Before you monetize your blog, you will want to build a substantial readership that relies on you for information and insight on a regular basis. You want people who are accustomed to coming back again and again, and who are likely to do so even after you start trying to make money from it. Once you have that regular readership, there are several things that you can do to turn your blog into a revenue stream. Here are five of them.
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Offer something for free in exchange for names and e-mail addresses
This is typically something that you want to have in a side column of your blog. Free reports, e-books, lists of tips, and other options are great for this. When you choose to go this route, you can choose to do any number of things. You can e-mail your list with relevant offers of your own or other people’s products and services. You can rent your list to third parties, a great source of revenue that requires little work on your part. If you’d like, you can even partner with someone on something like a webinar on which they will be selling a product. In this case, you would e-mail your list about your webinar and get a share of the revenue from anyone from your list who buys your partner’s product or service.
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Provide relevant product reviews
This can be tricky because you run the risk of turning your blog into a commercial, and nobody likes commercials. If you update your blog several times a day, though, squeezing in the odd review about something relevant is usually okay. The key is to make your reviews honest. Know the product, tell the truth about it, and offer your readers the opportunity to learn more about it with an affiliate link. Clickbank is one source for such opportunities, but there are many others.
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Sell ads
The big advantage of going this route is that it creates steady revenue for you. The disadvantage is that the profits are not likely to be what they would be with some of the other options. You can sell ad space in a variety of locations on your blog, but make sure that you do not fill your blog with it. If your audience is targeted enough, many business owners will love the opportunity to reach them.
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Sell guest posts
Be careful to identify paid guests posts as such to retain your credibility among your readership. That said, if you have a regular readership that is passionate about a topic, some people will be eager for the extra exposure that comes with guest blog posts. In many cases, they will gladly pay you to allow them to post on your blog. If you go this route, be sure that you have the right to approve content before it gets posted. Otherwise, you could find yourself in a tricky situation if the guest blogger says something that causes your blog to lose credibility among its readership.
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Advertise your products or services in the About Us section and posts
If your blog is related to something that you do professionally, be sure to mention your credentials in your “About Us/Me” section of your blog. Most blogging software will also enable you to create a tag that goes on the end of all of your posts and comments. The tag should be just long enough to describe your services broadly and include a link that has either your e-mail address or a “Contact Us/Me” form. As your readership continues to grow, it becomes more likely that some of your readers will have a need for your relevant goods or services.
These are five easy ways to monetize your blog, though there are plenty of others. As you introduce one or more of these things to your blog, be sure to keep the needs of your readers at the forefront of your mind and continue to provide them with the same insight and information that have kept them coming back to this point. The more value you provide and the more credible you become, the easier it will be to make money from your blog.
