Blogging hasn’t yet been generally perceived as a full-time job. What most people aren’t aware of, is that so many people make a full-time income blogging, some even turn it into a company and hire a full staff team to manage it. So how do you monetize your blog? It’s not as simple as it sounds; continue reading below to discover a few simple steps to make money from your blog.
If you want to have a professional well-optimised blog, you have to, first of all, find a way to drive a good deal of traffic to it. You have to also understand that it will take some time to make a decent revenue for your blog. That being said, start with the basics of blogging: Optimizing your blog with
#1. Patience is key
Blogging is a long-term process, and it will take time before you start making even a few pennies, that’s because it requires you to build an audience, to gather a large amount of resources or blog posts that are useful, and to be recognized by search engines. Studies have shown that it takes on average a year to start making decent money blogging.
#2. Optimize your blog
Even if your content is 100% legit and useful, people won’t stumble across your blog by accident, working on search engine optimization and keyword optimization is important in order to get recognized by search engines as well as to get a higher Domain Authority and Alexa Rank. Take a modern furniture blog for instance, the keywords “modern furniture” will keep getting repeated throughout the various blog posts.
#3. Collaborate with other bloggers
In the blog world, bloggers promote each other’s content to one another’s audiences, this makes it easier for you to get more traction. Offer to write guest posts that link back to your website, offer to contribute with a story or an infographic. It will result in better search engine optimization for your website. Here’s an example of a guest post written by an author on a blog which is linking back to that author’s website for instance.
#4. Accept guest posts
Guest posts can increase the quantity and quality of content on your blog and consequently result in better search engine visibility. Accept as much relevant and well-written guest posts as you can, in order to increase your site’s visibility while at the same time getting your blog posts promoted on other domains. Eventually, a great way to start earning an income is to start charging authors for guest posts.
To put it in a nutshell, there are various ways in which bloggers can make a decent income by blogging, but it takes time, persistence and smart work to get there. A great way to start your own money-making blog is to start it as a hobby or a part-time job and grow it slowly but steadily until it starts to get good traction.
Now that you’ve got the basics down, and if you’re starting to see a stable amount of traffic visit your website on a daily basis, then you are ready to start making money! There are so many various methods you can monetise your blog. That being said, don’t get disheartened if one way doesn’t work for you, not all monetisation methods are supposed to work for any one blog. Depending on the type of blog that you own, one method will work more for you than another.
Below are some of the best monetisation methods to get those dollar bills rolling.
#5. Pay Per Click Advertising
This is the simplest and most used blog monetisation tool. Basically, you get paid every time a visitor clicks on one of your ads. You can display the ads wherever you think is more relevant. Some people even go as far as to display the ads within the blog posts themselves, somewhere between the text. This method is usually used with a combination of other monetisation methods and is usually the most successful for blogs that have a really significant amount of traffic.
#6. Charging for guest posts
We’ve already mentioned this in the beginning of this post. Basically, when you have a good enough amount of daily traffic coming into your site, and authors start approaching you for guest posting opportunities, a great way to add more relevant content to your site while at the same time making money is to charge a fee for guest posting. It can go all the way from $20 to $400 to publish an author’s guest post. Some websites go as far as to charge $500 and more on a single guest post.
The fee that you will charge authors will all depend on several factors including the Domain Authority of your website, your Alexa Rank, your daily traffic, the period of time for which you will keep a guest post up on the site, the page on which the guest post will appear and finally whether or not external links (nofollow or dofollow) will be included in the guest post.e relevant to the themes of your blog.
One thing to beware of when accepting paid guest posts is spammy guest posts. Google might penalize you for publishing spammy, link-filled, irrelevant or useless content on your site and charging for it. It’s usually smart to only accept guest posts that add some kind of value to your readers, that don’t seem spammy and only contain relevant links and finally that are relevant to the themes of your blog.
#7. Text Link Ads
Similar to how authors sometimes link to their sites or to other websites within their blog posts, text link ads are ads that show up when a reader clicks on the text link and are usually relevant to the content of the blog post. This method is very similar, in a way, to pay per click advertising in that you pay for every click or possibly purchase (depending on the type of affiliate marketing that you signed up for) that your readers make. This method is non-intrusive in the sense where it does not disturb readers while they are reading a blog post, definitely not as much as pay per click ads that appear in between text or besides articles.
#8. Pop-ups/Lightboxes
You have all definitely heard or experienced these. Pop-up ads appear while you are browsing a certain page on a website usually to promote something. The problem with pop-up ads is that most people find them to be really annoying and just want to click the “x” button as soon as the ad shows up. The good thing is that once a user closes the pop-up ad, most websites won’t display them again, then again a few blogs will continue displaying them everytime a readers goes on to a different page on the website. Pop-up ads can be really useful in terms of monetisation as they have the ability to grab as much attention from the reader as possible. Be careful how to use them though, since they are perceived by a lot of people as annoying and disturbing.
Finally, there are so many more blog monetization techniques that can be used such as affiliate marketing, product reviews, creating and selling your own product, writing an ebook, writing tutorials and guides, live workshops, hosting a webinar, providing consulting services and so many more. I’ve only gone into detail about the ones mentioned above because I personally find them to be the most useful and can be used by most blogs. If you need more help with figuring out which monetization method works best for your blog, consider hiring a marketing coach or consider talking to other blog owners to learn from their experience.
Image: monetize blog phrase made from metallic letter blocks over dollar banknotes
