In the current financial climate people are looking for as many ways to make money as possible. One way that has been seen as an attractive method by many is blogging. Because blogging has been quite high profile of late; with several bloggers becoming highly successful because of their blogs making money blogging has become the dream of many.

So how do you make money blogging? What should you blog about? Where do you start? These are just some of the common questions that people have once they start to dig deeper in their quest to realise their dreams of blogging themselves rich.

Blogging is hard work

The first thing you need to realise is that if you think that you are going to make money in a matter of weeks, you are sadly mistaken. In fact you may never make a penny. A blog is something that requires a substantial time investment with potentially no monetary reward, so it is important that you choose a niche that you really enjoy to blog about. If you are a fan of photography you could start a photography blog; if you like fashion you could start a fashion or lifestyle blog. If you love to travel or even would love to travel you could start a travel blog. Did you know that a huge number of people who blog about travelling don’t actually travel? Some of these travel blogs are classed as bucket list blogs.

Whichever niche you choose to blog about you have to be fully committed and realistic about the work involved. If you just write a post a month and don’t put any ground work in to promote it your posts may never see the light of day. There is loads to do way beyond writing; it is important to work hard to create a social presence and for you to begin to build relationships with other people in your niche. Collaboration is a huge part blogging success and if you can build the right bridges it can really help you to grow.

Once you build up a little traffic and you can start looking at how to monetize your website there are a number of choices that you have to make. When you are going to monetize your site and how you are going to do it are 2 choices that you will need to make. If you plan to monetize your website you will have to self-host it, as many free platforms don’t allow this in their terms and conditions.

Ways of making money from your blog:

  • Selling advertising space
  • Brand promotion
  • Product endorsements and affiliate marketing
  • Educating

Selling advertising space – Selling advertising space is one of the more common ways of monetizing your blog. There are different ways of doing this. You can use platforms such as Google Ads, which serve up different adverts to different visitors based on their previous browsing history. Another way is selling space to specific companies. It is up to you to negotiate the price with the brands.

Brand promotion – If you gain a large following lots of brands will be willing to pay to leverage your influence. Make sure that you declare anything to your fan base though so that there is no conflict of interest.

Product endorsements and affiliate marketing – Endorsing or reviewing products with affiliate links are a common first step into money making from blogs. Affiliate marketing is big business; but make sure it is done in a transparent way or you could alienate your readers.

Educating – Educating users is another great way of making money. Selling access to your knowledge in the form of guides or resources that help others to learn from your knowledge is very common.

Whatever way you plan to make money from blogging, there are some things that are certain. It is going to take a lot of work, a lot of time and a little luck. Good luck!