Did you know that blogging is one of the most common ways of making money online? Of course, it takes more than just putting a few paragraphs and publishing it on WordPress. It takes a bit of work but fortunately, it’s a very scalable way to make money on the internet.
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You can start small. In fact, there are many freelance bloggers that managed to build a business out of blogging. Many even start it as a part-time gig, blogging during after-work hours. So, to help you start making money with a blog, here are five useful tips:
1. Publish product endorsements
Product endorsement is one of the most popular ways of making money on social media today. This is because these social media personalities have built their communities that trust them in their specific niche or because they want to emulate their lifestyles. The same can be implemented with blogging. As long as you have a loyal and sizeable following that trust you, then product endorsements might be something worth exploring.
If you build a large enough following of blog or even email subscribers, you can monetize your blog by posting product endorsements. Depending on the subject of your blog, you’ll need around 1,000 to 20,000 subscribers before anyone might be interested in paying you to endorse them.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is particularly lucrative if your blog becomes an authority in a particular niche. Setting up a blog for the purpose of generating income through affiliate marketing can be managed by one-man bands so undoubtedly, anyone can do it too. For those not familiar with affiliate marketing, it basically allows you to take a cut of the sale whenever someone who clicked a link from your website buys something on the other end.
In fact, there’s a whole industry that grew around affiliate marketing in the past few years due to ease in setting up websites, the spread of affiliate marketing programs as well as the more attractive option of working from home and the possibility of generating a passive income.
If you have a blog that’s focused on a particular niche and you are a trusted voice for your subscribers, then they would be more willing to purchase products that you mention and link throughout your blog articles.
3. Premium Access Content
You blog often, you have subscribers that trust you and you are a valued voice in your particular community – if you have all this, then you can start offering some kind of paid premium access content.
You can offer access to online courses, webinars or even one-on-one consultation sessions. The key here is that the value of what you are offering should be relevant and attractive enough to your subscriber base. It definitely should be something more than the value they get from your blogs which they get for free anyway.
4. Membership programs
Successful (and profitable bloggers) also use another way to engage their communities – through membership programs. By creating a paid membership program that includes access to a kind of forum and additional members-only content, bloggers provide an added value to their subscribers. Some bloggers are even more sophisticated as they allow access for members to their specially developed web-based software or platforms that are relevant to their subject matter.
5. Digital Magazine
You can also delve into digital magazines with a paid subscription. If you are using WordPress to blog, then you can take advantage of plugins that can gather your blog posts and turn them into a digital magazine. Choose a plugin with the following features:
- It allows you to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS);
- The format of the output is HPub, which is based on HTML5 that’s used in websites and web applications and is popular for its design versatility;
- It supports multiple magazines so you can create different ones based on subject matter.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Making money with a blog is not just a dream but a possibility… if done right. But among all the items mentioned above, there is one key factor that will be the foundation to all of them and that is your audience. You need to have built up an audience of at least 1,000 subscribers.
It’s something like a numbers game. If you can’t find 1,000 regular readers of your blog, then you won’t find enough customers that are willing to buy from you or buy something because of what you’ve written. So, to sum up, you need to start by building an audience, start testing the waters with affiliate marketing or product endorsements and then move on to bigger value offerings such as premium content, membership programs and digital magazines.
