Back again to educate the Mum Blogging community, Erica Douglas offers us some outstanding insight into the world of monetising your blog. If you're looking for some tips as to how to make a bit of income with your blog, look no further!
So you've been blogging for a while and you're loving it! Your blog is looking exactly how you want it (after many a midnight hour spent tinkering!) and your traffic is on the up and up. So what next? Successful bloggers have gone on to do everything from publishing a book to building a business, turned freelance and built niche websites.
The opportunities are endless, do you have goals beyond blogging for fun? I could have written about any of the topics above but Karin suggested monetising your blog as the hot topic of the moment. If you're happily blogging for fun then look away now, we're going to talk about that dirty thing called money.
Sponsored Posts
A sponsored post is a post that you write for some form of remuneration, in this instance I'm talking only about cold hard cash but sponsored posts are often traded for freebies too. Companies purchase sponsored posts to raise the profile of their brand, be connected with influential bloggers, to create awareness of specific products and the embedded text links can also raise the PageRank of the business.
In short there are lots of benefits for a business to securing a post on a high profile blog or one that has a very targeted audience. You can sell sponsored posts by having an 'advertise' page on your blog or by simply making an alternative proposal to all those PR pitches you get. Rates for sponsored posts range from £40 - £125 per post from what I've seen so consider your traffic and set your prices accordingly. I've always worked on a supply and demand basis. I work out what the optimum amount of sponsored posts on my blog would be and then when I find I'm exceeding that I put the price up. This has worked well for me and has allowed me to increase my prices significantly.
Banner & Text Link Advertising
Selling sidebar space was one of the earliest ways to monetise a blog. A business will purchase a banner ad to raise the profile of the business, create awareness and attract sales through clickthroughs. Text links are usually only bought as a way to help businesses increase their PageRank. Most bloggers with reasonable traffic could sell banner ad space, however to sell text links you need a good PageRank - which you can check here.
A PageRank of four or above tends to be what most companies are looking for. Rates for banners and text links vary but I recommend putting a few packages together for three months, six months and a year. This cuts down on the work for you and ensures that income comes in in lump sums. Many companies will be happy to purchase for longer terms for example a year if there are monetary advantages to doing so.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote and sell someonelse's products for a percentage share of the proceeds. When done well affiliate marketing is great because you can promote products and services you truly believe in and make money without having to worry about importing and delivering goods. You can start affiliate marketing straight away and if you have the right sort of audience who are loyal and trust your opinion on things then you may well make sales.
Amazon and affiliate future are a great place to start, but if there are products and services you truly believe in then search out the specific affiliate programs, even small companies run affiliate programmes you just need to know where to look (which is usually at the foot of the front page btw).
I hope that's given you some food for thought. If you enjoyed this you may enjoy a free 30 day eCourse I've written on creating income streams from home.
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