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Making Money from Blogging - DailyBlogTips

Making Money from Blogging - DailyBlogTips

Making Money from Blogging

Posted: 21 Dec 2015 07:17 AM PST

A lot of people blog for different reasons. Some do it to share their knowledge and experience, while others may do it for more professional reasons; blogs are very effective for building professional image and establish authority in certain fields. Whatever your reasons may be, you would want to make money from blogging. I have to warn you: making money from blogging is not an easy thing to do. That said, these next few tips will help you get started without a problem.

Establish Your Blog

Before you can start monetizing your blog, you need to have an established blog in the first place. If you don't have one already, not would be a good time to start. You may be tempted to start with a free blog, one that is built using the available free blogging platforms; I can tell you right now, that is not the best way to start.

To have an established blog, you need a few things:

– A logo or a brand that signifies the name and values of your blog.

– A dedicated domain name and also get your blog hosted somewhere reputable. Use a name that represents who you are or what your blog is all about.

– Content. A lot of quality content.

Establishing your own blog doesn't have to be all that complicated. There are a lot of tools that you can use to help you. When setting up your site, for instance, you can use a content management system (CMS) that you are already familiar with, such as self-hosted WordPress.

Now that you have your blog established, the next thing you need is….

High Quality Content and Resources

A blog is only as good as the articles and other content in it. Great design and pleasing visuals will get users happy, but it's the content that will eventually make them stay (and return). Similar to establishing the blog in the first place, creating high quality articles and other content for your blog can be really simple.

Start with topics you are familiar with the most. You can share personal experiences and expertise on various subjects. Don't worry about creating articles that sell just yet. Just focus on writing articles that users will find valuable. How-tos and tutorials, tips and tricks, news or updates as well as general stories can help build up your authority in the particular field you are writing.

Stick to a certain topic and let users identify your blog with it. I know how tempting it is to write about all kinds of things. To be honest, I started my blog doing just that: writing about anything from my day-to-day life to recipes and tech-related posts. Eventually, you will have to decide on a topic or a field you want to focus on.
Don't forget to write. Just write. Don't wait until tomorrow. Don't worry about making mistakes. Don't even sweat the small details. Just start writing and start filling your blog with quality articles. The rest will take care of itself.

Promote – Reach Out – Build Relationships

Once you have enough articles on your blog, it is time to start promoting it. Attracting users is much easier than it was a few years ago. You now have social networks, multiple promotional tools and thousands of other blogs and websites talking about the same set of topics. These make promoting your blog a lot easier to do.

There are a few things you can do to jumpstart your blog's promotions:

– Go on social media and start engaging users directly. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the main social networks to target. Share articles, talk about updates and don't forget to respond to your followers. You'll be surprised by just how quickly you can gain traction on social media. Here is a great article on how to double your visitors.

– Use paid promotions and ads, especially when you don't have to pay for them. Web hosting companies often give away ad credits for free. These free credits can be used to place AdWords and Facebook ads and both are very effective for promoting blogs.

– Last but certainly not least, connect with other blogs. Visit other blogs that interest you and leave comments; genuine comments. Instead of spamming multiple blogs with generic comments, write insightful comments that will get the attention of the sites' owners and other users. Don't hesitate to get in touch with the sites' owners for the possibilities of writing a guest post and doing a cross-promotion.

Spend enough time socializing and promoting your blog and you will be able to maintain a steady stream of traffic. Once the traffic reaches a certain level, you are ready to start making money from your blog.

Monetize!

From what we have discussed so far, making money from blogging is actually 80% blogging. The remaining 20%, this part we are in right now, is when you start capitalizing on what you have accomplished as a blogger.

You can make money from blogging thanks to a wide range of opportunities currently available, including:

– Image, video and text ads. Three are a lot of ad networks that allow you to earn money from your blog's traffic. Find a good one to join, place the ads on your blog and you are all set.

– Paid reviews and advertorials. You can get paid to post an article on a particular topic. A lot of professional bloggers earn most of their revenues from advertorials.

– Offline revenue sources, such as seminars and talks. Once you have established yourself as the authoritative figure though your blog, you may be invited to do a seminar or a talk for a fee.

– Merchandising and online sales. You can start selling merchandises or other products related to your niche. You can even produce your own products that you think users will be able to benefit from.

I will let you in on a little secret: the key to earning a good stream of revenue from blogging is to actually implement multiple monetizing techniques. Understand your audience and choose the right opportunities to implement.

Still want to learn more about making money from blogging? Be sure to subscribe for more updates. I will discuss different monetizing opportunities in details on another post.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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How to Make a Full-Time Income by Adding a Storefront to Your Blog - DailyBlogTips

How to Make a Full-Time Income by Adding a Storefront to Your Blog - DailyBlogTips

How to Make a Full-Time Income by Adding a Storefront to Your Blog

Posted: 19 Dec 2015 03:28 AM PST

Creating and selling your own product lets you open a steady flow of passive income that may last long.

