Sure, blogging is a great way to exercise your creativity and get a loyal following, but surely the end game will always be to make money? A lot of time, effort and love goes into building blogs, wouldn’t it be nice to get some monetary compensation for it? Of course it would! Some people earn crazy amounts from humble beginnings as bloggers writing about their life, but the market is saturated and it’s hard to get to a point where you’re in the realms of Zoella and the like for ‘just’ being a blogger.
If you work hard, you could become an influencer, but there are a lot of long hours and missteps and failings on that road. If you’re passionate about what you do, maybe you could become the next blogging influencer, but it’s more likely that you’ll have to look into different avenues of payment. There are various ways you can look into monetising your blog, not all of them involve being a beloved and respected celebrity type figure. If you’ve set up your blog properly and are working hard on it, you can get money coming through regularly.
Of course, everyone will find a different preference of how to make money with their blog, sometimes it’s just a case of trial and error to see what works for you and what generates the most revenue from your blog. It also depends on your type of blog. For example, if you have a really engaged following, with loyal fans who are part of a community, certain revenue streams will work best, while if your blog is of a high quality, but with lurker traffic, another type may be better.
Setting Up An Online Store
This method works best if your blog has a loyal following, or if you have a distinguishable vibe where selling products would fit in well. The basics of how to do this is by setting up and integrating an e-commerce store into your blog, so you’ll need to either invest in a service that can do this promptly and beautifully, or some technical knowledge to do it yourself, or time and effort to learn the technical knowledge that you need.
Coming up with a streamlined strategy of what it is you’re going to sell is really important, if people think you’re selling any old crap for the sake of it, they’ll cotton on and start turning away as they’ll see you as a sellout looking to grab money. If you’re a fitness blog, sell workout accessories that you’ve bought in bulk, or customise accessories to make them unique and covetable. If you run a beauty blog, see if you can invest a bit of time in setting up your own make up brand or skincare and sell that via your online store. It’s all about working within your niche.
Once you’ve figured out what you’re going to be selling, all the profits will go straight to you. When you start out, chances are it’ll only pay for your hosting and domain etc, but if the success grows, it can help contribute to a healthy monthly take home.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a widely popular way for blog earnings in the online world and ti really couldn’t be easier. First of all, you have to find an affiliate, there are plenty of websites out there which are dedicated to finding affiliate programmes to help you start generating revenue on your blog. You can often search for affiliates in particular categories (this is where you find your niche and see what is on offer), which makes it great for finding products which fit in with your blog really well.
After finding your affiliate partner, you then need to set up the affiliate links on your blog. You need to make these look good and make people want to click on them because of the way affiliate marketing works. With affiliates, you earn money when people buy from your affiliate link, not just when they click on it. And to buy they need to click, if they don’t click, they don’t buy and you don’t get the commission.
These can either be as a side advert placed somewhere on your blog, or, the most popular option, by recommendations. These can be in the form of a blog, where you talk about a topic surrounding the affiliate link and then recommend the product and insert a link to it within the text.
AdSense
AdSense is Google’s advertising software that places ads across the internet to relevant people on relevant sites. The policy is pretty strict, but once you get the hang of it, the rewards can be plentiful. It basically works on a pay-per-click basis. Advertisers pay Google to run ads and whenever their advert is relevant to someone, it appears in the Adsense slots on participating websites. You’re basically giving Google free reign of these ad slots on your website.
You get paid when people click on the advert (not yourself though). They normally pay by bank transfer at the end of the month and you will get a report of your revenue earned.
Guest Posting
One of the ways certain blogs get money is by allowing third parties to post on their site for a fee. A lot of the time, these guest posts will contain a link to another website, which is the main reasons people pay to guest post. The posts are normally either sponsored for you to review products or recommend services or have contextual information that can be related to the sponsor.
Sometimes, you’re blog may be added to a blogger network, where they organise the guest posts and take a cut, or you can take posts directly from people who ask for it via your site or email.