How to Make Money Blogging
For those who want to know how to make money blogging, don’t be misled into thinking that it’s easy. Sure, it beats hard manual labor, but you’ll still need to devote months or possibly years to the process in order to achieve the kind of financial independence that most people dream of. There are those who will promise to teach you the secrets of achieving overnight success on the Internet, but they’re nothing more than con artists looking to separate you from your wallet.
In the following article, we’ll take a look at what you’ll need to do in order to start blogging. Then we’ll examine the various money-making blog options at your disposal. As you read, keep in mind that the road to blogging success is paved with hard work, creativity and a little bit of luck.
How to Start Blogging
In this section, we’ll discuss the basic steps you need to learn how to start making money with your own blog. While you might be tempted to skip one of these steps, I would advise against it. Following these suggestions will give you a solid foundation upon which to build your blogging empire.
Get a Domain Name
Some beginners may consider going with a free blog service, but your long-term success will hinge on establishing your own site with its own domain name. There are two reasons behind this:
1. Some free blog services may impose restrictions on advertising and affiliate links. If you’re trying to figure out how to make money blogging, do you really want someone telling you what you can and can’t advertise?
2. You’ll want to establish a brand name. Buying your own domain name will allow you to have a URL that looks clean and professional. With a free blog, you’ll have something tacked onto the end of the URL. Which sounds better to you: makemoney.com or makemoney.blogspot.com?
You might think there’s no difference in the two, but there is. You want people searching for “make money” to find you – not “make money blog spot”.
Domain Name Options
Two options for purchasing domain names are GoDaddy.com and Dreamhost. Some domain names can be purchased for under $10, while others can run into the thousands. Try to choose a name that’s catchy, short and easy to remember; search engines and your readers will love you for it.
Purchase a “dot com or “dot org” domain. Forget about options like “dot us.”
Get a Web Hosting Provider
A web hosting service is what allows people to access your website via the Internet. For around $10 to $20 per month, you can host your site on GoDaddy, BlueHost or DreamHost. For a little over $100 per month, you can be hosted at LiquidWeb, which offers more reliable service. Avoid free web hosting services, as they’re worthless for those trying to make money with a blog.
Choose a Blog Publisher
You’ll need a blogging platform in order to publish your posts. These are handy, because you don’t need to know lots of complicated HTML code. You just type it in (or cut and paste), and the platform will insert all the necessary codes.
I would recommend WordPress, as it’s much more convenient and user-friendly than Blogger.
Blog Every Day
It’s important to blog every day, especially in the beginning. It will take some time before people start discovering your posts, but the key is to remain patient and keep turning out high-quality blog entries. If, however, you feel yourself getting burned out, then there’s nothing wrong with taking a day or two off.
Get words up on the blog. The more words you put on your site, the more words people might find you via a search engine. Make these quality words and quality posts, of course. Nonsense will just drive readers away.
Keep Improving
No matter how well your blog starts doing, don’t rest on your laurels. You should always be looking for way to generate more traffic and increase sales or click-throughs. One way to accomplish this is by experimenting with the placement of ads and blog titles.
You can also look for ways to spread the word about your blog and achieve a bump in the search engines. Some options for this include article marketing, making guest posts on other blogs, commenting on forums, getting listed in blog directories, exchanging reciprocal text links, and establishing a presence on social media sites.
How to Monetize Your Blog
How to Make Money Blogging
Next, we’ll examine the best strategies for how to monetize your blog. Others do exist, but these are the strategies that have proven most consistent.
Sell Advertising Space
In order to sell advertising space on your blog, you’re going to need to generate a lot of monthly traffic. While this can lead to serious profits, it also requires a lot of focus and hard work. You should not assume that Internet marketing isn’t going to require some effort.
You’ll also need to constantly experiment with ways to promote your site. Still, when examining how to make money blogging, there are few options that are more lucrative.
Pay Per Post
You write blog posts geared towards promoting a specific product and get paid for doing so. Even with a small readership, you can make a decent amount of money. If you’re interested in this option, the best sites to visit are PayPerPost, LoudLaunch, Blogsvertise, Sponsored Reviews, and Blogitive.
Selling Text Links
You can also make money blogging by selling text links to businesses and webmasters looking to improve their ranking on Google. This option doesn’t require much time, but you may find yourself limited in regard to the number of links you can sell. Your site will also need to rank well on Google in order to charge higher fees.
Automated Blogs
This type of blog (also known as a splog) is set up to automatically pull items from search engines, news sites and RSS feeds. The best way to make money is to set up Google Adsense or affiliate links on these pages.
While you won’t have to write the articles yourself, your Google ranking will need to be high in order to generate solid traffic to your site. Even then, the conversion rate isn’t exactly impressive.
Contract Blogging
You get paid to create content for someone else’s blog. In most cases, you’ll either receive a small percentage of the site’s advertising revenue, or you’ll get paid in relation to the number of page views (also known as page impressions).
Affiliate Marketing – If you’re looking for how to make money blogging, this is one of the best options around. With affiliate marketing, you partner up with various companies and receive a payment for referrals. This most often works in one of three ways:
1. Pay Per Click – You receive a small payment each time someone clicks on a text ad or banner ad on your site.
2. Pay Per Sign-Up (aka Pay Per Action) – Each time you refer someone to another site and they sign-up or become a member of that site, you’ll receive a commission.
3. Pay Per Impressions – You receive a payment for a set number of website viewing impressions.
When using this option, it’s important to know your audience. If your site is geared towards people 50 and older, then affiliate ads for online video games wouldn’t be appropriate. Keep in mind that some affiliate programs won’t deal with you until your site generates a certain amount of monthly traffic.
As your blog’s traffic does increase, you may also be able to negotiate for a higher commission rate.
If you’re looking to test the waters of the affiliate marketplace, here are some quality places to start:
- Google Adsense – Perfect for beginners, Adsense automatically runs advertising based on the content of each post on your blog.
- Flex Offers – This affiliate group offers strong payout rates and a wide range of categories.
- eBay – You can link to the site’s homepage, or you may choose to link to a specific auction.
- NCS Reporting – A credit card referral company. When the economy is in a slump, you’ll find better options in other categories.
- Clickbank – They offer a number of ads and text links, but they specialize in e-books.
- Amazon – They sell a ton of items online and you can get a commission by sending customers their way.
- Chitika – Works similar to Google Adsense.
- Market Leverage – Growing in popularity, it offers a solid referral program.
- Commission Junction – If you like pay per action (pay per click) ads, then this is the network for you.
- Linkshare – They offer a number of well-designed and exclusive ads for affiliates.