Unlike monetizing your website with advertisements, you don't necessarily need to have a huge traffic base to make a solid income. Other blog monetization models such as sponsored posts, paid reviews and affiliate marketing might come off as a little out of sync to your trusting audience.

That being said, selling products on your blog is not a get rich scheme. However, with the right strategies it is totally possible to make a full-time income by adding a storefront while selling your own product.

In this article, I will show you how to make huge profits by adding an ecommerce storefront to your blog.

What to sell?

Before jumping in to start a storefront on your blog, one of the first questions you should ask yourself is 'what to sell'.

Unless you got hit with a brilliant idea, deciding what you should be selling on your blog can be tougher. With all the available technologies, though there are thousands of possible choices to create, everything might seem like as it’s been done by someone else already.

Here are a few suggestions for brainstorming product ideas.

  • Look for an opportunity gap and try solving your own problem: Create a product that can solve your own problem. By solving your own problem, more likely you're also solving a problem of others.
  • Validate the market: Before creating it, ask your followers if it helps to solve their problems. You can also walk through your niche forums and sites like Quora.com to see if your product can solve a common pain point of your potential customers.
  • Digital or physical product: Creating and selling digital products such as ebooks and online courses are easier than creating a physical product such as books. However, the profit margin will be huge when it comes to selling a physical product. Decide which option might be a good fit for you and go with it.
  • Pricing: Pricing your product is as important as the product creation itself. If you're not a well-known face among your niche circles, it might be harder to sell high priced products, so rather you should consider selling low priced products at first. After getting a nice start, in order to raise more revenue, you can think about expanding your product lines by releasing new products on a consistent basis or focus on selling a single higher priced product.

Should you start selling?

Once you decided what you should be selling, the very next step is to look at how to sell.

You might have started blogging for a while. However, it doesn't guarantee that you could run a successful ecommerce store on your blog by simply rolling it out and thus make huge profits.

For instance, if you didn't launch a product previously on your blog, chances are your readers might expect everything from you for free. That's a wrong mindset to be in. As a seller, what you could do to change that mindset is to nurture your prospects carefully throughout each customer lifecycle, so that they eventually buy products from your store.

Define your unique selling proposition: You need to define who your potential customers are and why they'd need your product.

Create a minimum viable product: Launch your product to a small group of people and get early feedback. Yaro Starak uses this approach to sell his premium plugin. He made a preselling campaign and asked his readers to buy the beta product for just $5. This strategy has not only helped him to get early funding but also valuable feedback before launching the final product.

Choose an ecommerce platform

As hundreds of different ecommerce platforms are available, it is easy to get overwhelmed with different choices. In fact, each platform has its own pros and cons. Some of them will charge you on the basis of total sales whereas some others will charge a monthly fee. In fact, there are even some other open source choices that charge you almost nothing.

To get a quick idea about which platform is best suits your needs, you can use a recommendation engine such as WebAppMeister. What it does is it does a head to head comparison between ecommerce apps and helps you pick one that seems to be the best choice for you.

If you're a WordPress blogger, below are some of popular shopping cart choices.

E-junkie- For selling digital products

E-junkie is one of the easiest ways to start selling digital products such as ebooks on your blog. All you need to do is to register an account on e-junkie and provide some basic info about your products and business. Copy the buy now button from the e-junkie admin panel and paste it on your blog where you'd like to sell it. Once you did it, E-junkie will take care about everything else.

Price: The monthly cost starts from $5 onwards.

You can visit e-junkie website here.

Woocommerce- For both digital and physical products

Woocommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin that lets you easily add a storefront to your blog. According to datanyze.com, Woocommerce is the shopping platform of choice for almost 22% of ecommerce websites in the Alexa Top 1 million sites.

It is best suitable if you're looking for adding a storefront that can easily integrate with your current blog.

Price: The Woocommerce plugin costs free. However, you may require buying additional plugins for making a fully featured ecommerce site.

Visit Woocommerce official site here.

Start selling

Once you picked the platform, it's time to start selling by adding a storefront to your blog and setting up the products on it.

Here are a few ways you can spread the word out of your new store.

Promote on your network: You can promote the news about the store throughout your blog and social network.

Special offers: Consider offering huge discounts to early customers.

Remarketing: It is a clever way to show ads to your blog visitors who haven't purchased a product from your store. The best thing is that the CTR for remarketing ads will be comparatively low.

Invite affiliates: Invite other bloggers in your niche as an affiliate marketer for your product.

Have you ever considered selling on your blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

 

Author bio: Shahzad Saeed is a freelance blogger and content marketer who has been featured in top internet marketing blogs like Problogger and John Chow several times. Connect with him on Twitter @shahzadsaeed.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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