Sayan Biswas, Negosentro | Blogging has picked up in recent years to become the main source of income for a majority of bloggers. This is a welcome development from when it was merely a hobby taken up by a few individuals.
These days blogging is fast growing industry and is one of the many ways a business can improve their sales and grow their revenues. Of course you need to have a blog in the first place to make money off it. This can be a personal blog where you write your opinions and share your expertise with the rest of the world or company blog to interact with your customers and drive sales.
Getting started
Here are a few things you need to put in place to come up with a blog.
Decide on a blogging niche
A niche is the overall theme of your blog. This could be human rights, education, environmental conservation, lifestyle, fashion, etc.
The niche you choose to blog about should be a subject you are passionate about or experienced in. This will make content generation much easier to come up with and make the whole blogging experience much more enjoyable.
Choose a blogging platform
WordPress and Blogger are some of the most popular blogging platforms but there are others like Joomla and Drupal. Also known as CMSs (Content Management Systems), these are the platforms upon which you build your blog.
Most of them are easy to use even for beginners but you can hire a professional web designer to handle the web development end of the blog.
Pick a domain name and a host
A domain is the name and URL of your blog like Webloggerz.Com. This is what internet users type into the address bars of their browsers.
The domain name should be short and aligned to what the blog is all about.
Although most blogging platforms have free hosting options, you should go for a self-hosted blog which will cost you between $10 and $30 if you hope to earn money from your blog. A self-hosted blogs gives you so much control when it comes to monetization.
How to make money from your blog
There are four main methods bloggers make money from their blogs: advertising, sponsored posts, affiliate marketing and selling goods and services.
Advertising
Selling ad space on your blog is one of the ways to monetize your blog. It is as simple as signing up with an ad network like Google Adsense and you earn money based on the views and the clicks the displayed ads have. You need to have good traffic on your website to make significant earnings.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is simply getting commissions when people buy products and services through links on your blog. You sign up with affiliate marketing program like Amazon Associates program after which they send you a link to post on your blog.
You get your cut every time someone buys something through that link.
Sponsored posts
This works in two ways. One, a business sponsor your blog so you write a review about their products or service. Two, they can sponsor your blog so you include backlinks to their websites.
Selling goods and services
You can directly market your goods and services to your customers through your blog. This is what many companies do. They have a corporate blog with direct links to their stores with the aim of driving sales.
