5 Easy Ways to Monetize your Blog

To earn money from blogging, you must know what you are doing. It is not enough to consistently churn out good content on your blog. Deliberate steps must be taken to monetize the blog before you can effectively make money from it. That is in addition to doing everything blog-related like networking and content writing. By the time you have a real hang on your blog, it is imperative to constantly and regularly update it, test it, and diligently work it to grow it. That requires some bit of patience and practice though. It is by doing these things you can only expect to have some measure of success with it provided you put in enough time and resources growing the blog. Making money from your blog depends on how it is monetized. Following are some of the most popular monetization ways most bloggers usually adopt to make money. 

 
1. Affiliate Marketing

You can earn money from your blog as an affiliate. It is one popular way bloggers earn commissions paid out by product merchants. The arrangement is quite simple. Bloggers simply place unique links or codes on their content linking products on third party websites of product merchants. If anyone clicks on these links and makes a purchase, the blogger earns a commission from the sale. Quite a simple and effective way to earn money from a blog no doubt!

2. Selling Products

You can list products for sale on your e-commerce store and use your blog to promote them. Once the products are listed for sale, you simply use your blogs as an advertisement tool for the e-commerce store. If you sell your own products, orders are taken directly from your website, payments made and you supply the products yourself. Even if you don’t have your own products to sell yet, you can sell the products of other merchants by way of dropshipping. By this method, orders are taken from your website and the products are supplied by a third party merchant who will be responsible for handling, packaging, shipping and delivery to the buyers. You earn a commission from each sale originating from your blog website.
 
3. Offering Services
 
As a blogger, you can offer various services on your blog. Depending on your skillsets, you can sell your skills profitably online. Such skills as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing and suchlike skills people are interested in and are prepared to pay for. You can also offer writing services, programming services or even Virtual Assistant services to busy Executives. If you have any of such valuable skills, you can through your blog advertise them properly and market yourself as a freelancer. That way, you’ll be able to earn good money from your skills.

4. Advertising

This is one of the most common ways of earning money from blogging. It is also very easy to understand and utilize once your blog is up and running and its readership is growing satisfactorily. You can work with many brands to advertise their products/services on your blog mostly through banner ads, codes or links. It is one easy way to earn money by way of paid commissions once your blog has garnered an audience.

5. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by displaying ads next to your blog content. These ads are served through very unique and specialized codes from Google. With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your blog visitors and even customize the look and feel of ads to match your site. Google AdSense provides a way for bloggers/publishers to earn money from their blog/online content. AdSense works by matching ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products. Since these advertisers pay different prices for different ads, the amount you earn varies. You earn money from AdSense through click-throughs and page views and the rates differ. You can for instance earn up to $1 for 1000 page views. 

8 Cool Ways to Make Money on Pinterest

For most digital marketers, making money on social media has become routine. Many use Pinterest to indirectly promote their products/services and their businesses are better for it. The reason is, Pinterest isn’t just another social media platform like all others. It is much more than that since it serves as some kind of search engine too. The reason it provides ample opportunities for marketers to make cool money directly on the platform. Pinterest works by allowing users to create pins, which are usually images or videos with links to outside sites. By leveraging these links, you can learn how to make money on Pinterest. But first, you must have a good plan how to go about making money on Pinterest. Next is to sign up for a Pinterest business account. After that, you must factor in how you’ll direct other pinners to your website or another destination website where you can earn an income and boom you are in business.

If you have interest in social media marketing and you are desirous to make some money out of it, find below some tested and credible ways to make money on Pinterest.

1. Partner with Brands

Why not? It is brands that must pay commissions for your marketing services, the reason you must partner with them. If you have a business account on Pinterest, you can directly partner with brands to promote their products/services for shoppable idea pins. The strategy works well if you already have a lot of followers and traffic on your pins. To monetize Pinterest in this way, you must create rates you’ll charge brands for single pins and other content. That is where the earnings come from.

2. Sell Pinterest Templates

Millions of Pinterest users rely on the site to bring traffic to their online content or products. The platform is designed in such a way that only certain types of images and design elements are more likely to perform well on the platform. Very typical and commonly used examples are eye-catching pins that include an image with text over it. If you have templates that include the basic format of these images, it is easy for your customers to simply insert their own images and headlines and you earn money from selling these templates.

