A blog can just be something that you update in your spare time because you enjoy it. But it can also be a way to make money. You can run your blog as a business, especially if you already have a blog with a large following. Making money from blogging isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s not as hard as some people may think. One of the great things about turning a blog into a business is that you have multiple ways to start bringing in money. A lot of bloggers have several income streams that might bring in different amounts each month. Diversifying your income from your blog is a great way to ensure you’re not always relying on one thing to make you money.
Create a Plan for Your Blog
Any business needs to have a business plan, even if you’re planning on turning your blog into a business. When you’re monetising a blog, especially if you want to come up with several income streams to start earning money, you should have a clear plan for what you want to do and what your goals are. It can take some experimentation to find out what works for your blog, but it’s useful to start with some things that you want to try out. By writing a plan for how you want to start making money from your blog, you can go into it with a clear idea of what you need to do.
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Grow Your Blog Audience
If you haven’t already, growing your blog audience to a respectable number is a must to help you monetise your blog. If you don’t have very many monthly visitors, it’s definitely worth spending some time promoting your blog to bring in a larger audience. Starting to try and make money from your blog too easy could be a mistake. If the audience isn’t there, you might not get very far, and then you could be at risk of giving up. Some money-making ideas are also better left until later too. For example, some affiliate marketing programs require you to make a sale within a certain amount of time. So it’s better to have a good number of reasons to help you guarantee your first sale.
Look for Writing Opportunities Elsewhere
One of the ways to promote your own blog is to look for writing opportunities on other blogs and websites. This often allows you to link back to your website and it also makes it possible to grow your reputation as a blogger. If you want your writing to be one of the ways you make money, writing for other people can often be your best opportunity to do so. You can go looking for writing opportunities by approaching other blogs and websites. Alternatively, or additionally, you can also add a page to your blog about the writing service that you offer.
Open an Online Store
An online store is a great thing to add to your blog if you want to make some money. There are often products that relate to your blog or brand that you can sell. What sort of things would your blog visitors and subscribers like to buy from you? It might make sense to sell stationery on a blog about organisation. If you visit here, you can find ideas such as tote bags that could work for a variety of different blogs. Before you start selling anything to your readers, think about what they want. They don’t want to be sold anything that they’re not interested in.
You can set up an online store in a few ways. It could be a store set up on Amazon or somewhere else. You might buy products to sell, or you could make your own products. Which option is best can depend on how much effort you want to put in, as well as what you think will actually sell well.
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Try Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money from a blog. It involves selling another business’s products by promoting them and linking to their site. Any sales that result from clicking on your special link to their product will result in a commission for you. Linking to products doesn’t necessarily have to involve promoting them directly. You might write a review of a product, but you could also link to it in a natural way within a post that relates to the product. You will need to let your readers know when a post contains links to affiliate products. Make sure you only link to products relevant to your blog and your audience too.
Get Revenue from Advertising
Advertising on your blog can be another way to bring in revenue. It won’t necessarily be your biggest money-maker, but it can be a good method of bringing in some extra cash. You can use ad networks to place adverts on your site. Ads from Google and other networks will automatically display on your site, using cookies to make them relevant to your readers. You can also offer your own, private ad space that you can sell to businesses. This can give you control over your placement of ads and you get to choose how much you charge for that advertising space, plus how often you rotate ads.
Grow Your Visibility
Focusing on growing the visibility of your blog is essential if you want to grow it as a business. You might have a good audience now but you have to keep building on it if you don’t want people to leave. Good SEO is an essential part of growing your blog. If you haven’t already put work into ensuring you get your SEO right, it’s something that you need to focus on. There are many elements of SEO, from using the right keywords to getting people to link back to your blog. You might even want to get some professional help with it.
If you want to turn your blog into a business, you should start by working out which methods of making money could work for you.
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