Making Money Blogging
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
A lot of bloggers have problems attempting to make money from their blogs. This is because they do not have a plan for making money blogging. Making a living with your blog involves testing to find out what works best.
Not all blogs are the same and they are targeted at different groups of people. So if you want to be making money blogging you will need to test different monetization strategies to see which works best for you and the market you are targeting.
The Secrets To Making Money Blogging
Let’s take a look at some of the inside secrets to making money blogging.
One very effective way to making money from your blog is to include affiliate links. You should use affiliate products that are directly related to your posts but use a soft sell. Write a short transition paragraph at the end of your post offering a tool or information to help your reader do what your post suggests. You could also put a top and a side banner on your blog selling something by offering some sort of free content to get an opt in and build your list.
As you build your list you can use email marketing to your opted in subscribers to give them additional content and offers. You should make sure that anything you are offering your subscribers is of good quality and preferably you own and use it yourself.
It is also important to make sure your blog has a theme. Do not try to blog about or sell a wide variety of unrelated things. Your readers should know what your blog is all about and your posts should be consistent with that theme.
Another way people are making money blogging is by placing paid ads on your blog. Understand this strategy will only work if your blog already gets a good amount of traffic. If your blog is new, save this strategy for later when you are more established.
When you are ready to take advertising, make sure the products and services you take ads for are consistent with your blog’s image and offer a value to your readers.
Lastly, offer an information product you produce to your readers. By creating and selling your own proprietary product you can build credibility and trust and open up the possibility of offering additional related products in the future.
Making Money Blogging Requires Traffic
Creating a blog or web site that no one ever sees is like putting a billboard in the middle of a desert. Once you have put up your blog, making money blogging will require you to “build a road” by your billboard.
You begin by selecting the keywords you want to be found when people search for them. Google has a free keyword tool you can use to do this. You will want to target keywords that get traffic but are not too competitive.
It is good if there are a lot of Google Ad Words ads on your keyword because that means people are paying money to be found on that term and are making money by doing so. If a Google search on your keywords has no paid ads, pick a different keyword.
It’s best if each blog post is keyword optimized. To do that, put the keyword in the title, the first paragraph, the last paragraph and also in some subheads. Also sprinkle the keyword elsewhere in your content where it makes sense.
Creating the keyword optimized post is only the first step, now you need to promote that post so that the search engines will rank you on your keyword. Google ranks content online in large part by the number of backlinks pointing to it. He who has the most incoming links wins.
To do this, you will need to use some tools to create backlinks to your post from other web sites, directories, blogs and social networks. There are tools that will automate this for you. Some are free and some are paid.
If you would like my list of the tools I use, what I use each one for, what they cost, and the order in which I use them to promote my content, send me an email to joemcvoy@gmail.com and put “Tools for making money blogging” in the subject line.