How to Generate Passive Income from Your Blog

If you want your blog to generate passive income for you, you must treat it as a real business. That is, you must explore all available avenues to make your blogging activities to be real passive-income-generating. To make blogging a lucrative passive-income-generating business, you must be actively and professionally involved in blogging. One of the most beautiful things about blogging is that you can blog just about any subject under the sun. If you are a professional or really knowledgeable about any industry, you can blog about it. All that you really require to set up a blog is the basic knowledge about any industry or profession. Then, you can start writing and creating content about the things you already know and do. This is the content that can generate income for you in perpetuity for as long as it is informative, educational and entertaining enough to bring readers to your blog. That is passive income.



Here are some very helpful tips to help you generate passive income from your blog.

Create Only Content that Solves Peoples’ Problems

Yeah, that’s exactly what people want to read. If the content does not solve people’s problems, don’t even bother with it. Even though there are no strictly defined rules set out on what must be created and published on any blog, what matters is what people want to read because it helps them to solve problems. The right to decide what to publish on your blog is all yours as a blogger but, if you want to be relevant in any industry, you must publish only content that solves your readers’ problems. Everyday 24/7, people are out there on the internet seeking for solutions to different types of worries. If your blog provides relevant answers, then it will attract inbound traffic and ultimately income.

Create Money-Making Blog Posts

As experienced bloggers like to tell us, not all blog posts have the power to generate income. Generally, only problem-solving posts can be easily monetized, even though there are some types of posts crafted only for the money involved. These include direct product promos, product reviews, sponsored contents, sales pitches, products endorsements, etc. etc.

Treat Your Blog as a Real Business

To do this, just like in any other business, you must prepare yourself, train for it and acquire the requisite blogging tools for your blogging business. The tools you really need here are computer equipment, a website, web hosting, plugins, templates and such like blogging tools. Next is to acquire real training online/offline, reading books on blogging and by connecting and relating with fellow like-minded content creators. Next is to commence your blogging activities and you learn on the job while devoting quality time to your blogging activities. Finally, when your blog gets under way, you must take concrete steps to promote it real good. These are the things that help it to bring in traffic and ultimately income.

Link Your Blog to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one very easy and popular way to monetize your blog. It is one great way to generate passive income from blogging. When you link your blog to affiliate marketing, all you are required to do from your blog site is to use the blog to promote products owned by product merchants. That way, you get paid commissions by the merchants on sales generated directly by your promotional efforts. There are many variants of affiliate marketing depending on the type or products being marketed and the mode of commission payment. Some variants pay one-off commissions while others pay recurring commissions as you generate sales.

Promote Your Blog Effectively

Just like any other business, you must take deliberate steps to promote your blog effectively. If you can’t tell people you are out there with something good for them, many will hardly notice you. Thus, promoting your blog effectively simply means making it easily available to people who need your content. What every blog needs is readership traffic. Whatsoever you can do to bring in this traffic is good for your blog. You may choose to share any content you publish very widely on social media or you make some little payments here and there to have it well advertised. Getting traffic to it is what really counts and that’s what brings in the money. To promote your blog through search engines, you just have to be good in SEO techniques. These techniques help to drive organic traffic to your blog through the activities of search engines. That is traffic from people who are online searching for the type of content you’ve published. One very good reason you must purposely publish content that is search-engine-friendly.



Monetize Your Blog Diversely

Once you get a good and popular blog going, you can monetize it in several ways. Some of such ways are:

Google Adsense: Where Google runs ads on your blog and you get paid as a publisher.

Affiliate marketing Ads: Where you get paid commissions for products sales directly related to your promotional efforts.

Direct Ads: Where companies or individual businesses run banner ads on your blog site and they pay you for the ads space.

Polls/Researches: Where polls are run on your blog and you get paid for participating. etc, etc.

