Blogging can be more than a passion, it can be a way for you to make money doing what you love. As we’ve highlighted in our comprehensive How to Make Money Blogging guide, making money with your blog involves a lot of work and takes time – it won’t make you rich overnight. What’s more, monetizing a blog requires far more than placing a bunch of ads on your website or reviewing affiliate products. It’s a process that entails a lot of experimentation, measuring, and adjusting before it generates favorable results.
To help you out, we’ve gathered together for you a few crucial tips on blogging for money that can help you turn your blog into a profitable business. Integrate these tips into your efforts at monetizing your blog.
Target a Profitable Niche You Are Interested In
You are probably familiar with the dictum ‘blog about your passion’. The thing is, if you want to blog for money, you want to make sure that your passion attracts a large enough audience to bring you an income. For example, if you are passionate about 18th century literature and also happen to be passionate about desktop accessories, you will probably find it easier to monetize a blog about desktop accessories, since you can tap into several markets and do affiliate marketing for lots of products, and perhaps even land a sponsorship contract. In other words, before trying to make money blogging, decide which of your passions is the most marketable.
Localize Your Blog
It may sound like you’re narrowing down your audience, but actually you’re creating valuable local marketing opportunities. There are so many blogs out there that whatever topic and theme you choose for your blog, you will have at least one or two direct competitors. Being local adds specificity to your blog and helps you focus on a more targeted audience. Your local search engine ranking will improve, and so more people who perform local searches will end up on your blog. Local companies will be more tempted to buy ad space on your blog, or pay for sponsored content, and your display ads will likely have higher conversion rates due to their specificity.
Write Terrific Guest Posts
Guest posting on other blogs doesn’t usually bring you money directly, although some blogs do pay for guest posts. That said, guest blogging can drive a lot of targeted traffic to your blog, and with it new customers for your products or services. When you have just started blogging, guest posts can actually be even more valuable than your own content, as they can reach a far wider audience. If you’re keen on blogging for money, consider investing, at least in the beginning, as much energy into guest blogging as you invest in creating original content for your blog.
Don’t Sell Ads
Ads are easy to set up on your blog with AdSense, and the great thing is is that you don’t have to bother with them that much, provided that you find a good placement for them. However, while ads are not entirely ineffective – some bloggers still make lots of money with them – there are better ways to make money blogging. One of these ways is selling your own products and services.
It doesn’t have to be the ubiquitous ebook that everyone is selling these days, but courses, membership subscriptions, premium content, and any other product or service you can create by packing your expertise and experience in a format that is easy for your audience to digest. You can also use blog space for affiliate marketing purposes, or to promote a sponsor. These income streams often prove more effective than display ads, which, let’s face it, annoy just about everyone these days.
Sell Your Expertise
Instead of promoting yourself as a blogger, promote yourself as an expert in the niche you are passionate about. You do have to be really good at what you’re doing to pull this off. As you probably know already, people are more likely to buy knowledge when it comes from an authoritative and well-known source. Having a lot of traffic, generating social media buzz, and being recognized and respected by other bloggers in your niche acts as proof of your status as a top blogger and helps you sell your expertise more effectively.
Think Twice Before Offering Cheap Services
Many people associate low prices with poor quality, especially if they are not familiar with the name of the blogger providing them. If the digital product or service you are offering through your blog is not cheap, people will actually be more likely to want to learn more, to find out what value they are getting for the money.
You can make more money blogging by selling your product or services to the richest members of your audience at a premium price, rather than mass selling it for a low price to many different customers. This strategy applies especially to courses, classes, and other educational programs you may offer through your blog, and which can generate more money than ebooks. Of course, to sell at premium prices, you need premium products or services.
The quality of the content on your blog and how much traffic you get have a huge impact on how your blog is viewed by prospects, which is why you want to build trust and authority through your content before trying to push for a sale.
Create Long-Form Content
Long-form content tends to get more traffic. What long-form actually means in blogging terms depends on who you’re asking, but 1,500-2,000 words is a good starting point. Writing long posts requires more effort of course, as well as research and planning, but helps establish you as an authority in your niche. Your calls to action are more likely to be answered if they come at the end of a 3,000-word post replete with facts and useful information than after a thin 500-word post.
Spend As Much Time Promoting Your Content As You Spend Writing It
Use any means available at your disposal, whether they are free or paid. Comment on other blogs, link to your posts, allude to your blog in discussions on forums, encourage reblogs, turn your posts into podcasts or short videos, share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, and so on. Above all, use a marketing platform like MailChimp, AWeber, or Campaign Monitor to build an email list and spread your content far and wide through newsletters. Newsletters have very high conversion rates, much higher than ads or social media. For a guide on how to harness the power of email marketing to make money with your blog, check our in-depth posts about email marketing, including Why You Need to Collect Emails and How to Choose an Email Platform.
Focus On Your Content, Rather Than On Social Media Marketing
Although being on Twitter and Facebook can help you send more traffic to your blog, as well as to advertise to your followers and fans, and also boosts your search engine ranking, social media marketing can be a time-sink for bloggers. You don’t want to neglect social media, but there isn’t always a correlation between the size of your social media following and higher conversions for your blog. At any rate, you don’t want to end up spending more time managing your social media accounts than writing content for your blog, guest posts, and developing digital products and services.
Use Blogging As a Platform For Your Startup, Rather Than As An End In Itself
For many top bloggers, their blog is only a platform through which they launch products or services. They use their blogs as a base for everything they do, but they don’t necessarily try to make money by placing banners on their blogs or selling things directly. You may want to do the same with your blog, to use it to inform, educate, and communicate with your audience and to present what you have to offer, but without featuring any buy buttons whatsoever. Instead, you can use your blog to direct prospects to other landing pages and online storefronts where they can make a purchase.
The Bottom Line
Blogging for money is something that you can pull off if you are passionate about the right thing and keep at it. Just as important as passion and dedication, however, is to understand that the reason many bloggers fail to make money from their blogs in spite of the good content they produce is that they have unrealistic expectations from display ads, affiliate marketing, and ebook sales, strategies which, although still viable, tend to work better for some niches than for others. In the end, remember that you’re not selling ads or products or services, that you are a blogger offering your audience your expertise and passion, at a cost. The trick is to find the right format into which to pack your expertise, and then you too will make money from your blog.
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