Is blogging for fun or is it something you do to make money? Some people think they can get rich by maintaining a blog, but the problem is that you cannot make much money from your blog. In the beginning, if you post every week, you will be lucky to make $3 per month from affiliate advertising.
Should this put you off?
No!
If you are looking to become a blogger, then you should do it for fun. It is the only way you will ever keep it up long enough to start earning money from it. Most blogs are abandoned within two years. If you don’t believe that fact, then check your RSS feed for all the blogs you signed up with two years ago. Most of them will be gone unless they are sponsored by a business.
What is the point in writing a blog if you are not going to make money from it? It can be fun writing a blog, and if you write regularly, you will eventually build enough of a following to start earning money.
How Do Bloggers Earn Money?
Most bloggers insert affiliate advertising onto their blogs. Viewers click their adverts and they earn a small amount of money. These adverts are called PPC (Pay Per Click) adverts and you receive a few cents every time a user clicks your adverts. People don’t click them very often. After all, when was the last time you clicked an advert on purpose?
Affiliate advertising is a numbers game. If you receive 300 views per month, you may get one click for 7 cents. If you receive 600 views per month, you may get two clicks and earn 14 cents that month, and so on. Most bloggers have to write for years before they receive followers in the thousands, so be prepared to stick with it for the long haul. You may decide on freelance writing as a career of a progressive modern writer, in which case, you can take freelance projects for a few years until your blog receives enough followers to earn you a reasonable amount of money.
Seven Unexpected Ways To Earn Money From Your Blog
The money making method listed above may seem a little bleak, but most money making bloggers didn’t start blogging to make money. For them, the fact they are now earning money is a bonus rather than their overall objective. The seven methods listed below are for bloggers who have been writing for years and having built a solid following.
1 – Use your popularity to gain secret sponsors
It is a little sneaky, but thousands of bloggers do it. Search out sponsors who operate within your niche. They pay you for posts where you mention or promote their goods or services without explicitly saying you are working for them. To your followers, it appears as if you are a fan of the company’s products, whereas you are actually being paid by the company. The more of an influencer you are within your niche, then the more your sponsors will be willing to pay you.
2 – Customize your adverts to greatly improve your earning power
Set up affiliate advertising with Google Adsense for your regular adverts, and then set yourself up with another company for specific adverts. For example, if you mention a book you have just read, you may sign up with a book-selling network. Most will allow you to alter and manipulate your adverts to fit your blog. For example, you could have an image-advert carousel featuring the book you read, or you may insert links over the name of the back on your blog to the book-selling network. When users click your links, the affiliate company pays you.
3 – Use your blog to promote your YouTube channel
YouTube and other social media networks have more earning potential than blogs. After all, you can force people to sit through your unskippable adverts. Most popular social media networks are so overcrowded that it is hard to make an impact. Not only are you able to send people to your social media posts where you may earn more from affiliate advertising, you may also write posts about your videos to further entice people to watch them. You may even embed your videos into your blog posts with the affiliate adverts attached.
4 – Sell the second half of your posts to interested followers
The trick is to write posts that are crammed with amazing information. The first half of your blog post has to be crammed with your very best stuff. Encourage your users to pay for the second half of your blog post. You email them the full version once they have paid. The second half is where you give a few more tips and you expand on the tips you gave in the first half. Do a good job and people will return time and time again for help.
5 – Asking your followers to support you via Patreon
There are websites such as Patreon where people pay you for posts. YouTube creators dominate Patreon at the moment, but there are some bloggers making a nice wedge of cash from their followers. The great thing is that if you have a good following, you can take a week off now and then by paying a writing company such as EssayGeeks.co.uk to write your post for you. The money you receive from your followers for posting will cover the amount you spent paying other writers. All you have to do is convince your followers to sign up with Patreon and just contribute one dollar per post. The money soon adds up, and you are paid for every post you generate.
6 – Charge people to post guest posts and followed links
If you create a very popular blog, or a blog that has a good following, then people will pay you to post guest posts on your blog. What they want is a followed link from your website because it helps them rank up the search engine results, and it drives targeted traffic to their website. Advertise on your website that you will consider guest posters, and when they contact you, tell them how much you charge for them posting on your website. Some websites make a massive amount of money using this technique. During the last Soccer World Cup, there were soccer websites charging guest posters over $600 for a guest post and followed link.
7 – Sell your blog posts to the highest bidders
One way to make a bundle is to build your website up, to post for a few years until you have over one hundred posts and over ten thousand followers. You then put your website up for sale on a website that sells domain names. Buyers will be able to see how much traffic you receive and how much you have written for your blog. You can earn hundreds, if not thousands, for selling your domain name and your blog.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, it is far better if you start blogging for fun rather than for money. If you blog for money, then your journey towards success will be long and arduous. If you blog for fun, then the money comes as a nice surprise. Even if you blog for years and you still fail, there may still be people willing to pay a pretty penny for your blog and its well-aged domain name. Don’t underestimate how much people will pay for your blog. Take a look right now at domain selling websites and see how much people are paying for mature blogs and domains. You could fail for two years and still earn a big wedge of cash.