This is a Guest Post by Audrey Porterman of Doctoral Programs. If you would like to Guest Post for WAHI, please visit the Guest Posting page.
Blogging is one of the best ways to make money online. When you’re just starting out, it may be unclear exactly how it is that you make money from blogging. You might understand that advertising is involved somehow, and you might know that getting a lot of traffic to your site is important, but how it all comes together may be a bit confusing.
There are a few different ways that you can make money through blogging. Here are the basics:
Advertising
There are many different ways to sell advertising on your blog. You can sell advertising directly, setting your own rates and terms. Unless you have a really popular blog in a popular niche, you aren’t likely to be attractive enough to advertisers for them to pay for space on your blog.
The form of advertising that most bloggers use is pay-per-click or pay-per-impression advertising. They sign up through a program such as Google AdSense (the most popular advertising program with bloggers) and place the ads on their blogs. Whenever a reader clicks on that ad, the blogger gets money — usually a few pennies. The more popular the blog, the more traffic it gets and the more likely that more people will click on the ads, creating more revenue. The less popular the blog, the more likely that revenue will be very small (maybe only a few dollars a month or none at all).
Other ads include pay-per-impression (whenever a user views the ad, measured by traffic) and text links (which pay per click or impression and are tied to hyperlinks in the blog content).
Affiliate Marketing
Another form of advertising, affiliate marketing pays the blogger a commission on any sales generated through those ads. For example, if you display an ad from Amazon for a new TV, and a reader clicks on that ad and buys that TV, you get a commission. Affiliate marketing tracks sales through specially coded links tied to your ads. Commissions can be fixed or based on a percentage.
When you choose affiliate marketing, it is best to choose products to promote that you actually endorse and that are tied to the content of your blog. You’ll be able to promote the products better, and your readers will be more likely to buy them because they tie in to their interests.
Sponsored Reviews
More companies are recognizing the power of blogs to promote their products — or to hurt their reputations. It only takes the recommendation of a popular blog to increase sales or the bad review of a popular blog to create a negative reputation.
Many companies will pay bloggers to review their products in the hopes of getting a good review. If you write a paid review, you have to disclose the payment on your blog (the fact that you have been paid, not how much you were paid). You don’t have to say you love the product just because you were paid for the post.
Selling Your Own Products and Services
The best way that bloggers make money is to sell their own products and services. Do you want to write a craft blog? You can sell your own creations, an e-book explaining your techniques, or an online course showing others how to make your creations. Do you want to write about small businesses? You can sell your consulting services or an e-book outlining your expert recommendations.
No matter what type of blog you write, you can sell your own products. Consulting, e-books, or products you have created are among the most popular items to sell.
Whatever method you choose for making money with your blog, getting a lot of targeted traffic will be the key to your success. The more people in your target audience who are visiting your blog, the more people you have to potentially click on your ads, buys your affiliate products, or buy your own products or services. You won’t necessarily get rich from any one of these methods individually (though you could), but you have a very good chance of success if you diversity and you use all of them well.
About the Author: Audrey Porterman is the main researcher and writer for doctoralprograms.org. Her most recent accomplishment includes graduating from Ohio State, with a degree in business management. Her current focus for the site involves business doctoral programs and psychology phd programs.
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