If you’ve got a blog that nicely established, you may be thinking about this important question: how can you capitalize on your audience and start to make money from the blog? After all, you’re spending a good amount of time every week keeping up to date with new content for your readers, so you deserve to make some money back from it. You needn’t worry. It’s pretty easy to make money from most blogs providing you’ve put them together to appeal to enough people. And in this article, I’m going to show you how.
The first thing you should do is use a small amount of blog post to recommend products that will be of interest to you readership. If you’re doing a blog based around a niche, this should be fairly easy and you can find appropriate products. These may be information products. If an e-book is selling in your niche, for instance, how to solve a problem, then you may simply recommend them, perhaps in a more subtle way by giving a review. Inside the review, include a link to buy the product and make sure it includes your affiliate link, that way you get a commission whenever that product is sold. Now you shouldn’t recommend products solely to make money off them – make sure they are quality and use due diligence before you recommend them. It’s quite acceptable to review some bad products as well to keep things fairly balanced. If it’s a physical product sold by online stores such as Amazon, you can also review them in the same way and include an affiliate link to them. There should be no shortage of products for you to review.
The second thing you should be doing is capturing the names and email address of the people who read your blog regularly. This is known as building a mailing list. The good thing about a mailing list is you can keep in contact with them and it’s fairly easy to build a mailing list. You simply want to give them a compelling reason to give you their name and email address. One reason might be so you can tell them when your blog has been updated. If you have a good blog and you’re updating every few days, then people will value that email from you to tell them it’s been updated. Once you have a mailing list, there’s nothing to stop you from contacting these people with other offers and other ways which can help you to make money. This is a good long-term strategy because as your mailing list grows, it gives you more people you can contact directly and they’ve given you permission to contact them.
The third way you can make money from your blog is to incorporate advertising on it. There are different schools of thought about how to do this. If you have an acceptable blog, then you may check out the Google AdSense Program. This takes something out of your screen and it saves contacts, relevant ads. So if your blog is related to weddings, then you’ll probably find you get adverts appearing for wedding dresses, wedding photography, wedding cakes, or other items related to that most happy occasion. This is all backed up through Google servers and so every time somebody clicks on one of these adverts, you make a small commission, depending on the type of blog and how popular the search term is will determine how much you get paid. Now, you may instead decide to get a hold of advertising directly, you could put a banner up on your blog asking people if they want to rent that space for a set amount per month. I generally recommend renting this for time period, never sell a permanent advert on your site because this doesn’t give any flexibility to change your site in the future. This could also be a profitable way to get advertising on your site and give you a guaranteed bit of an income appearing on it.
Once you’ve put all these methods together, they’ll give you three very powerful revenues streams for your blog. Make sure you recommend affiliate products where appropriate and where you know these will help the people who are reading your blog. Take the time to build a mailing list by capturing names and email addresses of your readers so you can contact them again in the future. And, take up a small amount of your blog with advertising, whether this is through a contact sensitive advertising service or you sell this space directly. By putting together these three money making streams, your blog will soon be raking in more cash.