Build a Credible Email List from Your Blog

An email list is one very valuable asset every online marketer really needs. You can always build a credible one from your blog site. You can build this list by getting your blog readers to submit their email addresses to an email list you can procure for your site from an Email Service Provider, ESP such as MailChimp. Once in place on your blog, by offering some freebies like eBooks or Coupons as incentives, you can get your blog readers to leave their emails behind to deliver the incentives to them. That way, you can with time build up a very credible email list which you’ll depend on for your email marketing activities, promotions, special offers, special announcements, new products in the market, new blog post alerts, etc. etc.

Effectively Market Your Services

Well, as they say in business, if you know something, you can sell something. Once you have your blog running and people are reading it, apart from earning through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and advertising, some of your readers may be interested in paying you for your blogging expertise. You may choose to earn as a consultant using direct coaching and webinars or you can package and sell your knowledge/expertise by way of eBooks or full-blown video courses. Both of these ways can help your blog to attract very significant sales and income.

Essential Plugins Your Blog Needs

Every blog needs plugins to help fortify its functionality and availability for search engines. You can access some plugins free while some others come at a premium. If you are running your blog on WordPress you will have free access to many essential plugins that can add functionality to your blog. Knowing the service you want from plugins is important before you decide on which to install. There are a variety of plugins you can install depending on your blogging experience and the level of dexterity you’ve at blogging. What you choose to install is determined by the type of functionality you want for your blog. That is what digital marketing experts recommend.


 
Here are a few plugins of choice for many bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your site visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox. It helps to make sure your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages to enable your website load faster. Fast loading websites are search engine friendly.

Plugins are really essential to enhance the functionality of your blog. In digital marketing world, the competition is so stiff that any little thing you can do on your blog to give you some edge no matter how little over your competitors is always highly welcome. That is where plugins become really essential. They manage to help out providing such little essentials to enhance your blog. If you want to go far as a blogger, it is wise not to ignore them.


 

How to Create Multiple Revenue Streams for Your Blog

There are multiple ways to make money from your blog if it has been getting some good measure of traffic.  I have used some of these methods myself while I have never tried some others but I hear of bloggers who routinely earn money from multiple streams of sources. Many bloggers earn just a second pay check from blogging while others earn a fulltime income from same sources. What you earn depends largely on the streams you are using, how good you are at blogging and how popular your blog had become. This popularity is measured by inbound traffic flow to the blog. That is really what brings in the income.


 
For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. The better and more consistent they are at it, the more money they make. Many bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year while some even post much higher figures from one of or a combination of the following methods.

#1. Display ads measured with Google Adsense where income comes from PPV, pay per view or PPC pay per click.
#2. Affiliate Display ads. You can also earn an agreed percentage in commissions from products actually purchased from ads displayed on your website as an Affiliate Marketer.
#3. Sale of E-books.
#4. Fees from Webinars.
#5. Sale of how-to videos.
#6. Sale of packaged courses.
#7. Direct payments for display ads to announce or promote events or products.
#8. Earned fees for letting others market with your Email list.
#9. Earned fees for helping to run surveys on your blog.
#10. Fees from Magazine or Bulletin subscription.

This list is by no means exhaustive. As bloggers get smarter by the day alongside the deepening of the internet and proliferation of smart hand-held devices like IPhones, Tablets and Smart phones, many more income earning ways get developed by bloggers. It is very crucial to have a viable revenue strategy for your blog because even if you are not interested in making a living from your blog earnings, you need resources to keep developing and growing the blog. You may need 2-5 hours daily to add good content to your blog. This is precious time that you are investing in your blog. This time must somehow be compensated for by what you earn from the blog. Without earnings from your blog, it will be difficult for you to fund and maintain your content creation. If you can’t maintain your content creation, you will not be able to grow your blog to keep it relevant and competitive enough in the densely saturated blogging world.


