Blogging has been a favorite hobby of many people for many years, and currently, this is also a good way to make money on the Web. To make a blog profitable, one should put enough effort to stand out from the competition.
So as we’ve recently promised, in this post, we will speak on how to earn from your blog and succeed. We will distinguish 4 key types of earnings, so let’s start from the most wide-spread ones that are used in 2017 and will be used in 2018.
1. Affiliate Advertising
This is one of the easiest ways to make money online when you run a blog. Affiliate marketing works when you refer a user to any product available online. After a person buys the product based on your advice (your affiliate link), you get a commission.
You can promote products related to the subject of your blog. For instance, if you write about WordPress products, it’s quite possible to sign up for the affiliate programs of theme or plugin developers, online markets selling themes and plugins, hosting providers, WordPress customization services providers, some free page builders you compare with WordPress in your posts, etc.
When choosing a good affiliate program, consider some of the most important features:
- a convenient payment option (for instance PayPal);
- a single product affiliate link;
- custom link option;
- custom discount coupon code;
- email updates;
- affiliate stats and banners.
If you develop your website, you publish quality content and you gain bigger traffic day by day, affiliate marketing is for you, the better traffic you get the more you earn.
2. Products and Services for Sale
It’s not a wonder that bloggers earn money by selling their exclusive products for instance eBooks or online courses and video guides. So how can you find your buyers? This is a task which includes a few main steps:
- set up your blog;
- create quality and exciting content to get good traffic;
- convert visitors into loyal users and then into email subscribers;
- send trustworthy content to the subscribers;
- sell products or services that your target users require.
Mentioned above are the steps you should make to gain the desired results, but the process of achieving your aim will be more complicated than it seems from the beginning. To win the trust of your users and transform them into subscribers and potential customers is easy if you’ve already won the trust of Google and your website has good rankings comparing to your competitors. Stand out from the competition is tough but possible. Sometimes it takes months and sometimes you need years to reach your goal, the time differs depending on the niche.
3. Sponsored Reviews
A sponsored review is a good way to boost your monthly income. You can make from $10 to $1500 and more for a single review at your blog. How to earn this amount? The formula is almost the same as with your product sales:
- you launch a blog;
- you write quality content to make target users trust you;
- you gain good traffic and high rankings in Google;
- and now you can offer your services of writing a sponsored review to your target customers and promote their products on your website.
If your blog is popular you will get a lot of requests from digital product developers asking to write a review for them. So go ahead to make this real.
What benefits will a customer get from a sponsored review? The profit of a customer is obvious:
- direct traffic;
- buzz and popularity;
- valuable feedback;
- sales increase.
Your review works as a direct promotion: a good product promoted on a trustworthy website means that this product is a high-quality one, so this is a signal for a buyer to purchase it without hesitation. Both you and your customer get profit (you earn by writing a review and a customer earns by selling their product as many times as possible).
4. Contextual Ads
This way of making money by blogging is known and widely used for about 10 years. Using AdSense and getting income from every click of a target user – this is the concept of this earning method. You create AdSense account, you add this service (its code) to your website, you set up your payment information, and then you decide where to place Google ads on your web-page to encourage users to click on them.
It’s possible to show up to 3 AdSense units on one web-page. So you can place them above the fold, at the end of every article, in the sidebar, under the article’s title, etc. Google will show ads relevant to your content and interesting for your users, depending on what they search in Google.
Your income will depend on the number of advertisers in your niche, the amount of traffic you receive, the type of traffic and content you have, and some more factors.
Conclusion:
These are the key types of earnings you can receive from your blog if you make everything right. In the next post devoted to blogging, we will speak on how to properly promote your blog to gain better traffic and win the trust of your target users. Please leave your suggestions and concerns in the comments. Thanks.
