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How to earn money from your blog

How to earn money from your blog

Now that you have created your blog, found your blog niche and know how to use WordPress the important work can really begin. Having your own blog should be about writing about something that you are passionate about, or have knowledge on, however, this doesn’t mean that you can’t monetise your blog as well!

How to earn money from your blog

Promotion of your blog

Social media is really the kit when it comes to promotion of your blog. There are millions of people using social media everyday. The biggest channels, at present, for most bloggers are still TwitterFacebook and Instagram. The popularity of Pinterest is rising regularly and people in the UK are now the fourth biggest users of Pinterest throughout the World. If you are aiming your content towards people in the UK then Pinterest is a fantastic tool that can really help you achieve your blogging goals faster and promote your content to more people than ever before.

Creating accounts specifically for your blog are a great idea across all social media channels. Ensure that you use any relevant hashtags on your bios and be sure to include your location too. This can help brands that are looking to find bloggers in local areas and could potentially lead to review work in your local area too.

Sharing your content on social media

You can look to use programs, such as Hootsuite and Buffer, to help you share your content on social media. You can look at the times when your tweets, Instagram photos or Facebook statuses perform the best and look to have your posts automatically scheduled to be posted at these times. This is great for keeping your posts displayed at relevant times. For example, if you are targeting parents, then late evening is going to be a good time for you to post your tweets. Once the children are in bed some parents love to have a browse on Pinterest and look for new craft projects or even just ways to boost the household finances.

Monetising your posts

Affiliate marketing is HUGE. Many of the large websites that you know and love will use advertising to make themselves some money.

As well as specific adverts that you can place on your website there is the option to use Google Adsense, to display adverts to your visitors based on their personal search data, demographics and much more. Google Adsense will pay you for display these adverts and thus the more visitors you have the more potential there is to reach cash out faster. This book is a great resource for Adsense users.

Affiliate window become an affiliate

If you are looking to dedicate your time to just a handful of affiliate marketing companies online then look at the following:

Affiliate Window – One of the biggest and best affiliate companies online. They have 1000s of companies listed that will allow you to earn money for click throughs, sign ups, purchases and much more. Campaigns can be targeted sometimes and you may need to pitch to specific brands – so ensure that you have something to offer. If your website is just starting out it is important to work on your branding, web design and building up your followers across social media. Once you are more established you can begin to pitch to larger brands and even look at asking them to increase the commission amounts that you can receive per conversion.

Amazon Associates – Who doesn’t know and love Amazon?! With millions of products on sale it is easy to include links to Amazon in your sidebar, within blog posts and much more. You could even  look to publish posts that are dedicated to Amazon. Perhaps you could write about quirky items you’ve found for sale on Amazon, bargains or even just base a gift guide around the convenience of ordering everything from one company, Amazon, and having it delivered in one day! This is an ideal affiliate marketing company to be advertising around Christmas time. If someone clicks your link, but goes on to buy something else within 24 hours, then you will still receive from 1-10% commission for the purchase, depending on the category the item is from.

Commission Junction – Much like Affiliate Window this is another company where you can choose from 100s of advertisers. You can obtain links, banners and much more for use on your own website. They regularly have new brands joining and there are lots of ways that you could be looking to monetise your blog using their links.

Lastly, another actionable step would be to check whether the services/products you already use or love have affiliate programs. That’s the perfect duo: recommending what you love will make you more passionate about it and will look less commercial. Moreover, you can promote products or services that are in align with your values or ideas. For example, if you value education and learning a good option would be to partner up with an eLearning platform like BitDegree that has 50% commission rate on their courses. This not only will get you some money but would help spread the knowledge and education.

Companies want to pay bloggers to advertise their services. This might be something as simple as linking back to a website or it might be a more in-depth series of posts where you review products or services. Brands will pay for these valuable links, as well as for you exposing your audience to their products, websites or services. This is a fantastic way to boost your online earnings and as you become more established it isn’t uncommon for brands to come to you, either directly or via PR companies, to ask if you want to work with them on upcoming campaigns. Public relations companies are designed to help improve the reputation of a brand and help them be noticed more through advertising, search engine listings and much more.

Twitter Requests

There are lots of great companies online, including Bloggers Required, that can put you in touch with sponsored posts. Also, check Twitter using hashtags #prrequest and #bloggersrequired as there are tweets posted throughout the day and night from brands looking to work with bloggers. It can also be a handy hashtag to use to put yourself in touch with brands that are looking for bloggers in specific niches.

Join groups such as UK Bloggers and UK Parent Bloggers on Facebook. Also look for relevant groups in your niche as you will find an engaged audience here as well as opportunities to work with brands, learn more about your blog and generally just better yourself.

Always ensure that you check whether any links you are required to include are follow or no follow links. Google guidelines dictate that your website can be penalised, by being removed from search engine listings, for providing paid for follow links. Why not find out more about follow and no follow links?

Invoicing for work that you complete

Many companies that offer sponsored posts will want you to invoice them for the work that you have completed. Once a post is live you can look to arrange an invoice. If you have a brand that will accept a Paypal invoice then this is VERY simple. Paypal have templates already created that allow you to create an invoice, give it an invoice number (needed to keep track for the taxman) and add in details of your fees and any terms. Find out more about what to include in an invoice.

Always ensure that you include details of any non payment fees or late fees that you will be charging. If a brand is late paying you, beyond the agreed time (28-30 days is a good guideline) then you can look at charging them late fees. This can give you an opportunity to chase a brand a few days before a payment is overdue, to help avoid them having to pay additional fees, and it also means that if you DO have a company that fail to pay you that you can be compensated for the delay.

Monetising your blog can be a fantastic way to generate yourself some extra money online. While it may be slow to start initially once your readers learn that they can rely on you for quality content they will come back time and time again.

If you are looking for some great resources to help you monetise your blog then this book on building a money-making blog is a must read!

We hope that you have found our 3 part series helpful. Now that we have covered creating a blog, installing WordPress, writing content and monetising content you should have all the tools that you need to help you get started with your own monetised blog. Do remember that it can be slow progress at the beginning so avoid burning out. Do not publish all of your content in the first few weeks, spread it out, and always ensure that you spread your good ideas out. Think about whether you can split your posts down into parts and consider setting yourself a posting schedule to keep motivated.

What do you think?

Written by themoneyshed

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