Blogging can be a great way to express your passions, tell stories, or inspire others as a hobby. Chances are, though, that you’re running yours with the intention of making some money and promoting your brand. Whether your goal is to make an extra $1,000 per month or turn blogging into a full-time career, there are plenty of ways to make it happen.
Direct Sales
Likely the most advantageous way to make money on a blog is creating a product and selling it on your site. Increased accessibility in manufacturing and shipping make selling physical products simpler than ever before. This works for some and not for others, because not everyone has or can create a physical product that aligns with their brand. Digital or information products, such as eBooks for example, tend to work the best overall due to low overhead costs.
Whether you’re selling physical or digital goods, there’s a fair amount of research, organization, investment, and risk involved. A well-drafted eBook can bring in more income than CPM advertising or other marketing methods that continuously cost you money to use.
Affiliate Sales
Imagine finding a product you like, promoting that product on your site, and earning a bit of the profit from each sale your promotion generates. This is affiliate marketing in a nutshell, and it has the potential to literally earn money for you while you’re doing anything else. It serves as a relatively quick and simple way to make money without having to actually produce and sell a product. While the logistics can be complex, the payoff can be extraordinary. Often, the consumer doesn’t even need to buy the product for you as the affiliate to earn money.
There’s a variety of ways you can earn money promoting another company’s products. Pay Per Sale is the structure you’ll find most commonly in affiliate marketing. This is where you get paid when a consumer actually buys the product you’re promoting. Slightly more complex, Pay Per Lead pays you for each person who completes a designated action on the seller’s site such as signing up for a newsletter. Lastly, the Pay Per Click structure pays an affiliate for increased traffic to their site, meaning you must engage and convince the consumer to move to the merchant’s site from yours.
Broaden Your Reach
Kind of the flip side of becoming an affiliate merchant is getting your content onto other people’s websites. Guest blogging is a form of sincerely mutually beneficial online interaction. The host site gets free content and an additional voice for their readers to experience, while you get to gain exposure and connect with an entirely new audience.
Social media is another fantastic way to reach a wider audience. Adding blog links to your social media pages, posting images from your site onto your social media, and adding social media share buttons to every page on your site are great ways to get your content out to a larger group. The more places your content can be found, the more traffic and conversions you’ll get.
You may not be reaching a huge audience right now (most bloggers aren’t actually making money), and making money with your blog isn’t typically something that happens overnight. It takes persistence, and you’ll come to discover which methods work best for you.
Hernaldo Turrillo is a writer and author specialised in innovation, AI, DLT, SMEs, trading, investing and new trends in technology and business. He has been working for ztudium group since 2017. He is the editor of openbusinesscouncil.org, tradersdna.com, hedgethink.com, and writes regularly for intelligenthq.com, socialmediacouncil.eu. Hernaldo was born in Spain and finally settled in London, United Kingdom, after a few years of personal growth. Hernaldo finished his Journalism bachelor degree in the University of Seville, Spain, and began working as reporter in the newspaper, Europa Sur, writing about Politics and Society. He also worked as community manager and marketing advisor in Los Barrios, Spain. Innovation, technology, politics and economy are his main interests, with special focus on new trends and ethical projects. He enjoys finding himself getting lost in words, explaining what he understands from the world and helping others. Besides a journalist, he is also a thinker and proactive in digital transformation strategies. Knowledge and ideas have no limits.