How to Make Money with Your Blog
Everyone is looking for a way to make more money. Whether it’s rising through the ranks in your career or starting your own degree, there are many different routes you can go for financial success. What if we told you that you could make money with your blog? While it takes a lot of work and writing, it’s very possible.
With the internet becoming how people learn new information, purchase products and spread leisure time, it becomes a hotbed for entrepreneurs to make money. With all the opportunities with online blogging, you’d be foolish not to get into that space. Below, you can learn the best practices to get the traffic you need as well as methods you can monetize your blog. Let’s get started.
Get More Traffic to Your Site
First and foremost, you need to make a website that gets traffic. This isn’t something that happens overnight. Google doesn’t immediately trust new domains and you could see 4-6 months of little traffic before anything big actually happens – no matter the strength of your SEO strategy. That’s just the name of the game.
However, you shouldn’t get discouraged. Make sure you’re practicing best SEO strategies while in this “sandbox period”. Make sure you’re doing the proper keyword research and writing content that people are actually searching. If no one is looking something up, there’s no purpose is writing about it.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re getting backlinks directed to your website. No matter how great your content is, Google won’t rank you higher without this trust factor. Think of it this way, if you get a link from a website Google already trusts, it’s like a powerful endorsement. The Googlebots think that if this trustworthy, authoritative website references you, then you must also be a strong, trusted source. It also causes your site to be crawled more often so any changes you make are indexed sooner.
It’s All About Engagement
When it comes to creating a blog, it’s a cliche to say that engaging content is a must. However, it isn’t any less true. In fact, it’s the most important part of creating a great, monetizable blog. It’s even more important if your goal is to get someone to click on something or buy a product. If that content isn’t engaging, you’re not going to get any conversions.
What’s engaging content? If you’re only writing in your blog, you’ll want to beat the content that’s already ranking on the first page for your target keywords. See the content they wrote and any images/videos they use. That’s the bar that’s set – now you need to raise it. You need to write better, more informative content. You’ll also want to provide more useful videos and pleasant images. This will get people to be more likely to read/interact with your blog.
The type of content you choose to create is also very important. Most blog consist of only written content which could be very dull. Also, since Google prioritizes longer form content, the text could get pretty dense. You’ll want to break it up with something different. While we already mentioned videos, you may also want to consider infographics. These are images that content stats and useful information. Infographics are vastly more shareable and engaging than normal tet and images.
Make a Clean Site
The way you build your website is crucial to how well it ranks and how much traffic you get seeing your blog. That means the code needs to be clean and organized. You’ll also want to include alt text on all of your images. Since Google can’t actually see the image, it requires the alt text to tell them the contents of it. This is a great place to include the keyword.
Site speed is also an important ranking factor for a blog. The slower your site speed is (especially mobile), the less likely you are to rank on page one. While it isn’t impossible, it makes it much more difficult.
In addition to site speed being a ranking factor for Google, it’s also an engagement factor for users. Have you ever been to a website that loads so slow that you leave before doing anything? You’re not unique for that – most people won’t wait for your website to load. There are many options online and if you website won’t load, someone else’s will which means you’re losing potential money.
How Can You Get Paid?
Now that you know about the best SEO practices in order to get traffic to your website, now you’ll want to know how you can monetize your blog. There are many different directions you can go. You can even utilized several of these strategies to maximize your earning.
Affiliate with Online Stores
One of the most common ways to earn money online is to affiliate your blog with an online store. Surprisingly, many different websites have affiliate programs. Even Amazon offers an affiliate program that you can use.
What’s an affiliate program? Essentially, you get a percentage of any sale that’s directed from your website. You add specific affiliate links to the products you’re talking about and, if someone clicks on it, they’re cookied by the affiliate program. Anything the user buys within a specific period (could be 1 day, could be 1 month – it depends on the program), you get a percentage of the sale.
It’s important that you look into the affiliate program before you join them. Each program offers a different percentage of the sale. Sites like Amazon offer different percentages based on the products that are purchased. Make sure you read about the program so you know what you’re getting into.
CPC and CPM Ads
There are many websites that offer ads to your website. For instance,Google offers native ads that allow people using Google Ads add their banner ad to your website. Typically these are remarketing ads, so you don’t have control what shows up here (it’s based on the cookies of the user) but it’s an easy way to get a little money.
Sell Private Ads
On the other hand, you’ll have more control over the ads that show up on your website if you sell ads on your site. These are specific ads where the create pays you to show a specific message. Not only will you display ads for products that you’re comfortable with, but the messaging could be more exact to your user’s demographics. These types of ads are more likely to be clicked than CPC and CPM ads.
Provide Products/Services
The most obvious way to make money with your blog is to offer your own products/services. There are several ways of going about doing this. You can create your own craft or invention and sell it on your blog. The blog is the trust fact to get people to understand the use of your product.
The other way you can sell products online is to become a partner with a product. You can then purchase the product in bulk and sell it at a profit. While this may be more difficult and you’ll need to consider inventory, you have brand recognition behind you. This will help the sale be much easier.
Membership or Paid Content
The toughest way to make money over the blog is to have it gated by a membership. The reason this is so difficult is because you’ll need a brand. There needs to be a reason someone would pay to read your thoughts. However, if you’re an influencer, you have an opportunity to make money with your blog by creating a membership.
Maybe the entire blog isn’t gated by a membership – it could be just specific content. Gated content behind a paywall is very common for larger brands. In fact, it may not even be a paywall. You could have gated content that unlocks when you’re given an email address. Combine this with an email marketing strategy and you have another opportunity to make money with your blog.
You Can Make Money with Your Blog
Making money online is becoming the norm. Now that it’s so much easier to make a blog than ever before, there’s no reason why you should monetize it to create another revenue stream. As long as you’re practicing proper SEO and web develop strategies, there are many opportunities open to you.