3. Offer Pinterest Consulting Services

Consultants make money by selling their knowledge to others. So, if you have the knowledge and experience for creating your own successful Pinterest strategy, you can offer it to brands as Pinterest consulting services and you earn money from it. However, for this work, you must first explore creative ways to demonstrate your ability to promote your own website using the visual search engine of the platform. You can then market to other Pinterest users looking to make money with their Pinterest strategies.

4. Teach Pinterest Marketing Online

Not every marketer knows how to take full advantage of Pinterest to earn money. If you have this knowledge, you can teach your strategies to other online business owners in exchange for a fee. This is a bit similar to consulting services in some ways. To attract patronage, you can launch your own site and create an online course with various modules to serve various needs. You may in addition decide to even include it with content about other social media platforms or marketing strategies depending on how wide the audience you are targeting is.

5. Drive Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store

If you own an e-commerce store and you sell physical products, Pinterest can be a perfect way to bring in more sales. What you need do is to create pins that include photos and links to the products you are selling. These pins can help to raise brand awareness and consequently bring more interested buyers to your website.

6. Become a Pinterest Virtual Assistant

Busy executives always need the services of Virtual Assistants and they pay handsomely for the services. On Pinterest, virtual assistants can run accounts for and on behalf of other users. As a Virtual Assistant, you can help create pins, promote them, and schedule content for brands. To earn money as a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, you need to create your own account to showcase your abilities. You can then market your services on your website or make contacts with your favorite brands to offer them your services and you make money from rendering the services.

7. Include Affiliate Links in Pins

Including affiliate links in pins is a proven and effective digital marketing strategy. On Pinterest affiliate marketing, this simply involves creating pins that include a direct affiliate link to relevant products/services you are selling. If and when other users click the links from your pin, they’ll be directed to a site where they can make purchases. When that happens, you earn a commission from each sale. But first, you must take steps to sign up as an affiliate with your favorite brands. Next is to embed and sprinkle in your content the right affiliate links to the products/services you are selling. You should be more particular about this on the content you consider extremely valuable to your audience. That is what helps to get more leads and conversions.

8. Drive Traffic to Your Blog

If you are a good content writer or blogger, you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog website. Increased traffic directly helps to increase blogging income particularly if you are using sponsored posts or affiliate links to monetize your site. The more traffic your blog gets through Pinterest, the higher your chances of running a successful and profitable blog.

5 Tips to Monetize Your Website

If you are desirous to monetize your website, you must first work to create a proper monetization strategy. That is what you really need to be able to drive relevant traffic that converts real good. Even if you have a great website and steady traffic, you may not be able to make money from your website if you have no monetization strategy to do so. These here tips will help you to create that strategy and effectively monetize your website to earn money for you.

1. Sell Digital Products

To sell digital products on your website, you must first create such products that people will like to buy or you collaborate with other content creators and help to promote their products. The commonest digital products that really sell well are eBooks, educational courses, how-to templates, workout programs, research findings/data, travelogues, healthy food recipes and Industry trends. Make sure the digital products you offer on your website are essentially relevant stuff and of the highest quality available. You make good money selling digital products because creating and selling them is hugely cost-effective. It is much easier and cheaper distributing digital products than physical goods because you do not have to worry about handling, warehousing and shipping costs.

2. Join Affiliate Marketing

First be sure your website is designed to be able to handle affiliate marketing. Next is to reach out to product merchants whom you can promote their affiliate links on your website. You earn a commission from all sales made through the links you promote on your website. You can insert these links in your blog content and other articles on your website. You can also create side banners with images that promote affiliate products. Alternatively, you can decide to join reputable affiliate programs. The right affiliate program to join is directly dependent on the niche of your website. The most popular of these programs are ClickBank, SFI, Amazon, and eBay where you can seek niche-specific products that you can effectively promote to your audience. These programs will help to drive traffic to your website and each successful conversion will net you a commission. The more conversions you get, the more money you make. It is as simple as that.

3. Run Paid Ads

You can earn money through online advertisements on your website even if it is not your primary monetization method. These days, to earn money from online ads, you must factor in the huge impact of mobile devices in online traffic. What this means is that your website must be optimized for smartphones and tablets, not just computers. To run video ads, you can create inPage, inBanner, and inApp video ads which make it easier to insert professionally-looking online ads. You get paid by product merchants whose products ads you run professionally on your website. This payment depends on the number of clicks and views.

