A blog is a powerful tool to pass the information to the reader in a trusted, attractive and up-to-date way. This is a place to share a passion, professional knowledge, representing a personal message, be a part of business or… be the business itself!
Sounds great, but how to make your blog profitable? First, let’s have a look at how your website looks and feels. Obvious – that matters.
Review your blog
- Is your blogging platform working good and fits your requirements?
- Does your blog have an attractive and corresponding design?
- What are you good at? Is the content useful, interesting and up-to-date? Does the audience like it?
- Have you found you reader audience? How do you keep them informed about new posts at your website?
- How about the traffic? What are the ways to uncover your blog? Do your readers come back?
These aspects can affect the general impression of your website. Now it’s time to look closer at how to monetize your blog.
How to make a cost-effective blog
The ways of making money from blogging activity are various and they can be combined according to what is the most suitable for your blog. Generally, they are divided into 5 main groups – advertising, affiliates, sponsored posts, products/services and other income streams. Let’s explore them more detailed.
1. Advertising
Probably it’s the first thing that comes to your mind. And you’re right, it has a critical purpose in the business world. The most common way to do the advertising is the banner ads usage.
Google AdSense is a trusted and great program for using the ads on your blog. It identifies what is the main theme of your website and starts to generate relevant ads. Furthermore, you locate it wherever you want, block the topics you don’t want to promote and even choose the advertising you like! When ads are seen or clicked, you’ll automatically get money. Isn’t it great?
There are a few factors that affect the amount of profit you can get from Google AdSense:
- The number of readers who visit your blog and see the advertising. The big traffic on your website helps you to gain a new customer or client, continue to grow your popularity of the blog, and of course, it gives you more opportunities to sell the product or service from ads.
- The topic you are blogging about attracts the relative audience, and it matters what is the purchasing power of the potential customers. The readers of a blog about elite sports club are more likely to spend a bigger amount money by following the ad than the readers of books blog.
The alternative programs are Revenuehits, Chitika.
2. Affiliates
This is another powerful tool to make a profit from your blog. The plan is simple – you choose the product/service you want to promote, the advertiser gives you a specific link, which you mention on your website. When the customer clicks it and makes a purchase from the advertiser, you receive the specific percentage of profit. List of affiliate programs is enormous. The most popular platforms are the following:
If you’re a lucky owner of the blog based on WordPress, you can use the advantage of plugin installation and use ThirstyAffiliates. This tool gives you the possibility to connect your affiliate links with Google Analytics, automatically replace words into links and use the fixing sprints to make your links always up-to-date.
WordPress is a very capable blogger platform, so if you’re thinking about the right content management system for your blog I will recommend WP with no hesitation. In case, you want to change your current CMS to WordPress, there is an option to do it simple and fast in a fully automatic way.
3. Sponsored post
One of the other ways of making money on blogging is making sponsored posts. Actually, it’s a blog entry that contains the promoted content about the sponsor company. The more informative, engaging and appealing it is – the better your reader will react to it. It’s good to know – there are a lot of websites which connect the influencers with brands and agencies like Izea, Linqia, Pollinate.
4. Products and Services
As we all know, products and services can be physical and digital. I will go for the digital part because of its availability and effectiveness. Creating own digital products requires having the certain level of knowledge or specific skills. The options and recommendation for the products are the following:
- eBooks/ online Courses (Anthologize for WordPress users/ Skillshare,)
- Software (apps, plugins, themes);
- Downloadables (images, photographs, music).
And next is for the services:
- Couching, training;
- Consulting;
- Freelancing.
5. Other Income Streams
Paid donation and membership can be built on the positive and reliable relationship between blogger and reader. The reason is quite understandable – working on new posts assume spending time and living expenses. WordPress can help you again here with the ability of Memberpress plugin. It gives you an opportunity to create, manage and track membership subscriptions and sell digital download products.
The secret of premium content is the higher quality or more desirable than free content. Apparently, for a certain fee.
To sum it all up, the blogging can be an appealing and meaningful way to share the knowledge with the world. It’s also can be profitable if you know how to do it right.
Conclusion
You can mix and experiment with different ways of making income. It’s important to analyze the statistics and choose the proper way of successful sales planning. As far as your blog will get popularity, you can promote the products/services using your acknowledgment, but if you’re at the beginning of a blogging career, affiliates and advertisement are the best tools for you.
Remember – it takes time to make a profit from your blog. But if you will learn how to do it right, your efforts and creativity will be valued.
Inspire others, figure out what type of monetizing works best for you and get the income! Wish you good luck!