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A blog can be more than a hobby. By giving it enough dedication, you can turn your blog into a business and you can actually make money! It’s actually quite fun and can be very rewarding. Below are a few ways to get started!
Growing your blog
Before monetizing your blog, you need to grow it to a certain level. Ideally, you need to be getting lots of new and returning readers. There are lots of ways in which you can encourage this.
The first important thing to consider is your content. This needs to be engaging in order to attract readers – which means not rushing content. You also need to be posting content regularly. For this reason, many blogs take on guest writers so that they can beef up their content.
Marketing your content is important for attracting readers. Social media is a great tool for helping your content to gain exposure. You can also use SEO strategies to boost your rankings so that more people stumble across you through search engines.
Having a well-designed website is also important. Pick a theme somewhere like Restored 316 It could be worth using a service like Userzoom to help improve user-friendliness. Taking measures such as improving loading speed, improving navigation and recommending content can help to retain readers on your site longer. You might also need hosting and I love SITEGROUND.
Finally, think of ways to involve your readers. Social media is a great way to provide interaction with readers. Enabling comments on blog posts can also help encourage conversation and can help build a community.
Ways to monetize your blog
If your blog is regularly getting traffic and you’re starting to receive loyal readers, you can start to look into ways of monetizing your blog and turning it into a business. Some of the most popular ways of doing this are listed below.
Make money through ad revenue
The most popular way to make money via a blog is through advertising. Google AdSense is a platform that allows you to display ads on your site. You simply have to set up an account – if you are approved, ads will start displaying and you can start making money.
It’s very difficult to make a lot of money through ads alone. In fact, unless you’re getting millions of visitors per year, you’ll likely make very little from this strategy. That said, it’s still worth displaying ads – even if you only make a few dollars, it’s money you wouldn’t otherwise have earned.
Post sponsored content
Posting sponsored content is one of the easiest and most reliable ways to make an income via your blog. It usually involves a company or individual paying you to write a blog post promoting their product or service – this could be a review or a news post or something else.
You get to charge the fee you want. Most bloggers use sites like Fiverr to connect with clients that want sponsored content. The bigger your blog is, the more you’ll be able to charge for content. Just make sure that sponsored content fits the theme of your blog so that you don’t lose readers.
Get involved in affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is similar to writing sponsored content. In most cases it involves writing content for a company or individual. This content contains a link to their product or services. Every time someone clicks on this link and buys their product/service, you make a little bit of commission. I like shareasale to start because it’s an easy platform to use and offers a good variety of affiliates.
You could make no money through this strategy or you could make lots of money. You can learn more about affiliate marketing here.
Sell products/services via your blog
It may also be possible to sell products and services via your blog. This could include merchandise, online courses or other products. Having a popular blog will help when converting customers.
Share on Pinterest!
And lastly, make sure to share all your blog posts on Pinterest! This is a great way to continue to bring people back to your blog from another site! Not only will it continue to drive traffic, but if you are pinning posts that have affiliate links within it, you are going to be seeing increased revenue! Also, check into Tailwind – an app that will schedule pins to post at the best times for Pinterest! I love Tailwind and see a huge increase in traffic when I set up those scheduled pins!
And if you are looking for more programs to help grow your blog – check this one out! Blog Success – The $9,000/mo Blogging System is a great system that will totally help you grow, monetize, and enjoy blogging more!