 

How to Blog Like a Pro

Do you know something others don’t know? Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you express yourself well in writing? Great if you do. You can be a blogger and a good one at that just like the Pros. Now, how badly do you want to blog like a Pro? Simple! Just do exactly what Pros do. The good news is, Pros don’t do anything much different from what other bloggers do. They only manage to do better and differently same things other bloggers do in blogosphere. That is what makes them Pros. Here is how you too can get started if you want to blog like a Pro:

#1 Decide on a Domain Name

You may ask what’s in a name. In blogging, the answer is a lot. This is more so when your domain name will automatically become your brand name. In choosing a name, don’t go with the Joneses unless you want to struggle for recognition over a long time. You may even be crowded out easily if you are not lucky. You must make this choice very carefully because your web success may directly depend on it when search engines come to recognize it. Any name which resonates with your chosen niche always gets better results. AnyName.com is ok provided it is brandable and memorable. It must align with what you’ve decided for your brand recognition and it is available for web registration. 


 
#2 Carefully Choose Your Blog Niche

If you want to blog like Pro, you must carefully choose a niche and stick with it over the long haul. Your blog can not grow if it is not known for something unique to it even if it is just one thing. That is the reason you should not go for something too general like blogging for food or fitness. You can settle for a unique type of food or for some brand of fitness unique to pregnant women, to athletes or the elderly. These unique types of niches are likely to earn you recognition faster than general niches. Any niche you choose must be a combination of your talent, passion and marketing opportunity if you want to blog like Pro. 

#3 Get a Custom Logo

You may choose to get professionals to design a unique logo for you with a little fee or you go for free themes available in the WordPress repository. Either way, what matters is to get a unique logo which fits the niche theme you’ve chosen. A unique logo adds to your professionalism too. You must therefore be careful to settle for a design that is not excessively colorful and distracting. It must easily appeal to the eye and good for readability and page load speed both of which can help the SEO of your blog.

#4 Install a Self-Hosted Blog

You can easily have access to many blogging platforms on the web but some are free while some are not. The platforms that are not free may require that you pay a small rental fee monthly, quarterly or annually. The choice is yours to make. Free blog platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. appear to be most popular with many bloggers. However, there is some snag with many of the free platforms. Most of them do not allow commercial use of their platforms. Some others will not allow you to own your web-property. For these reasons, most Pros prefer to register and host their own domains with reputable Domain Hosts even at a premium.

#5 Write and Publish Your First Content

This is where what you know and are passionate about will come to the fore. Just relax, collect your thoughts and start writing something great. Be ready for the long haul because blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. The rules are no that strict, but always ensure the information you are giving out is authentic, rich, personal and unique enough for other persons to be interested in reading it. Your success as a blogger is heavily dependent on how much of rich, informative and educative information you can give out about your chosen niche in a prolonged basis. That is where your knowledge and expertise really come to the fore. It is this knowledge/information that helps you to acquire loyal readership and followership. Before making the first post on your content, be sure that your “About Me” page is carefully written out to tell readers who you are and what you can do and have done in the past. Most people always want to know who exactly they are dealing with before reading blog posts.

#6 Adopt a Good SEO Strategy

This stage involves some technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you adopt a good SEO strategy because how the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent there by search engines. Simply put, SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is a unique way of playing around with and positioning keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.


 
#7 Install Web Analytics
 
Analytics are very helpful in measuring results, carrying out research and even spying on other bloggers. Google Analytics is most preferable here but be sure you configure its search console as well. It is simple to deploy and use. Just sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. After signing up, Google will send you a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your blog you need to track and measure their performance. Once your Google Analytics is in place, you can daily track the number of visitors, to which page, sources of the traffic and even the countries and geographical regions of the world the traffic is coming from. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. Through it, you will also be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site. It gives you the right information you really need to rejig your SEO strategy from time to time depending on your blog readers’ behavior online.

#8 Install Essential Plugins

As soon as your blog is up and running, it becomes a very valuable web property which you must protect and enhance its functionality. That is when you need to install some essential and useful plugins. You may get some plugins free and you may have to pay for some others. What you use depends on what you aim to achieve or get from your blog. Here are some of the most popular plugins with bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that have links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. They get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Helps to back up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox.

#9 Get Your Blog on Social Media

As most marketers now know, social media is the place to be. This is because of the huge popularity of social media and the ease of sharing information and interaction. One blog can go viral in minutes via sharing to hundreds of thousands of persons all over the internet. As soon as you start publishing, just get your blog on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. That helps to put your blog before a very huge audience where you can easily source customers from the “likes” and “followers” you get on these platforms. If you do so, you will notice from your Google Analytics dashboard that your first set of visitors will be coming in good numbers from social media sites.

