It was inevitable: as soon as people realized that you could build blogs, one of the first questions they asked was “Great…now how do I make money from this?” The Internet, of course, is full of opportunities in just about every niche and avenue you can think of. But if you want to monetize a blog properly – and actually attract an audience capable of earning you money – then you’ve got to work at it.
Just because you’re making money online doesn’t mean that it will be any easier than if you were making money in the real world – with the obvious advantages of online payment and delivery excepted, of course. So if you have a blog, or even if you’re just considering starting a new blog, and you want to know how to make money, keep reading: we’ll help you cut out much of the learning curve so you can get started on the important stuff right away. Here’s how to make money from a blog.
Attracting the Audience
One of the first things you need to consider when building a blog from scratch is the audience. What kind of person will visit your blog? Too many people make the mistake of assuming that everyone will want to visit their blog. No company on earth can say they make a product for everyone – so ditch the delusions of grandeur. Instead, focus on the type of blog reader you might have. One additional question to ask yourself: what kind of product, service, or advertisement might this reader be looking to buy?
When you’re able to answer these questions, you can start formulating the content and theme of your blog. You can also ask yourself other useful questions to build up interesting content: what kind of answers are your blog visitors looking for? What guides might they find useful? What recommendations? These answers will help you determine your first blog posts as well as inspire you to create additional content as time goes on.
Of course, attracting an audience also requires that you put real work into your posts. Create posts that are informative and focus on giving value to the reader. Giving away something for free usually means that people will be happy to do something in return – at the very least they’ll read what you’ve written. But sometimes they’ll also recommend your content to others, and even be willing to buy a product when you introduce it to your blog audience.
Monetizing the Blog
Once you have a sizeable audience, it’s important to consider a few ways that you can start making money. After all, eyeballs are great, but they don’t earn you any money just by reading your blog. So here are a few ways you can earn money:
- Sell an information product. A DVD, an Ebook, a short PDF guide – whatever you can think of, try selling it to your readers. In many cases, these information products actually make good free incentives for joining your forums or joining your newsletter, but you can also sell these products if you’ve built enough trust with your audience.
- Post advertising. Some bloggers are big enough to attract sponsors, but in general you’ll want to use an advertising company like Google AdSense to monetize the traffic you get – the more people click on your ads, the more money you make. Just be careful not to make your entire blog about the advertising.
- Sell subscriptions to exclusive content. If your free content is great, you can argue then the subscription content will be even better – try selling subscriptions to get access to certain blog posts that no one else can see, or sell subscriptions to a membership forum at the same domain name as your blog.
- Recommend products that you earn commissions from. This one’s a little trickier. You can easily make a lot of money off of this strategy if you have a lot of traffic, but when people find out that you’re earning money from your recommendations, it can damage your trust. Don’t be underhanded or sneaky, however, and you may find that you can pull off the balancing act nicely.
How do you get started? There are plenty of ways. If you’re interested in flipping your current site and starting up a new blog, you’re at the right place. WebsiteBroker is full of domains and established websites that can help you find a solid web presence from which to build a new blog.
