Blogging can be a hugely lucrative field to be in, but you need to do it right from the beginning to make a good profit. When you first get set up, you will be paying between $30-$250 in operation costs, depending on the way you choose to operate. Whether you’ve just started or need a helping hand, you will find six tips for creating a profitable blog below.
Niche Down
Trying to write about every topic under the sun won’t make your blog stand out. Therefore, you need to choose a niche and demonstrate your expertise, which will be rewarded by Google’s SEO algorithm. Content is key when it comes to establishing yourself in a niche, with long-form blog posts needing to account for the majority of posts. When you start to write consistent expert posts, you will see your traffic begin to increase over time. Once you have the traffic, the money will start to follow.
Banner Adverts
If you’ve got the readers and have the space at the side of your blog, why not use it for ads? Let businesses purchase banner ads, and you will profit from a click-through rate. You can earn money through cost-per-click (CPC), or cost-per-thousand (CPM), which means you’ll get a negotiable payout per 1000 impressions. These days, with the rise of Adblocker plugins, CPM and CPC can be relatively low. However, there’s no harm in trying to make a profit this way.
Affiliate Links
Once you’ve put the groundwork in and built up a sizable following, you can start monetizing with Amazon Associates. When you write content, you talk about products sold by Amazon that are relevant to your niche. Every time someone buys the product, you gain a percentage of the price. When writing affiliate content, you need to keep it natural and use products that you’ve preferably tried yourself. It’s worth keeping in mind that, just because you get more money for higher-priced products, it doesn’t mean you should force them into your content. You will make more profit in the long term by talking about affordable and relatable products.
Guest Blogging
When you build up your blog expertise, other publications and blogs may contact you asking to write a guest post for them. Alternatively, you can pitch to niche-relative blogs and ask them if you can write a guest post. Although you won’t get paid for writing on someone else’s blog this way, it’s a fantastic way of reaching new readers and will increase your traffic over time.
PR and Outreach
Building organic web traffic will help to boost your blog profit, but it’s not a process that will happen overnight. Reaching out to publications and securing quality do-follow backlinks is a great way to do this. If you have the time to make a handful of email pitches every week, you should head over to Help a Reporter Out (HARO), which helps to connect journalists with experts for quotes. When you receive your daily newsletter, you should check out the placement publication to check their domain authority (DA) – the higher their DA, the more likely they are to place a do-follow backlink.
Sell Your Blog
Once you’ve created a profitable blog, it takes a lot of time to keep up maintenance. A great way to make a profit on a well-established blog is to sell it. When selling an online blog, your best option is to get in touch with a domain broker, who will assess your site’s worth. Blogs at the high-end can sell for thousands.
Blogging can be hugely profitable if done right from the beginning. If you put the hard work in to build traffic, you will start to see the money rolling in.