Category: Internet Marketing

Do you want to know how to make money blogging? As more people turn to finding their own way to make money writing, blogging is becoming more popular again after a lull for several years. That’s because there are now so many ways to monetise your writing, that it’s an attractive way to spend your free time. It’s not just money either – you can blag all kinds of free stuff from DVDs to holidays too!

• How do you create a blog?
• What do you write about?
• How do people find out about your blog?
• Getting paid with subscription writing services
• Other ways to make money online

Getting Started: Finding Your Platform

There are a huge number of platforms which allow users to set up a free website and write content for their network to read, including;

• WordPress
• Wix
• Weebly
• Blogger
• Substack

Take some time to research the format of each platform, any hidden fees, and how easy it is to use the back of the website (which is where you will write your blogs for upload). Each has a different style – some are basic and suited to those who just want to write articles, while others are more complex but have plug-ins that create integrations with other things like newsletter sign ups.

Look to sign up to one that allows you a free domain name, which includes the platform as standard – such as moneymagpie.wordpress.com – to begin with. You can always pay to upgrade to a paid website and pay for a domain name without the platform included once you start finding an audience and earning money from writing. Your free URL will always exist, and it’s easy on most sites to redirect traffic from the free URL to a paid one when it’s set up, so you won’t lose traffic from your regular visitors or people going to the old site.

How do you create a blog?

Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s straightforward to create your blog. Simply start writing! What works quite well when you’re starting out is to write several posts in draft, so that when you set them live and start marketing your blog, there is a range of content for early visitors to read.

The secret to blogging success is contained in three things: good content, good traffic and good marketing. And we’re not going to lie – achieving all three is hard work and certainly won’t happen overnight.

‘So how do you achieve these three magic things?’ you ask.

Good content: what do you write about?

This one is all on you. You need to have an inspired idea for what you’re going to write about and you need to be able to write about it well.

Step 1: See what’s already out there (and get inspired!)

Take a look at Google to see what other blogs are out there. It’s also worth checking out what the most popular blogs of the moment by searching for ones which have won awards like the Webby Awards. Look at blogs on platforms like Medium and Substack too, as you will be able to see which ones have the largest followings, and follow topics to see which writers are regularly promoted to you.

Read blogs that write about subjects you are interested in. See what they do and how you could do it better. Learn from other blogs about how they make money (if they do) and import those ideas into your blog.

Step 2: Decide on a subject

It should already be obvious that your blog can be about absolutely anything. If you’re looking to make money out of your blog, some subjects can attract more lucrative advertising than others. For example, if you set up a really popular travel blog, holiday company advertising can offer reasonable commissions.

What we will tell you though, is to write about something based on your real life experiences, or something that you are genuinely enthused about. Successful blogs are successful because they are built on passion.

How focused your blog is on a particular subject is up to you. Some websites build up a huge amount of traffic just by collecting together all the weird, funny or interesting things they find online. Most successful blogs, however, tend to zone in on one particular subject.

What’s your niche?

Try to find your own niche within the market. There’s no point trying to cover multiple news topics as you’re effectively competing with major websites with millions of readers. Provide something different to what’s on offer elsewhere. If you feel most websites aren’t paying particular attention to a certain topic, or aren’t covering it particularly well, and you can do a better job then a blog is your perfect chance. Your opinion is valid and it’s what readers want: people value authenticity.

As an added bonus, if your site builds up a good following then you can start using it to get ahead in the blogosphere. If your blog covers music, you can start asking record labels (and it’s probably best to start small) for free promo tracks that you can review. Labels will have to spend a lot of money on advertising, and often something like that is effectively free advertising for them. You give your blog credibility by consistently staying on top of the latest releases and you get free music at the same time!

Step 3: Know your audience – and let them find you

Who are you writing for? Family? Friends? People in your profession? Or the general public?

Knowing this will dictate the writing style of your blog, the layout, and how you let other people find out about your website.

If you’re serious about your blog making money then you need to be aiming for a very specific market. You also need to make sure that that market finds out about the blog.

Staying Safe As a Blogger

While your life and experiences and voice are important as a blogger, it is just as important to maintain personal boundaries and safety when writing as you would on any social media. For example, don’t give information that could let people find your home address, your children’s schools, or things like that. If you’re going away on holiday or for a work trip, don’t write or post about it until you’re home (it’s the best way to advertise to burglars that your house is unoccupied!).

It’s up to you if you want to post your face in photos online, or personal information – but don’t include other people that haven’t given you their consent. This includes young children (even if a parent says it is OK, their child can’t consent to their face being posted online which isn’t fair to them). When talking about your day job, keep details vague, such as ‘I work in retail’ or ‘I’m a freelancer in XYZ industry’ or ‘I work for a corporation in the manufacturing industry’. This keeps you safe but also prevents people from assuming what you say is representative of your company’s opinions – which could land you in hot water.

If you receive any harassment from readers, block their email address. If they continue on social media accounts, report and block. Don’t engage with people who want to troll you: it is a waste of your energy and only validates their negative behaviour.

Good traffic: how do people find out about your blog?

It takes time but with persistence you will get there. Start by posting about your blog on all your social media platforms. Follow and engage with other bloggers, journalists, and key industry figures related to your blog, too – they might repost or recommend your blog to others as their audience is your audience.

The right name can do wonders

A catchy or memorable name for your blog is crucial if you are to get people’s attention and make them click on your blog.

You can call it whatever you like – but make sure your blog name is the same as the URL if you want your site to be noticed.

If you want your URL to match your blog name, you will need to purchase your own domain name. However this isn’t usually very much – most website ‘domain’ names can be bought for less than £10 a year (sometimes they only a cost a couple of quid).

