On the surface, the concepts behind making money blogging are fairly straightforward and simple:
- Get Traffic
- Sell Stuff (either yours or someone else’s)
- ????
- Profit!
People hear “Make Money Blogging!” and think all it involves is throwing up a blog and putting some ads on it, then VOILA! the checks start rolling in!
Well, it won’t take long to realize that this is not true. At all.
Getting Traffic
Simply having a blog isn’t enough to get traffic. Sure, you might eventually get a trickling of visitors from search engines if it’s been online long enough, but if you want to get serious about increasing the traffic on your blog, you need to take action.
You need to make people come to your blog. Comment on other blogs in the same field, participate in message boards, and don’t be afraid to talk yourself up. If you’re commenting on someone’s blog, and you have a post of your own that’s related to it or provides another point of view, mention your post in your comment and invite people to check it out.
Use social media to your advantage. Twitter has become a huge tool for internet marketing. It provides a way to interact on another level with the people that might read your blog. Facebook, Friendfeed, and just about any other social media site can be used to help boost your traffic.
This takes time. There’s really no way around it. You have to put in the effort if you want to reap the rewards. Different sources will tell you different things, but marketing your blog will take up a large portion of your overall blogging time. And it’s not something you do once and then coast the rest of the way. You have to be consistent and persistent.
Selling Stuff
So you have the traffic, and now you want to start turning those clicks into cash. There are different ways to go about monetizing your blog, and it will take more than this little summary to tackle them all, so we’ll just mention a few of the more traditional methods.
Probably the first method that most new bloggers are familiar with is Google’s Adsense. These are the banners and boxes with the text links that you see almost everywhere. They’re ubiquitous, but don’t really make that much.
Direct ad sales are affiliate programs are a little more lucrative. With direct ad sales, you’re directly selling space on your blog to someone. You might see a blog with a couple squares with “Advertise Here” in them; this is what direct ad sales are. Advertisers will pay depending on how many times their ad is seen or clicked on. With affiliate programs, you basically try to sell someone else’s product. Any product that you sell for them will result in a commission.
If you hadn’t noticed, these methods require you to sell someone else’s stuff. When you do that, you can’t maximize your profits.
Where the real money starts to come in is with your own products that you sell directly through your blog. Depending on what your blog is about, you might have physical objects that you can sell. For example, if you’re blogging about jewelry making, you could sell your necklaces, earrings, and anything else you make. If you blog about something less tangible, you can sell information products in the form of ebooks, videos, guides, or some such. This could even include your blog itself, in the form of “Premium” versus “Free” content.
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[Content redacted by International Society of Blogger Gnomes]
Profit!
If you’ve been vigilant, you should start seeing some cash start to trickle in. It won’t be the “Get Rich Quick” level of income, but it’s a start. Keep at it!
