How to Make Money With Your Blog
It doesn't seem that long ago that the great debate in the blogging world was if you could or should make money from your blog. Now that it is widely accepted the question has become how you can make money, or how you can make more money off of your site. If you want to know how I make money with my blogs then take a look at this list of top revenue sources.
Direct Sales
Your blog should be centered on a certain niche and that niche should allow you to sell something to your audience that they actually like or want to buy. You need to make sure that the content that you are producing is highly relevant to what you are trying to sell in order to maximize your return.
When you are starting out and building an audience it is a great time to learn about what kind of needs and wants your readers have. If you listen to what your readers are looking for then you are in a great spot to produce just that. This method is sometimes easier than building a great product and then trying to build traffic around the topic. Start with the traffic and then build a product catering to that audience.
The best thing about direct sales is that after you produce your product you get to keep all of the money from what you sell. The down side is that it can take a lot of time and effort to create a new product or service and if you don't think you can do a better job at it than someone else, it might not even be worth it.
Affiliate Marketing
The next best thing to selling your own product or service is selling someone else's wares for part of the profits. Do your research and find out what your readers are interested in and then partner up with companies that offer those kinds of products. The down side to affiliate marketing is that you only get to keep a part of the sales, but the plus side is that you don't have to go through the work of creating the product or service either.
Advertisements
This is the most popular choice of generating revenue for most blog owners, but I feel like it's the least profitable. If you are going to seek fee-based sponsors for your site then it's still best to match them to your audience, so you can plug offers in your posts and feel genuinely passionate about what the sponsor has to offer. If you do a good job of integrating your advertisers into your site then they are going to see a bigger return on their investment. This means they will be more interested in renewing or paying higher fees down the line.
Selling Text Links
This used to be popular, but with google cracking down on sites both buying and selling text links, I would recommend you faze this out of your business model.
These are just a few of the best ways to make money with your blog. If you have other methods that you use and have success, let's hear them in the comments.
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