There are multiple possible ways to make money with blogging. Nearly all of them require you to have readers – so your first concern as an aspiring income-earning blogger would be figuring out how to get people to regularly visit your blog. Since every other blogger on the planet is also trying to compete for traffic, this is a significant hurdle to overcome. Here’s how to do it:
The primary key to success as a blogger: you must post interesting blog content
Usually, people visit a blog for one of several reasons:
- The blog has information that would be helpful to them – perhaps it has useful videos, articles or project instructions;
- The blog has attractive photography; or
- The blog is entertaining.
Ideally, you’d want your blog to achieve all three of these goals. However, sometimes, it’s sufficient to only meet one of them, if you really excel at one of these aspects of drawing traffic.
Compelling photography
These days, great photography is practically essential for a successful blog. If you want your blog to earn income for you, you’ll have the best possible chance of meeting that goal if you make it a high priority to secure great photographs.
It isn’t as simple as just grabbing photos from Google image searches – because, generally speaking, unless you took a photo yourself, someone other than you owns the rights to it. So you should never use someone else’s photo in your blog unless you first acquire their permission to do so.
That’s one method of getting photos for your blog. Another method is to find a site that’s dedicated to sharing photos you can use for free. Unsplash.com is a great choice for this.
You can also pay to use other photographers’ copyrighted photos. If you want to start a celebrity gossip blog, this is a viable way of getting celebrity photos you can use. Istockphoto and Getty Images are a couple of reliable sources for photos of this type.
The downside to these methods is that the photos you have access to will not be unique to your blog. Zillions of other bloggers could also be using them.
The only way to ensure that you’ll have unique photos is to create them yourself (or to hire a photographer to create unique photos for you).
Many professional bloggers have invested in taking photography courses because they know that eye-catching photos are one of the most important keys to blogging success. Taking your own pictures is one of the quickest ways to ensure you will always have access to unique, memorable images.
However, you don’t necessarily have to take classes if you are able to learn in other ways – perhaps by reading books or websites on the topic of photography, and then implementing what you’ve learned. The key to learning photography is to take heaps of pictures and then analyse the results. You’ll make numerous mistakes, but if you can learn from them, you’ll eventually be able to count on having amazing pictures to post in your blog.
Excellent writing
After photography, the next important thing to focus on is the writing in the blog. It should ideally be clear, free of grammatical errors, interesting and helpful. It should either provide entertainment or useful information that would give visitors a reason to want to return to the blog in the future.
Informative videography
Video is one of the most challenging types of content to produce well. Blogs don’t need video content to be successful; however, blogs that do incorporate excellent videography tend to have an edge over those that don’t. If you have a talent for creating compelling video content, you could use that as an advantage to attract traffic to your blog.
Monetising your blog
Driving traffic to your blog is only the first step in making money. The next hurdle to be overcome is figuring out how to transform that traffic into revenue. There are several ways you could accomplish that:
- Solicit donations
- Sell sponsored posts or other sponsored content on your blog
- Sell ad space on your blog
- Offer products (either physical products or informational products) for sale
- Join affiliate programs and recommend another merchant’s products to your audience
These aren’t the only possible ways to make money blogging. However, the methods mentioned above are some of the most popular and lucrative options that bloggers are currently using. If you’re hoping to make money blogging, the steps revealed above give you a straightforward and viable blueprint to follow. Success is not guaranteed, but many bloggers are able to make at least a part-time income using these methods.