If you treat your blog like a business, you could one day blog for money. This is Part III of my series on blogging for small businesses. In Part I, we talked about how to develop a content strategy. In Part II, we discussed how to promote your small business blog. This blog is focused on how to monetize your blog and get paid to develop content.
If you are looking for a secondary stream of income to complement your small business. becoming a professional blogger and social media influencer could be a good idea. Especially if you enjoy writing, blogging could be making money for you. Top writers can get paid $3 per word for writing. And if you have decent traffic to your blog as well as tons of followers on social media, there are ways to financially benefit from your blog as a brand influencer. Here are a few different ways to monetize your blog.
Ways to Monetize Your Blog
Write for Other Sites
While writing for your own business blog may not directly turn into money, becoming a paid writer on another blog can be lucrative. There are dozens of online publications looking for talented writers to add to their portfolio so that they can continually offer higher-quality content with a fresh perspective. You might not get paid very much when you start out, but the more you do it, the more followers you have the more you can charge for your work.
How to Get Started: An editor for a major publication will only consider you if you have a decent writing portfolio. If you don’t yet have one, start guest blogging on other sites for free. While these opportunities won’t pay you, you will get links to build credibility that you can present when you apply for paid gigs.
Accept Sponsored Content
You don’t even have to write content to make money from blogging. Companies looking to get in front of your audience are willing to pay to publish their content on your blog. Typically, you only want to accept informative articles and you must disclose that you’ve been paid to publish it. Set rules for what you’ll accept. Be specific about the topics you want to be covered in your sponsored content guidelines and specify how many links that you allow in sponsored posts on your blog. I only allow three on my blog. If you have good traffic to your blog as well as a solid social media audience you’re a good candidate, to monetize sponsored content. You can charge a premium for sponsored content.
How to Get Started: Pay attention to your Google analytics, know your numbers, and dig into the demographics to understand who visits your site are (gender, age, geographic location, etc.). Make a list of brands you want to work with. Create a media kit to present all this information to potential content sponsors or their PR agencies along with rates.
Become a Brand Ambassador
If you’re truly a social influencer, there may be more opportunity beyond just getting paid for an article on your blog. Corporations are constantly looking for people who have a connection with the audience they’re trying to reach. They want to build relationships with these individuals so they’ll spread the word about their brand. An ambassador may be required, for example, to share social posts about the brand, create a video using the product or service, write some content, or participate in Tweetchats as part of her contract. Having a large social network that you engage with regularly will attract potential brands to contact you.,
How to Get Started: Contact the PR agencies of a few brands that you can’t live without and inquire whether or not they have an influencer marketing program. Then, pitch them on how you envision working together. Try to negotiate at least a 6-month contract. The longer the relationship, the better. One blog post is not going to garner any partner significant brand awareness, but over time, with multiple touchpoints, you can influence people to consider the brand’s products.
Accept Advertising
Another way to get paid on your own blog is to accept ads on the sidebar of your blog. Because you can set these up and forget about them, they’re a great passive revenue opportunity. You can either work directly with the company that wants to advertise (maybe bundling a package that includes sponsored content as well) or work with an advertising network that automatically populates the ads with new content once you set it up in your blog’s back end.
How to Get Started: Check that your blog layout has room for advertising. You can look at other blogs to get a sense of what ads will look like. You might offer some small squares of ad space down the side of the home page, as well as longer banner ads at the top of the page. Just remember that you don’t want to turn visitors off by bombarding them with ads.
If you’re already blogging for your business, why not make money from it? With a little effort, you can add this as a revenue stream to what you’re already doing.
I hope you have enjoyed this blog series, please tell me what other topics about blogging you want to know.
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