Thursday 3 April 2014

12 ways to make your blog profitable

Nowadays, blogging isn’t only a form of expressing oneself via the Internet. Many people have also found a stable income stream from blogging for other sites or creating their own blog site. But it is important to remember that not everyone is able to succeed. Those who are successful likely have the knowledge and know-how on the proper way of blogging, from format to topic selection.Though there are so many ways to build a profitable blog to make money but nothing works if you don’t put hard work and time in making it a success. One of the reasons why most people
fail at making money blogging is they don’t care about their readers or traffic. They always focus on either SEO or link building related stuff to rank higher in the search engines.
But remember that, this is a Google Panda and Penguin world, you just can’t build links by guest posting to make your blog profitable. You have to think beyond and work consistently to achieve your blogging goals.
Here is a guide for newbies and aspiring bloggers to make their blog profitable.
How to make your blog profitable?

1. Monetize

Bloggers often travel the globe in the hopes of finding a conducive topic for their blog. Yet ultimately, they stumble upon the problem of not getting paid for it. If you want your blog to make money rather than lose it, you should prioritize looking for problems to solve instead of the travel. If you focus your perspective and your blog around problem-solving, monetizing your blog will become much simpler and faster.
Don’t Miss: How to go about monetizing your blog

2. Affiliate Marketing

By far, affiliate marketing is the simplest and most helpful means of monetizing your blog site. Affiliate marketing involves selling other website’s products and services. If a customer buys these products and services with your help, you earn a commission, which is mostly not bad considering you don’t really have to mind anything.
You don’t have to build a highly traffic website to make money from affiliate marketing, but you must have good connections with fellow bloggers. Then and only then you will be able to make sales, because in online, no one buys from someone who they don’t know. Trust is the key to make more sales from affiliate products.
Read: How you can use Affiliate Marketing to make money from a coupon website

3. Offer Your Own Services

The first and simplest means of monetizing a blog site is to offer services. Look for your strengths and skills and work on how you can offer it to clients in a way that they will find great value for it. Consultations regarding legal matters, accounting, editing, copywriting, etc. are some of the more common services offered by bloggers. Suppose you are good in guest blogging, you can start offering guest blogging as a services on your website.
There are many bloggers who started their career (of making money) by offering their own services. For instance, full time blogger (and successful Internet marketer) likeDaniel Scocco started making his first money by offering his freelance writing services. So don’t feel shy to showcase your skills to make money.
Once you start making decent income, you can think about different monetization streams like affiliate marketing, niche websites etc. But don’t wait to make money if you already have good skills in your topics.

4. Premium Products

Services included above should be treated as a short-term money-making strategy. If you want to earn stable income for the long haul, you need to think of and create a premium product reliant upon your expertise, adventures, or travels. Provide your readers and visitors with quality free content that they can use. In addition, create useful products and crafts to sell in your blog.
Few people like Darren Rowse offer premium products to sell to their audience to make passive income from their online sources. It’s often a best way to make money online byselling premium products like eBooks, membership sites, plugins, themes etc. Because you don’t have to work hard once people started liking and buying your products.
Moreover you can ask people to buy your products by offering affiliate commissions. Thus you can make more money without sweating much, but make sure to find the right product ideas or else they might get fail to make money.

5. Niche Picking

It is a common mistake for bloggers to venture into a particular market or industry with little or no knowledge at all just because the market is trending. You should always blog about something you are most knowledgeable of. Readers don’t want to take advice and recommendations from someone who doesn’t even know what are talking about.
Bloggers like Pat Flynn who is extremely smart blogger when it comes to making money by launching niche websites is a good example of this model. In niche websites, you need to stick to particular topic and write quality articles related to only them. If you are doing good SEO and getting good amount of traffic to your keywords, then you can make money through Google AdSense or placing affiliate products by selling banner ads in your niche websites.
All it takes is to figure out the best keywords for your niche and write in depth articles related to it and drive more traffic from search engines.

