Blogging is a great way to build another online income stream in 2020. There are entrepreneurs carving out an extra chunk of money every month through blogging.
For example, Lifehacker, a lifestyle blog, brings in $110,000 a MONTH for its CEO Gina Trapani.
Many people shy away from starting a blog because they don’t think of themselves as good writers. This is such a shame because anybody can start a blog and the benefits they’re missing out on are enormous. You don’t need to be a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times author to create a profitable blog.
You don’t even need to be a particularly knowledgeable in a certain subject to blog, now you can affordably outsource most of the work or ethically curate content if you’re averse to writing.
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There are dozens of ways to profit off of your blog, but here are my 6 favorite methods for making money while blogging:
1. Place Ads on Your Blog
If you’ve been online for more than five minutes, then you have seen ads placed on a blog. This is one of the more popular methods for blog monetization, as it’s relatively simple.
You make good content, drive traffic to your site, and profit off of the ads.
There are a few ways that you can set ads to run on your site. Cost-per-click (CPC) ads reward you with money for every single click you get. The price per click of these ads is usually a few cents, but if you drive large amounts of traffic and get a lot of clicks then you can rake in a lot of profit with CPC ads.
Then there are CPM ads (cost per mille) which will give you a payout for every 1000 people who view the ad – nobody even has to click! These ads are golden for people who drive lots of traffic.
Some ads will charge a flat fee to be run during a certain time period, similar to how television commercials work.
The other 5 methods require a little more salesmanship to work (which is inevitable for any entrepreneur), but if you prefer to focus your time on posting good content, driving traffic, and building a high viewership for your blog, then placing ads might be a good way for you to make money blogging.
2. Sell Your Own Product
After you finish reading this article, take a few minutes to explore some blogs. You will notice that a lot of them are selling something of their own. You will see a mixture of digital products and physical products.
There are many well-established businesses that create blogs to generate another stream of income. They take a product that is already developed and selling, and they use their blog to sell more of that product.
In fact, it’s becoming a standard business practice in 2020 for businesses to build a blog for extra sales. Your business is missing out if it doesn’t have a blog to drive more sales.
If you don’t have an existing product to sell, then you can easily create a new one to sell on your blog. In the 21st century it’s easier than ever to launch your own product to sell. You can dropship physical products that you sell on your site, draft up an ebook, come up with a course (which isn’t as hard as it sounds), and do a lot more to create a product of your own to promote on your blog.
Now this isn’t a ‘get rich quick’ method. Blogging, like any business, requires time, energy, and cunning. There is actual strategy to selling with a blog. The first rule is to keep a ratio of 80% ordinary content to 20% promotional content.
Nobody wants to be sold to. When someone reads your blog, they’re reading it because they think they can derive some sort of value from it. Provide that value!
If someone clicks on one of your blogs and gets hit with a sales letter, then they will just click away and never come back. You can create a loyal base of readers just by providing good content to read. These loyal readers will always come back.
But, at the tail end of your blog posts make sure to weave in your promotions. If the reader found value in the first part of your post, they will trust you and be more inclined to take you up on whatever you’re offering them.
3. Sell a Membership
Memberships are powerful. The digital businesses with a recurring payment membership model are the businesses given the highest value by investors. This isn’t for no reason – routine, evergreen income streams made reliably every month are vital for financial prosperity.
Membership products are great ways to build this type of income and blogs are even better ways to sell these memberships.
Memberships are almost exclusively digital and they come in a few forms. They can come in the form of email newsletters, special courses, exclusive member only content, special software, apps, etc.
Blogs are really good ways to build memberships, since you’re building a devoted reader-base over time. A lot of these readers would be willing to pay a small fee for your membership to hear more from you.
If you’re selling a $10/month subscription and you get only 100 subscribers to that membership, you’re making an extra $1000 every month! Now just play with the numbers and see just how big a business like this could get.
The best part is you only need to acquire a customer once and they’re giving you recurring payments repeatedly for months. You acquire those 100 subscribers one time and they flowing income to you for long after that moment.
4. Affiliate Offers
If you don’t have your own product to sell or you’re simply not interested in creating your own product, then you can just sell other people’s products for them by affiliate blogging.
Affiliate marketing is when you sell another person’s offer in exchange for commission. You can find affiliate programs to promote on your blog.
Most affiliate programs will give you a link and if anybody makes a purchase with that link you will get a commission of the sale.
You can also find affiliate programs that give you a commission for every single person who clicks your link, or for every person who makes it to a certain point in the affiliate funnel.
Many bloggers make the mistake of promoting completely random affiliate offers. They will write a blog post on the importance of maintaining cybersecurity and then at the end of that post promote an ebook on gardening.
Readers interested in cybersecurity aren’t too likely to have much interest in gardening. A better affiliate link would sell those readers a VPN or a course on staying secure online.
When promoting affiliate offers on your blog, just remember to maintain that 80% content to 20% ratio and find a way to naturally transition to the promotion section of your blog instead of abruptly sticking in your affiliate link out of nowhere.
5. Build a List
You can make a lot of money with blogging without placing a single promotion or offer into your blog posts.
Instead of directly trying to drive sales through your blogs, you can use your blogs to build up your email list. Once you have a list built you can promote all kinds of offers to them.
The list you build over time will be a lot more receptive to promotional material than the raw traffic directed to your blog posts.
By using your blogs to build a loyal, profitable list over time, you can actually make more money than just writing promotional blogs and building no list.
6. Flip It!
Many digital entrepreneurs make their money by flipping blogs.
You can build one from scratch, build up its reader base, start building revenue with it, and then sell it to a happy customer.
You can also buy an existing one for cheap, fix it up, and then flip that one.
It’s like mini house flipping. Instead of selling a house for $800,000, you can sell a blog for $8,000.
The key to blog flipping is to get it to routinely generate at least some amount of money every month reliably.
The only reason somebody would buy a blog off of you is because that blog is an investment. The buyer wants to see that the blog is already producing revenue.
You can make a business with any of these models for little to no investment. That's apart of the beauty of blogging. Anybody could build a blogging powerhouse if they dedicate the time and energy to it.
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