If you want to know how to make money blogging, then this post is for you.
There are many people who have come to believe that just because they put up a blog, that they will automatically make money from it.
The truth is, the money does not come from the blog alone. Simply putting words on a page will not magically create an income for you.
There are however, ways that money can be made as a result of blogging. In this post, I am going to tell you some of the ways that utilizing the power of blogging can add to your income.
First off, in case you don't know my story, I started blogging in 2008; grew my blog to a nice sized audience, and then quit because I, like many others, didn't really understand how to monetize my blog. I thought that just by writing and posting random content, that I would crack the code to earning a living as a full-time blogger.
Here is what I did not know: before money can be made online, or even offline for that matter, you need to have two things present: traffic and a buying audience.
Traffic consists of the people who are going to come to your site. You don't just want a bunch of random people coming to your site with no intentions of spending a dime; instead, you want people who are actually looking for whatever it is that you happen to be selling. People who are ready to spend money and buy something.
Your site must offer a solution to the site visitor if you want them to stick around long enough to even see what you have to offer in the form of a solution for them.
Not having traffic and readers to your blog or to your website, it like having a beautiful storefront that nobody knows exists.
Traffic comes from a variety of sources. There are free and paid sources of traffic. Your job as the blogger is to get as much qualified traffic from these sources to come to your blog.
I mean, let's face it; one visitor to your blog is not going to be enough traffic to write home about. You want to get your posts in front of as many people as possible, every single day.
Not only do you need to send good traffic to your blog, but you also want to find a way to turn those site visitors into customers.
The best way to turn those visitors into customers is to get them on your email list.
The email list is one of the most effective ways to get to the money with a blog.
Your blog is really a marketing tool that you use to help you get in front of customers who are interested in what you have to sell. They come to your blog, read your blog posts, and hopefully, make the transition from just a visitor to your site, to being upgraded to a new customer. This is what I call a buying audience.
But let's get back to the traffic. With the right kind and amount of traffic, you can become a source where people come to gain exposure.
There are three ways that a blogger can use their traffic to earn money with their blog. They are affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, and actually selling ads on their blogs.
1. Affiliate Marketing: This is where a blogger is paid to promote other people's content via a website or blog, in exchange for a commission. This is favorable in that you don't have to come up with anything of your own to sell, and oftentimes, the marketer will give you tools to help drive more traffic to your blog so that you can more easily monetize your traffic.
2. Write a Sponsored Post: Sometimes a company may approach you to write one post promoting a particular product or service in exchange for a set fee. This is especially good for someone who has a niche audience.
3. Sell advertising on your blog: You can rent out space by the month on your blog in exchange for a monthly fee. Some bloggers have space in the sides of their blogs that they allow to be purchased by advertisers. Bloggers who have a newsletter that they promote via their blog rent space in their newsletters to advertisers as well.
Money can be made as a result of blogging, but the blog itself is often not the source of income. Hopefully that makes sense because it took a minute for me to get it as well... sigh.
There are three things you need to focus on if you goal is to use your blog as a marketing tool. While earning money is definitely something to look forward to, you need to focus on these three things first:
Focus on getting targeted traffic to your blog
Focus on building a targeted and engaged email list.
Focus on monetization techniques after you have built up the first two.