#10 Monetize your Blog

Yeah, this is the icing on the cake. Pro bloggers get to make real good money from their blogs when they monetize them. Some Forbes Research Results indicate that many Pro bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some posting much higher figures. That is good money no doubt. For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. Display ads as monetized with Google Adsense is readily one of the easiest ways to make money with your blog. But, there are many others which Pros have learned to combine into making multiple streams of income. It is also possible to earn money through Pay-Per-View, PPV, Pay-Per-Click, PPC and direct product ads on your website if your blog has become sufficiently popular by way of good traffic inflow. Other methods include, selling E-books, Lessons, Lectures, How-to videos, Webinars and many other electronic products which you can create yourself, advertise on your blog and sell to buyers online.

Quickest Ways to Improve Your Blog Ranking

Webmasters and online marketers now rely heavily on blogging to improve their website’s ranking on search engines. That is because they have come to realize that blogs have become a powerful source for online marketing. However, many newbie bloggers still fail to know that without proper SEO, many blogs never get to rank high in search engines.  The real reason their blogs and websites remain relatively unnoticed by web surfers. Therefore, if you want to utilize your blog for effective marketing of your business, you’ve got to do all you can to improve your blog’s ranking by search engines.

Here are some tips which can help you to quickly have your blog ranking high in search engines:


 
Get Your Blog on Social Media
 
These days, social media is where everyone seems to be. As a result, you get to find social networking sites in almost every corner of the web. Because of the popularity of social media sites, they have become the best places to meet people with the same interests online. That makes them very ideal places where you can get important links. You can easily create a brand name and improve your brand popularity on social media if you regularly post high quality articles which get noticed and attract comments from readers.

Do Blog Commenting
 
This is particularly very helpful when you comment on blogs which are already very popular. The popularity of such blogs somehow helps your comments to be indexed by search engines. That helps your own blog ranking as well. Adding relevant comments to other’s blog posts is another effective way to increase blog traffic. You must be sure your comments are relevant to the topic and informative enough to attract comments. When readers find your comments useful, they naturally get more curious to find out more about you. That consequently attracts clicks on your link back to your own website or blog. That means more traffic!

Give Your Blog Wide Exposure

To boost your blog’s search engine ranking and traffic, you must explore all ways to give it maximum exposure. One of the best ways to do so is by syndicating it with RSS feeds to give it full exposure. With RSS feeds, whenever any modification or addition is made on your blog, your audience gets updated quickly and seamlessly.

Do Social Bookmarking

This is one online activity which only experienced hands in the business can use effectively. When properly done, bookmarking helps immensely to increase both traffic and search engine ranking of your blog. Technically, what social bookmarking does is to allow your blog users to save and create a collection of their favorite bookmarks, categorize them and later share them with other users. These other users can further subscribe the bookmarks to other’s lists and even add bookmarks from other lists to their own. This way, your blog gets further propagation thereby getting exposed more and more. The more bookmarking you do, the more blog traffic you get and that helps your search engines ranking a great deal.

6 Techniques to Blog Like a Pro

According to online marketing experts, nearly everyone now blogs to support their businesses. That is content marketing. You may be aware that blogging and creating other types of online content can provide a big boost to your small business marketing strategy. However, be informed that it takes a lot of planning to actually make content work toward your main business goals. If you are already into it or you want to commence blogging, there are blogging techniques you can deploy to get results like a pro. Here are some of such techniques.

01. Create Content That Gets Real Traffic and Links: The essence of blogging is to get traffic to your business. This you can do by using effective ways to increase links to your blog and improving your reach. That means you must always put a very good content out there. You can improve this content to make it more shareable particularly on Social Media.

02. Use Your Blog to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation: The fierce battle for reputation is what makes online marketing tick. It is your business reputation that contributes largely to bringing customers to your business again and again. For that reason, no matter where you blog, you must pay particular attention to reviews and feedbacks relating to the content you are sharing. That helps you to monitor and work to improve on what is said about your business online.  One credible way to build a good online reputation!

