How To Make Your First $500 From Blogging (A Step-By-Step Guide)
Let’s take a look at the most popular options for earning an income from your blog. Pick and choose several of the methods below to diversify your income and turn your blog into a real business supported by display advertising, sponsored posts, affiliate sales and other revenue. Experiment, test and take your time choosing the methods that fit your blog topic and your audience the best.
Don’t force it as you will find that the best monetization methods will come to you naturally over time. Affiliate marketing is the practice of recommending products and services to your visitors and getting a commission if they decide to make a purchase. Thousands of companies who will pay you a commission on sales that you generate through your content.
Even the New York Times entered the affiliate marketing by acquiring site The Wirecutter. 30 million for the site which has affiliate revenue as its only income source. Find opportunities in your market and products you are familiar with. You can enter a very broad market that appeals to a wide audience and offers many products for sale.
Niches such as health, beauty and fitness. 1. Then you publish amazing informational content that truly answers questions real people have. This helps you build an audience. 2. You also publish product based content such as reviews, comparisons, how-to guides and step-by-step instructions. These are amazing and educational and help people use the product better, show how the product can improve their lives. The products you recommend must be relevant, useful and valuable to your audience and the needs they want to fulfill.
3. Rather than using banner ads to promote the product, put the affiliate links naturally within the content itself. Banner blindness is a very known phenomenon which was proven by several eye-tracking studies and has shown that visitors tend to ignore banners. 4. Always remember to disclose your relationship with the company you promote. So how do you find affiliate programs to join, Amazon has a large affiliate program where you can earn a commission of up to 10% on anything they sell.
You can also join one of the larger affiliate networks such as Commission Junction, Clickbank or Shareasale which all feature opportunities from hundreds of merchants. Skimlinks is an option if you want an easy way to take advantage of affiliate marketing. They scan your content and automatically insert relevant links from thousands of merchants, so you don’t have to worry about joining affiliate programs and thinking about links. You can also visit a company site directly and see if they have an affiliate program.
If they don’t, contact the company, explain your situation and ask if they would like to agree to do an affiliate deal with you. This one is all about you monetizing your audience directly. If you’ve built a very passionate audience for your cause, a very effective monetization strategy is to let them fund you.
In exchange, you can reward those who pay you by reserving them premium access to some of your content. Patreon is a platform that can help you accept funding from your true fans. More than 50,000 creators use Patreon with more than 1 million true fans being monthly active paying patrons. Some creators also sell branded merchandise such as t-shirts, hoodies and coffee mugs to the faithful fans. Jason Kottke, one of the very first bloggers, allows fans to purchase yearly memberships to support his blog.
And that’s even without promising any exclusive content. PayPal offers these buttons too and it just might be the way for you to get rewarded for the help you provide to your readers. You can also limit access to some (or all) of your content and allow your true fans to get access to it by paying a small fee. Most major newspapers such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have these paywalls as one of their primary sources of income.
