make money blogging

Kwabena Okyire Appianing

Business

About the author

Kwabena Okyire Appianing

Considered the #1 authority on engineering profitable customer acquisition campaigns, Kwabena is the marketing expert other experts go to when they need help

Six Smart Ways to Make Money with Your Website or Blog

The internet is over two decades old but not many are aware of its money-making potential. To give you a fair idea of the internet’s power to make you rich in a short time, take a look at present day billionaires and millionaires across the globe. Jack Ma (founder and CEO of Alibaba), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Founders of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook) and the list goes on. These names are all on billionaires list. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions across the globe make money blogging. Making money online is real and the avenues are many.

You may not be as technically gifted as some of these billionaires and millionaires, and honestly, you don’t have to be, to also make money from the internet and all that it offers to mankind.

One easy way to make money  online is by owning a website (or a blog).  Sometimes, and mostly so, it’s because they do not know how to monetize the site and start making enough money or start making money quickly online.

How to Make Money with Your Website/Blog

You may have heard that you could make money blogging. You even tried it and didn’t make money as you expected. Though there’s no magic formula, there are basic things you need to cover if you want to monetize your website. Problogger, Copyblogger, Linda Ikeji, Ghanaweb, are some blogs making good money.

There are several income streams available to you as a blogger (or a site owner/manager) and here are the most common and easy ways of making money from your blog or website.

  1. Advertising

It is definitely the oldest form of making money with a blog or website. Emergence and dominance of other forms of revenue streams are gradually making advertising the model bringing in the least revenue. You can sell advertising space directly on your site or you can go through intermediaries like Google Adsense or Media.net, buysellads.com infolinks.com

You only make enough money from advertising when your site visits hit the thousands on daily basis. So the key here is to be patient while growing the number of visitors to your site. Write attractive and yet relevant articles, if you’re a blogger, to increase your web traffic. You can also rely on effective SEO to improve your visibility and increase traffic. For websites whose primary purpose is not churning on contents for reading, you can increase traffic through attractive offerings, affiliations with bigger sites, and improved SEO.

  1. Affiliate Marketing

In this model, you basically sell products of other businesses on your site and make a commission whenever someone buys the product through your site. There are many affiliate networks, such as FlexOffers and CJ Affiliate that allow you to promote other people’s products and services. You simply put a link or a banner on your page and then you get a percentage if someone clicks through and buys the product/service.

You’ll want to select products that are specifically within your blog’s category. This is an effective way to earn money once you have the traffic coming to your blog. Choosing the wrong product means your visitors are least likely to buy, and thus this strategy is rendered ineffective. For instance, if you own a fashion blog (you write on fashion), you can negotiate with fashion brands to place their products on your site so people would click and buy. This increases your chance of success because your readers are mostly fashion lovers who want to be abreast with latest trends and are willing to spend money on clothes.

  1. Membership/Subscription

Allowing people to subscribe for exclusive content can make you money. Many people have created a paid membership area on their blog. This is typically for exclusive content that you can only access when you become a paid member. If you think of something valuable (newsletter, online magazine, advice etc.) that you can consistently offer on a certain basis (weekly, monthly, etc.), you may want to offer a subscription service. If you have a really great idea on what to include, this can be a great idea.  You’ll have to create something that can’t easily be accessed around the web, if visitors are to pay for it.

It’s simply, offering extra or premium service for a fee. Your job is to find out exactly what additional valuable offering your visitors would be willing to pay for that are in line with what your site’s category.

  1. Products

You can create your own product, such as an ebook , video lessons, or a web app. You would then use your blog as a promotion tool to get people to buy your product. As long as you create a legitimate product with a whole lot of value, you should be able to get some buyers, but like everything else with a blog, you’ll need the traffic to make the sales.

For example, some sites sell ebooks while others offer you products such as complex calculators, tax computation service, etc that you pay to access and utilize.

  1. Services

You can offer a paid service, such as life coaching, blog coaching, goal setting or financial planning. Just be sure to investigate all the legal implications and make sure you’re not claiming to be a professional if you’re not one. With a service like this, you’re basically using your blog to sell yourself. You’ll need to convince people that you’re worth buying and then be able to back up your claims once they purchase your service.

This revenue stream is usually used by professionals. For example, a renowned musician can start providing coaching to people via his website for a fee. This would include writing, composing, arranging and recording the music. Producing and distributing could be additional service rendered for a premium.

  1. Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are basically just posts about a specific brand, product or service. A company will pay you to publish an article about it. You are basically selling the spot for the article on your site. If you decide to take this route, you’ll want to build your web traffic before you will get many offers.

The internet presents many money making opportunities for all. The good thing about making money online is that it is fast and often involves lower investment. In my future post , i will share more on this topic.

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