So you are thinking about starting a blog and are curious how to make money off of it. First off, I would recommend not getting too far ahead of yourself. Blogging takes a lot of hard work and commitment and it will take some time to find and develop your niche. Most people that want to start a blog are mainly interested in sharing their ideas and experiences with others. The great thing about this is that if your content is interesting and valuable to your audience, then you will start to develop opportunities to monetize it.
Monetization opportunities for a blog can come from many channels, but one of the most important factors to making a lot of money off your blog is traffic. Just like a physical retail stores, more traffic means more potential to convert those visitors to paying customers.
So if your goal is to make a lot of money off of blogging, you need to focus on creating content that will attract a ton of visitors to your site.
That said, you can start to monetize your traffic starting on day one. Here are some of the best ways to monetize blog’s traffic:
Advertising
This is the easiest monetization channel that you can set up for your blog. Almost every single website on the internet displays some sort of advertising to generate income from their traffic. It’s as easy as signing up for Google Adsense and putting the advertising code on your website. As you grow your website, you may have opportunities to partner directly with brands that find your website a good channel to attract new customers through. For example, a makeup company might want partner directly with you if your blog focuses on beauty products. The possibilities are really endless.
Affiliate Marketing
This is a monetization channel where brands will reward you with financial incentives for directing new customers to them. There are tons of affiliate marketing networks out there where you can sign-up to promote offers from every product imaginable. The decision on what you want to promote is really up to you. If you love writing about travel, then you may feel like your customers are more likely to buy flights or hotels through your site, so it may make sense to promote offers from Expedia, Hotels.com, etc. And for every customer that you direct to these brands, you will be rewarded with some percentage of the sale or a fixed fee.
Selling Your Own Products
The monetization channel that takes the most amount of effort and financial risk is to sell your own products through your blog. It’s very easy to set up an ecommerce store through your WordPress site or to create one via specialized shopping platforms such as Shopify. The real challenge with this channel is that you need to develop a market around the product you are trying to sell and also deal with producing or procuring the product and potentially dealing with everything form fulfillment to customer service. The great thing about selling your own product is that you have direct control over the pricing and margins, which means you have to potential to make significantly more profit then if you were to promote another brands products.
Now that I have gone over the three best ways to monetize your blog, are you ready to start making some money?
If so, start to formulate an idea for your blog and then check out my step-by-step guide to get your blog up and running.