4. Publish Sponsored Content

If you write a popular blog or you have a large social media following, you can publish sponsored content and get paid for it. Having a great blog allows you to sell guest posts to make money. Here is how it works. You deliberately seek out interested parties who would like to publish an article on your website and get a do-follow link to help their SEO campaigns. By this arrangement, your website will benefit from good content besides the payment you’ll receive for publishing the content. However, you must ensure such content is genuine and original. For ethical reasons, you must notify your readers that the content is sponsored.

To find leads for good content, start with Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms. You can also join relevant online groups and advertise yourself as someone who invites interested parties to post on your website. With time, and through this collaboration, you’ll be able to find more leads, get more sponsored content and make more money.

5. Paid Membership

Paying for a membership on a website when you can probably find a free alternative usually presents some kind of dilemma for some marketers. These are marketers who are not too conversant with the benefits that may accrue to them for doing so even though some of these benefits might not seem so obvious. Membership sites create relationships and loyal communities. They also give website owners a pre-qualified audience for marketing and upselling. Growing a significant community also establishes you as an authority in the industry. Finally and most significantly, as the website scales and your value increases, the community will keep you on your toes and encourage you to create the best possible content you can. Checking all these marks should be good enough to turn a membership site into a sustainable source of income. Other than just the membership fees, you can also consider other monetization methods as the membership grows.

Last Line

All told, these five website monetization tips are just a few of the ideas website owners can really depend on to make money form their monetized websites. The business niche of your website and the efforts you are prepared to put in matter a lot in the eventual income you’ll generate from your website. You may choose to work with just one of the methods or you combine as many of them as you are comfortable with. The bottom line is the amount of income you generate with your website if you monetize it with a good strategy.

Popular Social Media Platforms You Can Make Money On

A huge number of people worldwide are active on social media but very few really get to make money on it. Many of these people merely use social media to socialize and make fun but without any thoughts whatsoever to make money. Aside from not having the right business ideas to do so, what each social media platform offers and how that can help in the process of making money is usually lost on many. Well, here is the good news. If you have the right business ideas and you are able to take advantage of what each social media platform offers, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. To make money on social media, you must first ensure you have many followers you can easily influence through your content. Next is to monetize your social media accounts in various platforms to make money. Here is how the numbers stack up to enhance that effort in some of the most popular platforms.

 
On Instagram, you need a minimum of 5,000 Instagram followers and some 300 plus sponsored posts a year to generate good income.

On Facebook, you need to have at least 10,000 followers and 30,000 +1 minute views.

On YouTube, you will need at least 1,000 subscribers and some 4,000 watch hours in a year to start earning.

On Twitter, you need at least 10,000 followers and 10,000 re-tweets to earn good income.

Now let’s look at what the individual platforms have to offer to help users make money. You can take good advantage of the in-house marketing tools of most of the under listed social media platforms to help you make money on the platforms.

Facebook: You can make money by promoting other brands, affiliate marketing, selling your products and posting sponsored content.

Twitter: You can make money by tweeting as a ghost writer, do affiliate marketing, sell your own products, or work as an influencer.

Pinterest: You can make money by promoting a brand, promoting affiliate products and selling your products.

LinkedIn: You can make money by placing ads for brands using affiliate links and selling your products and or services.

Instagram: You can make money by partnering with a brand, pushing affiliate links and getting revenue from ads played on their IGTV videos.

YouTube: You can use this platform to market your video content, do affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and collaborate with brands to market their products.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

Due to the prevailing pandemic, millions of people now appear to have lost their businesses and means of livelihoods. Many people now face grossly reduced incomes or no incomes at all. It is simply natural to expect such people to look for alternative ways of survival. Many now think rightly of website monetization and making money online. As a result, the internet seems increasingly very attractive at the moment. It is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times. Taking your small business online and exploring all avenues to have the site monetized has become a very attractive prospect. If you are thinking that way as well here is what works. If you are able to create a good website, offer for sale an excellent product or service from the site, you too can make money online. Next step is how to promote your website successfully online to attract good traffic. This website traffic is what you really need to earn money by way of monetization. The following are very popular ways to monetize your website for that purpose.

