If you have been looking to break away from the hectic 9-to-5 work week, considering an easier way to make money, and have a passion for sharing your knowledge online, blogging might be your calling, and there are many ways you can profit from it.
With a blog or a website, there are a number of ways you can profit from it, and the best thing is you don’t even need to have a product to sell to make money!
Here’s three ways to profit from your blog….
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Did you know in recent years over $3 billion dollars were paid out to bloggers and website owners through affiliate marketing services! Thats some serious cash for doing very little work, if you are savvy and know how.
One of the great things about affiliate marketing is it costs very little to start up your own online blog or website and the income is really up to how much you want to earn.
Affiliate marketing is so easy to get started in, and many of the leading services and stores now have affiliate programs. Simply go to your favourite online store, scroll to the footer and look for ‘Affiliates’, and you can sign up once you have your site up and running.
These sites will provide you with your unique affiliate code, which you add into either text links, image links, or the banner code they provide you with. When someone clicks on that link, it takes the visitor to the retailer’s website, and when they make a purchase you get a commission! It’s truly that simple. You can sell anything from fashion, travel, books, to art, insurance, web hosting and even homes.
Affiliate marketing would have to be one of the easiest ways to make money, both online or in life in general, as it takes so little work, especially if you know how to drive traffic to your site.
ADVERTISING
Selling advertising space is another of the popular and very easy ways to make money online. When you create a blog on WordPress you will find a Widget section allowing you to add content in your sidebar area. By utilising a banner advertising plugin such as WP PRO Advertising System, you can sell and display banners easily through your website. Plugins such as this also allow you to rotate a certain number of banners, and even allocate banners into particular niches, which means you can advertise more banners, and charge them at the appropriate rates for its position or niche, and it will automatically generate the invoice, linked to your Paypal account.So you literally site back and do nothing apart from focus on driving traffic to your site, which is probably the only catch. To sell your advertising space at a good rate, your advertiser will want to see returns, which means you need traffic, so ensure you allocate a certain percentage of sales from your marketing back into advertising such as Facebook Ads or Google Adwords campaigns.
ADVERTORIALS
You’ll notice on many daytime Tv shows, or the Sunday Night ’60 minutes-style’ shows that sometimes they feature a story on someone, and then end the story with a quick marketing spiel of their upcoming movie, world tour, book launch, etc. This is usually not a co-incidence…it is a paid advertorial, which is an editorial piece with an advertising component added. The network makes dollars by featuring them and their product or service by doing it subtly.
The same works online very well. By promoting a business or their services while at the same time providing valuable information relating to that service, Google don’t view it as spam or advertising, and usually treat it as general content of value, which then drives traffic to your site and promotes the business. You ask the business for a particular fee to have the article professionally written by a service such as Crowd Content or similar, so that it is a high quality article of value, add a link back to their website or product page subtly, and they get the traffic, brand awareness and also usually a good high quality backlink, which in turn can increase their site’s ranking. And you make some nice cash just for doing so.
So if you’re looking at running a blog, or already have one, make sure you work on a monetization strategy for your blog incorporating one or all of the above. You’ll be surprised how much money you can make from not having to work hard.
