Contributed post
Running a blog has become much more than just writing a few thoughts down on WordPress. Now, it’s a viable career move, with many people earning six-figure sums from blogging. It sounds too good to be true, but as this list on www.targetinternet.com shows, some blogs pulled in millions of dollars last year alone.
So, how does a blog go from being a personal place for you to talk about different topics, to a massive organization that makes loads of money every day? Well, you may not believe it, but the theory behind making money from a blog is actually pretty simple. It all starts with the framework of your blog; what’s the topic about? Who’s your target audience? Loads of questions like these need answering to ensure you decide on a blogging concept that’s actually popular enough to make money. For example, a lot of the most prominent blogs talk about things like business and marketing as loads of people are interested in that. If you started a blog about your pet cat called Larry, then I doubt it’s going to provide you with the framework to make much cash!
When you’ve landed on the idea for your blog, now you need to think about everything else that should fall into place for you to earn money. That’s what I’m going to bring to you today, so get yourself settled and read all about how you can turn your blog into a money-making machine.
Bring In A Loyal Audience
It’s crucial that you get a steady stream of traffic coming to your blog every day. One of the fundamental ways of doing this is trying to find new audience members every day. However, I’ll talk about that later. Right now, I want to focus on building a loyal audience for your blog. This ensures that you have a group of people who visit your site almost every day and are always there to read your content.
How is this possible? To begin, you need to work on bringing people to your blog in the first place. As it says on www.third-angle.com, if you want to build a loyal following, you need to create a memorable brand experience for your audience. So, you need to ensure your blog has a clear brand and some brand values that people will identify with. This makes certain that your audience feels a connection with your blog, and are more inclined to come back for more. Branding encompasses everything from the way your site looks, to the content you produce. Hopefully, when you decide on the idea of your blog, you have a target audience nailed down. Now, design your brand to appeal to that target audience, and you’re way more likely to create loyal readers.
Bring In New Web Traffic
Clearly, you can’t get people to align with your brand values if no-one is visiting your site. Therefore, there should be an equal amount of emphasis put on bringing in new web traffic. This ensures that you have a constant stream of traffic that can increase every day, or at least remain reasonably steady. Remember, you could have 100 people visiting your site on one day, but then all 100 don’t return the next. However, if you keep looking for new traffic, you may get 100 new visitors the next day, so it still evens out.
Here, you’re looking to explore the key principles of digital marketing. You’ll see it mentions on thrivehive.com that there are ten different ways you can drive traffic to your site. Perhaps the biggest ones are SEO, social media, online advertising, and emails. But, you can also see on www.thedrum.com that there are some trends you may want to think about when marketing your blog this year. I won’t take up any more words talking about this, just know that you should spend a lot of time growing your web traffic via digital marketing.
Side Note: Why Is Traffic So Important?
I’ve spent the last few hundred words telling you to make sure your blog gets a lot of traffic to make money from it. At this point you may be wondering; why? What’s so important about web traffic? As you’ll soon see, a lot of the ways you start earning money from a blog will revolve around the amount of traffic you have. In essence; you will most probably earn more money the more web traffic your blog has on a regular basis. This will start to make more sense as I go through the different methods of generating revenue from your blog.
Add Google AdSense To Your Website
Have you ever been on a website and seen lots of different adverts as you scroll down a page or navigate around the site? I’m sure most of you have, and these adverts are pretty much always from Google AdSense. As it says on the actual Google web page for AdSense, this is a great way to monetize your website. The idea is that you sign up for this service, and Google will then place adverts on your site. It happens pretty much automatically, and they tend to be ads that are tailored to your audience members. As such, they shouldn’t be annoyed by the adverts, which ensures a lower bounce rate and more money for you.
If you’re wondering how you add Google AdSense to your website, then there’s a really helpful guide over on www.quicksprout.com that will help you out. But, I’m sure more of you are wondering how you actually get paid for these ads. Essentially, when you choose the type of adverts you want on your site, and your ad space has been filled, you get paid when the advert is either seen or clicked by someone. Now, this is where the importance of traffic comes into play. A blog with loads of web traffic will undoubtedly get more eyes and clicks on an advert than one with hardly any. Therefore, you could see a hefty paycheck from Google every month.
Promote Things In Your Content
The next couple of monetization ideas will center around this idea of having relationships with brands. So, first and foremost, make sure your site is attractive to at least some brands. The good news is, when you have a specific audience for your site, you become an influencer that certain brands will be keen to work with. In an ideal world, they’ll come to you, but there’s nothing wrong with approaching a brand and seeing if they want to strike some sort of deal. There’s a lot of good content on http://mostlymorgan.com that tells you how best to work with and approach brands with a blogger, so that’s worth a read too.
With this idea, you’re going to work with different brands and promote their products. There are different ways you can do this; the obvious one being sponsored blog posts. They pay you to write a post about their product/service, and you duly oblige. Another way is by sponsoring your blog and getting you to display links to their site on every post or making sure you mention them in some way. The amount of money you get paid is pretty much entirely dependent on your traffic numbers. A blog with a massive stream of content from a specific target audience is a goldmine for brands. They’ll chuck as much money at you as you demand!
Join An Affiliate Program
This final idea is almost an indirect way of working with brands. You still work with them in the sense that you’re kind of still promoting your stuff. The main difference is in how it works and how you get paid. Basically, there are loads of big companies that have affiliate programs for people to join. The aim of the game is to point your audience in the direction of this website, to specific products. But, you only get paid if someone clicks the link and then makes a purchase. You’ll get a percentage of what they paid.
This is a highly popular method of making money via a blog because pretty much anyone can sign up for these programs. Big name brands like Amazon have one, and I’ve seen bloggers with pretty average site stats be apart of it. Again, you stand more chance of succeeding and making loads of money when you have a lot of traffic. It’s simply the law of averages; when 1000 people visit a page with your affiliate link on, then you’ll get more clicks and purchases than if only 100 people visited. However, you can help ensure more success by creating good content around your affiliate link too.
There are two main things to take from this entire article. One; ensure you build a blog that gets a lot of traffic every day. Two; explore different methods of monetizing your site. When you combine both sets of ideas, you end up with the perfect concoction of money-making awesomeness!