blogging, over the years, has changed from the traditional publishing of contents in a free blog and monetizing them to more advanced methods. Many blogs are now being referred to as media agencies and have even expanded to include other writers who write and curate the articles.
Since 2005, more than 50 million blogs in different have been created in the many different blogging platforms with Wordpress taking the lead.
Getting your blog discovered on the World Wide Web has become harder, unlike the previous years, thereby making it hard for people interested in monetizing their blogs. As a blogger, one of the easiest ways of generating traffic to your blog is by sharing it to your different social media handles.
The world’s most popular social media platform is Facebook with more than a billion active users; this is followed by other ones like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The power of social media in generating traffic cannot be underestimated; in fact, it has been proved to be the easiest source of traffic.
After social media, you talk of the search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines are also amazing sources of traffic to blogs and websites. For your articles to be discovered by the search engines, they should be written with necessary keywords and non-plagiarized. A good way of making this possible is by testing your articles with online plagiarism checking tools or using software like the Yoast SEO tools.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way of monetizing your blog by selling products without physically touching the product. You will earn commissions for sales you generate and rates differ from one product to another. Some of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms include eCommerce shops like Amazon, Konga and Jumia.
Ad networks
Ad networks help with connecting advertisers to publishers. All publishers need to do is to sign-up to any ad network of their choice and if approved, advertisements will start displaying on their blogs with commissions paid on per click or per impression basis. Display of adverts will be made possible after you’ve placed the widgets and most ad networks will allow you to choose the type of ads that you wish to be displayed. Some popular ad networks include Adsense and Chitika.
Sales of products and services
If you have a physical shop, you can also start advertising your products on your blog and delivering to your customers after payments. Fashion products like shoes, jewelries, hand bags, t-shirts and face caps sell well online. You can also advertise your services and get clients from your blog. If you can write very well, your blog can serve as a way of getting gigs. This also applies to other freelancing services like graphics designing, website designing, app creation or online tutoring.
Paid subscription
You can offer premium content so your readers will have to pay before they will be able to view them. This method is not so popular but can still be practiced, especially when you have a defined audience.
Direct advertising
As your blog becomes more popular, brands will start approaching you for sponsored posts and banners. Your charges should be based on your traffic and blog sites like alexa ranking and domain authority.