Have a look at 123-reg.co.uk or easily.uk and bag yourself a memorable name for your website. You can also usually buy a domain through your platform if you use a hosting service like Ionos, WordPress, or Wix.

A couple of other rules to follow when naming your blog:

1) Keep the title short and snappy

2) Avoid using things like hyphens in the URL (it makes your web address complicated and hard to remember)

Get your blog out there

Don’t just sit and wait for people to come to you. If you’re writing an industry blog, create a press release and send it out to relevant PR agencies, companies, publications, and key figures. Reach out to relevant podcasters, too – audio is a huge market now and interviews can make a big difference on building your audience.

Always post on your social media. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need a platform on every single social channel – it gets exhausting to post on all of them, all the time. You should claim the ‘handle’ (your username people use to find you) on each one though. Use NameCheckr to find a handle that is available across the key platforms, and set up the accounts. You can set the ones you don’t want to use as private. Claiming the handle prevents people from impersonating you online.

It is worth researching different social platforms and how they suit you. For example, you might be able to build a big audience on TikTok but those followers are less likely to move across to your blog from a video compared to a post on LinkedIn.

Good marketing: how to start to make money from blogging?

Once you’ve got things up and running, sign up to a service like Google Adsense which uses specialist search technology to target your site with relevant advertising.

This means that once someone comes to your site to read your blog, if they click on one of the adverts, you will get a share of the revenue. It usually follows that the more informative your site is, the more people will click on relevant ads.

But before you do this, there are some things you may want to think about first.

Who are your target advertisers?

It may sound obvious, but it’s best to pick advertisers who suit your target readers. This not only involves looking through potentially suitable advertisers, but also asking yourself what type of people will read your blog.

This may be quite hard to work out initially, as if it’s just a general blog it will be difficult to determine readership. But once you’ve decided the aim of your blog – or its ‘niche’ – then you can jump into advertising. Even if it’s just a blog about yourself, it’s likely your readers will be like-minded people, so if you write a lot about music then choose music advertising.

With a small blog, to make money from advertising you will need people to click through to the adverts. If the advertising is not suited to your audience then you won’t get any people clicking on them, and you’ll just have some redundant advertising on your page!

Be careful with your advertising though. Most people don’t mind a small amount of advertising – sometimes it can even brighten up a page. But if people are inundated with pop-ups and videos when on your blog they’ll get annoyed and probably won’t come back. There’s nothing wrong with advertising, just try and make it discreet.

Make the most of affiliates

Affiliate marketing can earn you a tidy income. This is where you include a special tracked link from your blog post or website and if someone clicks it then makes a purchase, you earn a percentage or set amount of their purchase total. Make sure your affiliates are relevant to your blog topics – for example, parenting blogs do well with links for baby and child clothes and gadgets.

Awin, ShareASale, and Rakuten Advertising are popular affiliate programmes. You can also create an Amazon storefront and use affiliate links from products you list on there to earn money on items purchased.

Build your traffic

Obviously, unless you have serious amounts of traffic, this is only going to be making you pocket money.

Readers are put off by advert-filled pages, so it’s best to focus on content before you begin to carefully select which adverts to put around your page. If the readers aren’t completely bombarded with them, and the adverts you choose are geared towards the readers, then you’ll do better from it. Readers also are more likely to click on an affiliate link within your blog that is relevant to the topic of the post, or on a special advert at the end of the blog that is your personal recommendation of a product or service you have used and want to share.

You’ll probably need to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website in order to make a living from this kind of advertising, but if you just stick to the basics above your blog could be a nice little side earner.

Sell things off your blog

Don’t forget that you can also sell things from your blog. This is likely to be a more surefire way of making a bit of cash from your blog if the size of your readership is more modest.

If you write a gardening blog for instance, you could sell seeds or an ebook of all your top tips. And if you make a living as a gardener, use the blog to advertise your services, and include photos and write-ups of your best past commissions. It will be a lot more eye-catching than a bog standard CV!

Alternatively, if you’ve decided to start a more creative blog with examples of your illustrations or creations you’ve made you could sell some of these too. Sites like Etsy and Big Cartel offer pages for independent designers to sell their products, and you can attach these links to your blog so people can purchase if they like. Or, set your website up with Shopify to be able to sell direct and have more control over pricing and commission rates.

The possibilities are pretty much endless for selling things on your blog, and the more inventive you are, the more you stand to earn.

Make Money with Paid Subscription Services

In recent years, paid subscription content has become a Big Deal for people making money writing online. The best balance for these services is to offer a free tier, where anyone can get some content each month – and then scale up with paid options for more content.

For example, you might release one blog post a month to the free tier. But a paid tier could get access (or early access) to a weekly post. There are other things you can offer too, such as setting up webinars or live Q&A sessions, or letting your subscribers send you questions to answer in an upcoming blog.

Paid subscriptions are popular on Patreon and Substack. There are pros and cons to both, so research them first before signing up to make sure you’re signed up to the one that suits you best. A paid tier can start from as little as £1 a month – but if you get a hundred people signed up to that, you’re looking at £100 a month for your writing.

Medium is another platform that can pay writers. However, the way it works is a bit more complicated (it is based on reads per month and other metrics), and you don’t own an email list on the platform. This means you can’t individually contact people who sign up to follow you on the site. Patreon and Substack let you manage email lists and that’s incredibly valuable to anyone building their audience.

Register with the ICO

A word on email lists: if you can see people’s email addresses and other personal data, you probably need to register with the ICO. This is a data protection regulator, and it’s the law for anyone handling personal data.

 

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Original source: https://www.moneymagpie.com/make-money/how-to-make-money-from-a-blog