1. Selling a Product/Service

Having a great product or service to sell online is one very positive way to earn money online. If you are selling your own product or service, all the sales revenue accrue to you. At minimal investment of cash, the ROI is usually very attractive if you are selling your own product or service online. Just think out of the box, create a product or service that easily solves problems for many people and wham, you are in business. Draw inspiration from your passion and talent to create a solution by way of a product or a service, and make things simple, you’ll get customers in no time.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model of linking merchants to consumers and you get paid commissions for your efforts. If you promote affiliate links from your website and purchases are made via those links, you get paid. That simply means earning commissions from promoting and selling merchants’ products to your website visitors. This becomes simpler and better paying if you sign up for the programs of large e-commerce affiliate sites like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba. When you sign-up for their programs, you will then have access to products’ links to promote on your website. Include these links in the content you write to recommend various e-commerce products you feel like promoting on your website. When people click on these links and purchase any products, you earn a percentage commission from the sales. It is as simple as that.

3. Membership Fees

Charging membership fees is one sure way to earn from your website. To qualify for such fees, the info you put out from your website must be highly informative, authoritative, exclusive and in very high demand. Good content suitable for membership on websites include market research findings, webinars, or podcasts. If you create such content, you can then ask your website visitors who desperately need the info to pay a fee before having access to the content. That way, you make money steadily for as long as your content is in demand. 

4. Sponsored Posts

After you launch your website, you must promote it vigorously to grow traffic and audience. When the audience is big enough, you can reach out to bigger marketing businesses that operate in the same niche you are to find out if they are interested in your website traffic. If they show interest, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. You can offer to include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site. If they realize that they are getting traffic from your efforts, you can then cut a sponsorship deal with them. That simply means steady money and income.

5. Website Traffic Reselling

As a successful marketer, you can actually resell your website traffic if it is huge and steady. If your website traffic gets to such high level, say in the thousands, you can then decide to join platforms like Google Ads or Ezoic by applying to them to place advertisements on your website. Google Adsense is particularly very popular at this and the code they give you to insert on your website is very efficient in calculating the “views” and “hits” on the ads they run on your website. That is what determines what they pay you as a publisher of these ads. It is only when your website traffic sees or clicks on the ads that you are entitled to be paid. Alternatively, you can reach out to marketers, merchants and other advertisers directly. By displaying their banners and links on your website, you are helping them to advertise their products or services. You earn money from these efforts through the clicks that emanate from your website.

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.

Trending Ways to Make Money Online

Without a doubt, the internet has greatly transformed the ways people do business around the world. It has managed to find a way around artificial boundaries and borders, removed limitations imposed by geographical regions and locations. It has greatly improved the ease of doing business even with limited financial resources. With just a computer, tablet or smart phone and access to the internet, you can get down to business and make money online. There is no shortage of clever and even highly ingenious ways to make money online. What is trending with most marketers right now are:

Email Marketing
Online advertising
Google Ads
Social media ads: particularly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc etc.
Search Engine Marketing, SEM
Social Media Marketing, SMM
Influencer Marketing
Search Engine Optimization, SEO


 
Here now is the real catch: Blogging for money.

Blogging and bloggers are currently taking the internet by storm. Blogs are simply informational websites where writers share their views on subjects of their choice where they know something and have some measure of expertise. What matters is to choose a niche industry you really know something about which you’ll gladly share through your blogs. To make money, you need profitable niches you can blog about. Such popular niches like travels, hospitality, food, photography, health, fitness, career, fashion, gardening, and finance are some great niches many marketers now blog about.

Having settled for a great niche to blog about, bloggers next settle for ways to make money from the blog. They do this by monetizing the blog. Among many other ways, here are the commonest ways blogs are monetized:

You can sell digital products such as photos, music, apps, online courses, and videos.

You can engage in Affiliate Marketing. This is done by blogging about an advertiser’s product. You get paid commissions for every sale that comes via your blog website.

You can sell private ads and sponsored posts.

You can sell memberships on your blog site. If for example, you own a career blog, you can charge fees for members to access a private job board.

You can place ads on your blog site as a publisher. With that, you make money through Pay-Per-Click, PPC or Pay-Per-View, PPV. For PPC, you are paid for the ad-clicks when readers click on your ads, while you are paid as per the number of people who have viewed your ads in case of PPV. Bloggers preferring these methods of monetization, depend on using Google Adsense for effective, fraud free calculation and payment method.

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.