So, you finally have started that blog you always wanted. Like any writer, you want your work to generate some income for you and monetising a blog is the best way to do this.
Any successful blog needs constant time and dedication to make sure it grows and incites people to spend a lot of time reading its content. Only successful blogs can make money and without engagement there is very little chance of making money from your blog.

Here are a few tips on how to monetise your blog:

1. Create Niche stories
First, before you can think about advertising, you need to make sure that you have an audience for your blog. Advertisers buy your audience as they need a market to sell their products to. In order to gain an audience, your stories need to be unique and target a specific type of audience. This way you are more likely to gain traction as your stories will appear in feeds on specific genres, and the more your readership grows, the more you will gain followers.

2. Engage with your audience
With consistent, exciting and focused content, you will have people visiting your blog and engaging with your content. It is important to engage with your audience, creating a community that keeps on coming back for more. This means you must respond to comments and reach out to readers, people are more likely to come back to your blog if they feel included and validated. Engaging with your audience also allows for the generation of new ideas and necessary criticism, which in turn helps you improve the quality of your blog.

3. Advertise as an income
As your blog grows, advertisers may peek interest in your blog. One way to do this is to use applications such as Google AdSense, which enables small publishers to run ads on your blogs. Or use affiliate income, which is advertising via the use of links. You simply link a product that is for sale on another site (using platforms such as Amazon) on your blog. And when someone follows your link to that product, and buys the product, you will earn a commission.

4. Promotions
This requires you to pay a monthly subscription for access to membership programmes on your blog. This means that readers will pay a certain amount, either monthly or annually, to access information on your blog. These work best with ‘How To’ blogs, coaching blogs and or learning blogs. If you are more of a narrative type blogger, this may take time as you will first need to create a large following and reputable blog.

5. Offering services
If you’re qualified, you can offer services such as copy writing, editing, designing etc. It would help having a LinkedIn account and a collage of all your work on your blog to show the quality of your work so the audience can trust you can do what you say you can offer.

6. Products
Products come in any forms and sizes. In today’s day and age, many products have become virtual – these can be products such as EBooks, courses or editing software. Again, create links to their websites and earn yourself commission. Physical products would take the shape of real tangible merchandise such as T-shirts, hats, bags and so on.

So there you have it, you can make money from a blog, but a sticky audience and how you promote yourself as a brand is crucial to your success. You need to have your hand on a number of social networking platforms to help you grow and remain adaptable and versatile in the way of advertising and growing your blog.

Give it a try and let us know how you go. Good luck!

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