How to monetize your Blog: Initial Steps
Blogs are growing exponentially, because they can generate very positive results without requiring a large investment, especially in the long term. In the following topics we will answer several questions that will clear all your doubts about how blogs work and how to make money from it.
What is a Blog?
A blog functions as a digital diary, serving as an online platform where individuals can share their thoughts, experiences, and knowledge with an audience. A blog is constituted by posts that feature individual content, such as text, images, audio, and video. In order to better understand what a blog is, we create an analogy, we assume that the blog is a library, and the posts are the books, rich in content, and these books can belong to the same theme or not.
Why should you create a blog?
There are a lot of reasons why an individual should create a blog. Some people decide to create a blog to monetize it, others simply to reach new potential clients and direct them to their website (As is our case!) and others with the goal of expanding their business to the digital world. Remembering that certain people also create blogs without monetary purposes and just to spread their thoughts and knowledge.
1-Potential income & Monetization
After reaching a reasonable number of visitors and an audience, blogs can bring you a lot of money. For example, you can choose to let companies put their advertisement on your blog in exchange for some money. You can also sell your own products and services or displace your affiliate links to gain commissions if a visitor from your website buys the product through your link. There’s also a change that some business owners will contact you and pay you to display and promote their content on your blog. As you can see, there are numerous ways to earn money by creating a blog.
2-Attract potential clients to your website
Creating a blog is a widely used technique to attract potential clients and new visitors to your website. Probably, you have noticed that a lot of businesses have a blog page on their website or have a different website as a blog linked to their business website and you may have also noticed that the posts they write are related to their business. Well, a lot of business owners do this because it attracts potential clients, and these potential clients can be redirected to their website, where they are a step closer to buy their service or to contact them.
Let’s imagine that you have a gym, if you create posts about “5 Ways to Get in Shape” or “How to be fitter” you can attract customers that potentially will be interested in going to a gymnasium. Now, you can make a simple redirection to your website or a single appeal to your gym in the conclusion, and then you may win a subscription. There are a lot more ways to do this, depending on your business, you just need to find related topics to your business to attract users that could be interested in your services & products or will be after they read your post.
3-It expands your business
Even if you don’t want to sell online or monetize your blogs through ads, you can always use it to write content about your business or about your work. If you write good content about your business or work, there’s a chance some people will see it and contact you. For example, if your business happens to be a restaurant, and you happen to be a good writer about food-oriented topics, while promoting your restaurant, you may get some visitors.
How to monetize your blog?
In the following list we will present several ways to make money with a blog. Remembering that there are no guarantees that these will work because success will depend on several factors combined, such as your commitment, your talent, your niche, search engine optimization (SEO) and also luck.
1-Advertise on your Blog
Advertising is a common way to monetize your blog. What most bloggers do is monetize their blogs with ads by using Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an ad network owned by Google that allows the exhibition of advertising on websites. The ads that will appear on your website are targeted to your audience and to your site content. When a visitor of your website clicks on an advertisement on your website, you can make money.
2-Sell Ad Space
Another way of making money by blogging is by selling ad space on your blog. In this case, you charge a flat rate for a banner ad on your blog. To find businesses looking to buy ad space on your website, you can create an “Advertise Here” Page on your website, so business owners contact you, or you can use platforms like BuySellAds to connect with companies.
3-Affiliate Marketing
This method of marketing is one of the most used ways by bloggers to make money. Basically, you will promote products from other businesses, and anytime someone purchases a product with your affiliate link, you will earn a commission. You can find a lot of companies and businesses that are interested in giving you affiliate links, in order to give you commissions but, as your blog grows, there’s a big chance that business owners will come to you and ask you to display their products.
This is an optimal strategy to earn money because all you need to have is traffic on your website and display affiliate links in related posts to the products you are promoting, while not having the need to create or sell any product. For example, let’s imagine that you have a blog about hygiene, and you write a post named “Top 10 best moisturizers in a low budget”, now you can take advantage of this and display affiliate links and talk about the products. There are numerous affiliate programs like:
4-Sponsored Blog content
A sponsored blog post can make you money in a direct way. This is basically when a company pays you to create content about their product or service on your blog, that content can be inserted in a portion of a blog post, or you can create a whole blog post about their products.
This common practice is even more commonly used in platforms like Instagram and YouTube and TikTok when companies pay influencers to promote their product. When your blog has a targeted audience, and you have a specific niche you may be contacted by businesses wanting to pay you for sponsored content. If you don’t want to wait you can reach out to companies and brands to see if they would be interested in being your partner. If you want to connect with companies offering paid opportunities, you can join some blogger networks, for example:
It’s also important to know that, depending on your country, you can be obligated to inform your audience about sponsored content. Firstly, make sure if you need to inform your public or not and if that’s the case, include a simple message like “This post is being sponsored by the X company”, generally at the beginning of the post.
5-Sell your own products or services
Selling your products or services is less common in the blogging world, not because it’s not lucrative, but because you need to have a lot of other work to have a good product and to provide a good service. Let’s say for example that your blog talks about sports, this may be a good opportunity to sell surf boards or any other sports-related products. Not only products but you can also promote your services,
6-Attract customers to your business
You can create a blog to promote your own business, without selling products or services, and not needing to monetize your blog through ads. You can always lure customers to your blog and then to your website. You can influence them to contact you, visit your physical store, or maybe you just want to grow your brand and be recognized.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are a lot of reasons to create a blog and numerous ways to do it. A blog can be very profitable to you, and it gives you the possibility to expand your business and your brand. We, FrimbleServices, are proud to say that we are responsible for the creation of numerous blogs. In our post “How to create a blog”, we teach everything you need to know to create a blog so make sure that you follow us to be updated with useful information to create your blog, and many other types of online businesses.