Your website layout is terrific, the content is chic and interesting, you’ve got all your friends and their moms linking to your blog on their social media pages — but you’re not making any money. Sound familiar?
Well, you’re not alone.
Millions of blogs are being written every year. People all around the world are taking to the internet to post about their lives, their interests, and their hobbies. People are also using social media more than ever before to promote themselves and share their lives with the world.
How can a beginner blogger make money and be unique if there are already millions of other people in the world doing the exact same thing? These fears are not unrealistic.
Most beginner bloggers don’t know where to start with their blogs and don’t even know all ways they can monetize their blogs. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how you can start making money from your blog, let’s look at some stats.
Current Blog Stats: Holy Moly!
Did you know that Tumblr’s cumulative total number of blogs from May 2011 to October 2017 is a whopping 373 million blog accounts? And that’s just Tumblr! There are countless other blogging websites on the internet that people from all across the globe are using.
So how do you set yourself apart
from the millions of other bloggers out there and monetize your blog? It’s not
easy…but with the right tools, skills, knowledge (and maybe even a little bit
of luck), you can make decent money
from your blog.
Just like any other business,
blogging can earn you some good cash flow — if done the right way.
There are certain things you can
(and should) do to make money off your blog. Some ways are easy, while others
require effort, time and care. If you care about your blog and its success,
these strategies and tools will guide you in the right direction and start
earning you cash in no time. There are many simple, effective and downright
easy ways to earn money off your blog.
It’s just about using the right
tools and knowing what to do with these tools to be successful.
Part
One: Money Making Methods
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is something you
absolutely have to become familiar with if you want to monetize your blog. It
is a way you can make money by promoting certain products or services on your
website for a percentage of commission from the sales.
Affiliate marketing is one of the
smartest strategies you can use to start earning money from your blog, and
should not be overlooked.
Here are 4 tips you can use that
will help you earn money from your blog through affiliate marketing:
Choose the right product or service
You
start earning money through affiliate marketing when readers (a) click on hyperlinked text or a hyperlinked
visual ad you have on your blog and then (b) purchase the promoted service or
product. This is why the product or service you are endorsing needs to be relevant
to the content on your blog.
Be genuine. Be yourself.
For example, if you have a blog
dedicated to health and fitness, you might want to affiliate with a health food
website that sells health products or even a website that promotes healthy
workout guides.
Ask yourself: What’s relevant and
valuable to my audience?
Make your content engaging
Don’t just throw in a random link to
one of your affiliate websites. Most readers will see right through this.
If your readers don’t find value in
clicking the link you posted, they won’t click it. Write a compelling review
or interesting anecdote about how a certain product or service helped
you, and explain how it can help your readers.
Make sure you’re genuine and that
you are being yourself. Your readers trust you. They will trust a product that
you endorse if you are 100% open and honest about it.
Endorse the right product or service
Make sure that you thoroughly
research who or what you will be endorsing before you do it.
Makes sure the product or service
you’re promoting will help your reader.
Remember, your readers trust you.
You don’t want to promote something which can be harmful to your readers and
make them lose their trust in you. Do your research and make sure that the
product or service you are promoting will serve to help your readers.
Make
sure your content is user-friendly
The user experience plays a huge
role in whether or not someone will come back to your blog, or how likely they
are to remain loyal to yours.
What goals can visitors accomplish
on your site? Is it easy for them to do so?
If you pepper links in everywhere
and make your ad placement look messy, you will minimize the user experience
and quite possibly lose readers. Make sure you place your links cleverly and
have a good balance between your content and links that you are promoting.
Remember: you’re helping your reader, not just selling to them.
If you’re interested in starting
affiliate marketing on your blog, here are some resources we recommend:
- Beginner Guide to Affiliate Marketing (source: Blogging.com) – Includes a video intro to affiliate marketing
- Affiliate Marketing Infographic – (source: WhoIsHostingThis.com) – Visual guide to affiliate marketing
Where
to Find Affiliate Programs & Products?
We recommend these well-established
programs & networks as a good place for beginners to start:
- Amazon Associates – one of the web’s oldest and largest affiliate programs
- CJ.com – large selection of products for you to promote
- ShareASale – hosts 1000s of affiliate programs
2. Email Marketing
Email
marketing is a great way to reach out to your
subscribers on a personal level. To start making money off of email marketing,
you need to use it as a way to promote and sell your own services or products.
One of the great things about email
marketing is that it is extremely cheap. Not only is it cheap, but if done the
right way it is extremely effective. It allows you to reach your
subscribers to provide them with information about your blog, and you can even
choose how often you send an email. It is a great way to bring in customers and
experience growth in revenue, whether it gets them to click through to your
site, purchase a product or service or take interest in your blog.
You can even put affiliate links in the
email, which can earn you extra cash.
Make sure that you don’t make your
emails look like sales pitches.
Personalize them and make them unique to you, your niche, and your voice.
