorials and other articles can all be linked to affiliate programmes from well-known companies.
Amazon, for example, has a very good affiliate program that offers commissions to bloggers, site owners and content creators.
2. Advertising
Whether it is a text ad or an animated banner, advertising is another way to turn your blog into a profitable business, especially if you have a lot of inbound traffic. You can choose between different payment schemes, different advertisement formats and even different ad networks such as BuySellAds.com
Be sure to keep the adverts you are displaying as classy and unobtrusive as possible. Users have it when there are too many ads on a single page – I know I have popup ads that cover the information I’m trying to get from the page.
3. Your Own Products
Another opportunity you should also explore is selling your own products. Whether it is an eBook – digital products in general – or physical products that relate well to the topic you are discussing on your blog, you can produce and sell your own products easily these days. There are companies who can make, package and ship the products for you. All you need to do is design the product and market them on your blog.
Don’t hesitate to explore other possibilities of turning your blog into a profitable business too. Selling services, giving offline and online talks for a fee and other opportunities are now present for bloggers. Brands and companies are also very open to collaborations, which translates to more ways to make money as a blogger.