03. Choose and Use the Right Keywords for Your Blog Niche: This technique is as old as content marketing itself and pros always emphasize it. If you want online surfers/readers to easily find your blog content by way of organic search, you need to deploy some SEO techniques. This will require you to choose and use some relevant keywords to your blog niche. That is called optimization which could be a bit tricky at times. SEO may pose a bit of technical challenges, so, if you are unable do it yourself, you can pay experts to help optimize your blog for you.

04. Always Provide Your Readers Personalized Content: This is very important for blogging. It shows you are an expert at something which you are able and willing to share it. If you habitually share sufficient good content regularly, you quickly get many readers hooked up to your blog. Posting generalized content on your blog may not solve specific problems your readers want solved. So, finding ways to create personalized content that is useful to an exact target audience is what works to get readers/traffic to your blog.

05. Use Customer and Competitive Research to Shape Your Blogging: Here, the use of Google Analytics comes in very handy. With it, you can research on and also “spy” on your customers and competitors to know what works for them and what doesn’t. Digging into customer and competitor data can help you find out which type of content gets the best results. That way, you can redesign your own content to better their results using Google Analytics research information.

06. Get More Email Subscribers for Your Blog: This takes a bit of time to set up and to garner sufficient emails. But, once up and running, it is a very good source of reliable traffic. You can lure your readers with token gifts like eBooks to get their emails. Your blog can also be designed with email subscription options which ensure your readers actually see your blog content as soon as it is posted. With their subscribed email addresses, your blog gets right in their inboxes as soon as you make the post.

How to Link Your Ads Online

As a rule in online advertising, your ads links must link to the place you want your site visitors to see. Usually that “place” is where the product you are selling or marketing can be found. It does not really matter whether the place is in your webpage/blog or in your SFI Gateway.

A link is just like a pathway which leads to somewhere. That somewhere is where you want your online visitors to get to. Whether the link is in form of text ads, banner ads or any other type of ad, so long as it takes visitors to wherever you want them to go when they click on it, it is a perfect link. That is the type of link that yields the desired results. What counts therefore, is not as much as where the ad link is placed but where it leads to when clicked.

You can place your ads links in your webpage/blog as well to an SFI Gateway provided the links take visitors to what you want them to see. That is what matters.

Good luck in your marketing!!!

 

Best Marketing Methods for Beginners in SFI Business

To my mind, what really should constitute the best marketing methods for beginners are methods which give the best results, are easy to use, cheap or even free to use. For that reason, it is pretty difficult to settle for just one marketing method as the best. It is always advisable to use many methods singly or in combinations. That is what gives the best results which can immensely benefit beginners. For best results, the marketing message can be packaged in form of: 

 
-Text ads.
- Banner ads.
- Blogs.
- Articles marketing.
- Brochures.
- Bulletins.
- Newspaper ads.
- Flyers, etc, etc.

Then the message can be put out in any of the following common and popular methods:

1. Internet marketing (e-mail, Websites, Blogs, etc.)
2. Print media (periodical/magazine ads, card decks, etc.)
3. Direct mail.
4. "Warm marketing" (friends, family, co-workers, etc.)
5. "Power Retailing" (extensive retailing beyond warm market)
6. One-on-one local recruiting.
7. Opportunity meetings (group presentations).
8. Telemarketing (phone prospecting and sales).
9. Radio/Television.
10. Social media.
11. Dropping Business cards.
12. Dropping Gift cards /Flyers.

These methods could be very good for beginners because:

a) Many of the methods are cheap or even free.
b) They are easy to use by beginners.
c) They are very effective.
d) They can be used any and everywhere.
e) They are cost-effective.
f) They are readily available and easy to access.
g) They give very good results. 


 
What is really important is that beginners should never forget to use their Gateways correctly in all their ads. That is the only way the credits of the ads will go to them. If not well used, all ads no matter how well-designed will not yield the desired results.