Business of Blogging: How to Blog for Money

If you're already blogging for your business, why not make money from it?

If you treat your blog like a business, you could one day blog for money. This is the second of two-part series on the business of blogging. In part one we, talked about how to get your blog to stand out. This blog is focused on building traffic and monetizing your content online.

If you are looking for a secondary stream of income to complement your small business. becoming a professional blogger could be a good idea. Especially if you enjoy writing, blogging could be a method for making more money. And even if you don't, if you have decent traffic to your blog as well as tons of followers on social media, there are ways to financially benefit from your blog as an influencer. Here are a few different methods to get paid for blogging.

Write for Other Sites

While writing for your own business' blog may not directly turn into money, becoming a paid writer on another blog can be lucrative. There are dozens of online publications that look for talented writers to add to their portfolio so that they can continually offer higher-quality content with a fresh perspective. You might not get paid very much when you start out, but the more you do it the more your work will be valued.

Who It's Good For: If you have a decent following on social media and through your own blog, you may be considered an influencer in your industry, and may be able to command a higher rate per article.

How to Get Started: An editor for a publication that pays writers will only consider you if you have a decent writing portfolio. If you don't yet have one, start guest blogging on other sites for free. While these opportunities won't pay you, you will get links to your content that you can present when you apply for paid gigs.

Accept Sponsored Content

You don't even have to write content to make money from blogging. Companies looking to get in front of the audience that you serve on your own blog are willing to pay to publish their content on your site. Typically, you only want to accept informative articles and not self-promotional content, and you can be specific about the topics you want covered in your sponsored content guidelines. Be sure to specify how many links that you allow in sponsored posts on your blog.

Who It's Good For: If you have good traffic to your blog as well as a solid social media audience you're a good candidate, to monetize sponsored content. You can charge a premium for sponsored content. But even if you're not to that level yet, you can still charge something for advertisers publish posts on your site. Getting even $25 for a post is more than you'd make from content otherwise!

How to Get Started: Pay attention to your website analytics so you know how many visitors you have on average each month. You can even dig into the demographics a bit more to understand who the people who visit your site are (their age, geographic location, et cetera). Create a media kit to present all this information to potential content sponsors, along with rates.

Become a Brand Ambassador

If you're truly a social influencer, there may be more opportunity beyond just getting paid for an article or two a month. Corporations are constantly looking for people who are passionate about their products, or who have a connection with the audience they're trying to reach. They want to build relationships with these individuals so that they become brand ambassadors and spread the word about the brand. An ambassador may be required, for example, to use a brand product or service and write some content, participate in Tweetchats, and attend events as part of her contract.

Who It's Good For: Having a large social network is part of the appeal to potential brands you can work with, but if there's a product you love and promote without getting paid for it, reach out to them whether you consider yourself an influencer or not. They may be happy to work with someone who loves their brand as much as you do.

How to Get Started: Contact the PR agencies of a few brands that you can't live without and inquire whether or not they have a brand ambassador program. If they don't, pitch them on how you envision working together. Typically, you'd perform a specific set of actions that connect their brand with your audience, in exchange for a monthly retainer or 6 month contract. The longer the relationship, the more fruitful it is for both of you. Writing a single blog post for a brand won't automatically result in sales. But over time, you can influence people to consider the brand's products.

Accept Advertising

Another way to get paid on your own blog without doing any writing is to accept ads on the sidebar of your blog. Because you can set these up and forget about them, they're great passive revenue opportunities. You can either work directly with the company that wants to advertise (maybe bundling a package that includes sponsored content as well) or work with an advertising network that automatically populates the ads with new content once you set it up in your blog's back end.

Who It's Good For: The more traffic your blog gets, naturally the more advertisers you can attract and the higher the rate you can command. Accepting advertisers is typically for people who have established blogs with strong SEO and high ranking in search results.

How to Get Started: Check that your blog layout has room for advertising. You can look at other blogs to get a sense for what ads will look like. You might offer some small squares of ad space down the side of the home page, as well as longer banner ads at the top of the page. Just remember that you don't want to turn visitors off by bombarding them with ads.

If you're already blogging for your business, why not make money from it? With a little effort, you can add this as a revenue stream to what you're already doing.

Source: Business of Blogging: How to Blog for Money