6. Space for Content

After making high-value content, create space online to market your blog. Possible spaces include Facebook fan pages, WordPress, Tumblr, etc. WordPress is ideal for bloggers lacking know-how regarding creation of a website.
Don’t think you can grow your blog only by posting contents on it. You can also make your blog profitable by helping people to solve their problems. Use social media sites to boost your reach, stay in touch with the influencers and you will over time notice the best results.

7. Schedule Content Release

You shouldn’t create 10 long posts and distribute them all at once. You should schedule release of content on a regular basis. For example, 10 articles can be divided into 5 weeks, meaning you will update your blog post with 2 articles a week. However, always remember that you can still post secondary blogs about your dinner last night or the latest news in sports.
One of the easiest ways to schedule your blog contents is to write well in advance. Don’t sit back and relax after writing and publishing a post. Think beyond and write few posts to schedule them in advance. This way even if you sometimes don’t feel like blogging or writing anything, you can schedule your already written posts to publish.
So your readers don’t have to wait for your posts when you schedule them automatically. Whenever you are in writing mood, write posts and don’t stop. You can edit later but don’t edit while writing. And keep away all the distractions like phone calls, emails, Facebook etc. when you are writing.

8. Driving Traffic

Distribute your guest posts to everyone in your niche at least once every week. This way, you have 1 guest post every week for 4 consecutive weeks. Those guest posts will be important in producing valuable website traffic. Make sure you post comments regularly on these individuals’ blogs as well.
If you think guest blogging is not working well for you, then think about launching a pinterest board and share your images (link them to your blog posts) and create awareness of your brand. You can also think different ways to drive traffic like using slideshare to get more reach etc.

9. Communicate with Users

Want to make your blog profitable within your blog itself?
Then try spending quality time to engage with the readers and visitors of your websites. Without proper engagement, like responding to the blog comments they think your blog is not a place to spend their time and they ultimately choose to stop reading your blog. So don’t make that mistake, whenever you have free time, send them few thankful messages or emails to show your gratitude.
Commenting on your blog posts and replying to other comments in social networking sites will inspire interest and make them feel more valued. Whenever someone posts a comment on your blog, try to reply immediately. Make sure your reply makes sense to the individual’s comment otherwise they’ll think it’s a spam.

10. Get Sponsors

If you do not get at least 1,000 unique visits per day, you won’t be able to start finding sponsors, which plays a crucial role in your pursuit. It is indeed possible to host your own events and contests. If you do, however, you will incur stiff costs and increase risks.
If your blog is bit popular, you can attract so many sponsors to sponsor your expenses. It can be anything from offering web hosting services to giving away plugins. Most designers of these premium products would love to give away for your readers for free if you could write a post for them. It’s basically a win/win approach for both you and your readers.

11. Job Board

Providing a job board within your blog is basic enough even for newbies. Through this feature, bloggers can provide complimentary and paid job listings for their visitors who may be looking for employment opportunities. To start earning from job boards, provide premium listings that enable greater exposure as compared to the regular, free job listings. You can charge users for as low as $10 to as high as $75.
But keep in mind that this job board thing works only if you have a huge loyal base around your blogs or at least if you are getting good amount of traffic from all over the world. Then and only then you can ask people to provide premium listings to make your blog profitable.

12. Sell Private Space

Once your blog site receives stable traffic, you can consider selling available ad space for marketers to place their text advertisements and banners. You can ask for fees on a monthly basis and earn as much as $100 for this strategy alone.
One of the best things about selling your own ads is the flexibility. It totally depends on you how much to charge, where to put your banner ads and which ads to consider using on your blogs or websites.
Overall, making money through blogs is a lengthy and demanding process, especially during its premature stages. Nonetheless, bloggers who are smart and skilled enough may be able to build an empire in a matter of months. An important thing to consider for any blogger is that you shouldn’t rush things and expect to earn thousands of dollars after only a few months. Be consistent in delivering high value content, products, and services to gain traffic over time.

Let me know if you have any questions and please share your views on making a blog profitable in the comment section below.
post from labnol.org

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