One really great thing about email
marketing is that it offers measurable metrics. These metrics let you measure
the results of all your email campaigns. These metrics include:
- Click-through rate: the number of people who actually clicked on the links provided in the newsletter
- Open rate (those who have opened and read the email)
- Revenue made (those who actually made a purchase).
Some great (and free!) email marketing tools you can use include:
Some great email marketing tools you
can use include:
- Aweber
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
Please see our in-depth guide to Email Marketing for Bloggers for more information
& options
3. Google AdSense
If you want to make direct income
from your blog through ads, Google AdSense
is something you may want to consider. Google AdSense is a type of
advertising program known as CPC (cost per click, also known as pay per click)
in which publishers display relevant ads on their websites. It is one of
the easiest ways you can make money as a beginner blogger.
After you apply for Google Adsense
and place their code on your site, AdSense automatically displays ads on your
blog. The ads are geared towards the type of content you have on your website.
Essentially, the ads you place on
your blog are placed there by advertisers to earn profit and revenue from the
traffic coming to your website. One of the best things about AdSense is that it
is completely free. This is a great way to earn extra money as
you start to gain more growth and traffic to your website. You can even include
AdSense ads (as linked text) in your blog’s internal search
engine.
Get started with
Google AdSense and get on the path to earning money.
4. Adsense Alternatives (Contextual
& PPC)
Contextual & PPC advertising
networks and services like Clicksor, Media.net work in a similar fashion to
Google AdSense, each with its own set of available advertisers.
There are dozens of alternatives to
Adsense, here are the most promising:
- Media.net – like Adsense, but Bing and Yahoo Networks
- Clicksor
- Chitika
- Infolinks
- Buysellads
- Bidvertiser
5. Banners Ads & Selling Ad Space
Advertisers can rent space on your
blog or website to place a banner with a link to their website. Like other
advertisements, the sole purpose of a banner is to get people who are viewing
your website to click on the banner, with an ultimate end goal of purchasing a
product or service.
Banner ads work much like
traditional ads in print (newspaper or magazine), but banner ads can actually
physically bring users directly to the website that is being advertised. Banner
ads can come in all shapes and sizes and can earn you a good deal of monthly
income, all by simply adding a graphic to your blog.
Advertisers measure the success of
banner ads a number of ways, including:
- Page views: this measures how many visitors are visiting your website and are being exposed to the ad
- Cost per sale: how much money is actually spent to make one sale.
- Click-throughs: how many people clicked on the advertisement
If you’re interested in putting
banner ads on your blog, you can contact businesses yourself to sell space on
your site — or join a banner ad network. Besides Google Adsense &
alternatives above, many of which have banner advertising, you can also check
out:
Pro tip: If you have a website that is very niche or very local,
sometimes selling year-long contracts via banner advertising space can be
lucrative.
For example, you have a website
about tourism in your area — rather than looking to a big advertising network,
you would be better off selling space to local related businesses like hotels
or B&Bs.
Be sure to include a “Advertise on
this site” link in your footer and contact page so the right advertisers can
find you.
6. Digital Downloads
If you’re selling digital products
or working with an affiliate who sells digital products, you might want to
consider looking into digital downloads.
The right digital download service
makes it extremely easy for you to sell digital products on your website.
Selling products like e-books, videos
courses, or software, directly from your website will increase your sales and
make it extremely convenient for the customer.
Look into a digital
download system that works for you,
and do your research. Once you choose one, you can set up digital downloads to
your website so that customers can easily purchase your products or services
with the click of a button.
You may also consider buying the
rights to an ebook, and repackage as your own. This is sometimes referred to as
“white label e-books”, and can be very lucrative.
7. Consulting Services
Consulting is a great way to make
money on your blog. It also helps improve your blog’s traffic and growth. This
is why it’s extremely important to have a very specific niche. That way,
you attract readers who are interested in your niche and are looking to learn
more about it.
For example, if your niche includes
digital marketing and SEO, you may want to consider offering SEO consultation.
If your blog is focused on graphic design, you can offer graphic design consulting
services where you charge a fee for an hour of consultation. The consultation
can be via Skype, phone or even in person.
Consulting is also a great way to
show off your expertise and gain credibility as an expert in your field. Once
you gain enough clients and earn their trust, they can write testimonials
for you which you can post on your blog. This will gain more attention from
prospective clients and will make you look like a trustworthy, credible expert.
Other consulting services people
offer include:
- Photography
- Design
- Health/Fitness
- Life Coaching
- Web Development
- Project Management
- And many more!
Getting started selling your
expertise & knowledge:
·
- How to sell your knowledge online – Free course from Udemy
- Experts Exchange – Is an online marketplace for tech experts, and offers multiple ways to earn. Worth checking out if your niche is related to app development or computers.
- Upwork.com – A marketplace for freelancers of all sorts, has a variety of consulting-related job boards, such as this one for startup consulting.
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