A blog can be more than a hobby. By taking the right measures, you can turn it into a source of income. Below are just a few ways to turn your blog into a business.
Monetize your blog through advertising
Displaying adverts on your blog allows you to make money through ad revenue. You can start displaying ads by signing up to Google AdSense. In order to make money, people have to click on ads displayed on your blog. You’ll only get a small amount of revenue per click – by generating as much traffic to your blog as possible, you can get more clicks and generate more revenue.
Explore other forms of income
Only very large blogs are able to survive purely on ad revenue. Most blogs have to find other forms of income.
A popular option is to start publishing sponsored content. These are reviews or articles that someone pays you to write. This is usually paid as a flat fee after you publish the post, however there are other forms of sponsored post such as affiliate posts in which you can generate continuous income for every lead that your post converts. Make sure that sponsored content is relevant to your blog. You can find customers willing to pay for sponsored posts through sites like Fiverr.
Another option could be to encourage paid subscribers. This could involve locking certain content so that only paid subscribers can see it – or putting your whole blog behind a paywall. This tends to only be effective if you already have a large following of readers.
Make your blog look professional
In order to treat your blog like a business, you need to make it look professional. This involves developing a brand around your blog – consider investing in graphics and keeping posts to a specific style. You should also make sure that you’ve got your own domain name (not a ‘.wordpress.com’ or ‘.blogspot.com’ address) and that your site is secure (it could be worth looking into an SSL certificate).
Invest in marketing
In the case of regular businesses, marketing can help you to build customers. When it comes to a blog, marketing can help you to build readers – which in turn could help you to generate more money through ad revenue.
There are lots of ways in which you can market your blog. A couple free options could include sharing posts on social media and adding keywords to your site to improve rankings. Investing a bit of money could help you to get greater results. This could include hiring a PPC agency to display adverts or paying for SEO.
Build a team of writers
Posting regular content to your blog will help it to gain traffic. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to publish all this content yourself – for this reason, it’s worth building a team of writers. These writers can help you to publish more content.
You may be able to take on voluntary guest bloggers at first. Paying bloggers to produce content could be necessary once your blog gets bigger – this incentive of payment could help you to create higher quality content, but you need to be sure that your blog is earning enough to be able to pay writers.
