Time for Money – Blogging as a Source of Income

Blogging takes time. Life is busy. Time is money. Therefore blogging should be making you money! Right?

If only it were that easy… but it can be, somewhat. But first, a caveat, you’re not going to make enough money from blogging to overcome the fact that you’re blogging about something you are not passionate about. If there’s no true interest or passion there, then the blog will founder, people will see the lack of interest and move on. The simple lesson to take away from this is that you have to pick something you’re truly passionate about. Anything from nail polish finishes to heavy machinery technology; if you are passionate about the topic, then all of your blog posting will show that.

Now, because you’re passionate about the topic on which you are blogging, you will naturally end up spending a great deal of time researching, writing, editing, re-writing, and so on. Harking back to the first line of this article; time is money, so how do you make money while blogging on the topic you’re passionate about? There are a multitude of different means of making your blog writing make money for you, but let’s stick to the simple ones for now shall we? Feel free to try different alternatives and see what works best for your blog – it’s even recommended to combine options in order to generate multiple revenue streams if at all possible.

AdSense is a simple way to start

Google’s AdSense is the premier option for bloggers because of its simplicity. All that is actually required is to sign up to AdSense and copy a prebuilt code into your blog forum or main header page. Truthfully, you can take it one step further and build the entire website using Google or utilizing the hosting services at Google +. A significant bonus to taking advantage of the Google AdSense program is that it is truly the largest advertising network available today, in any medium. On a practical level this translates into having an almost unlimited range of advertisers to work with.

Affiliate programs are a natural for bloggers

Blogs, by their very nature, are a natural link building media for affiliate programs; everything from Amazon’s massive and easy to establish click-through product oriented structure, to small specialty companies that are willing to partner with you and agree to a commission on any click through sales your blog may generate. The only limitation to this option is that income is almost exclusively based on actual sales and is almost entirely divorced from the up front work you may have done to that end.

 

Individual or company advertising and sponsorships

The marketing model of the internet is to sell views, to sell page hits, and to sell faces. As a blog grows, it generates more and more interest due to the traffic that it receives. Much like the concept of affiliate program marketing, hosting advertising on your blog is all about finding smart ways to build links into your site pointing to the advertisers and their products. In essence, advertising is all about fit, and to sell advertising or garner sponsorship your website needs to be able to provide high quality relevant content with good contextual backlinks for the advertiser or sponsor.

E-book expansion content

Blogging is essentially giving information (and time and effort) away for free. But as your content base grows and you have more traffic to work with, you can offer expanded services such as selling e-books with added insight, or extra content, or even just exclusive information for the buyers of the e-book. A good example of this is an author’s site where the author, through dedication to the craft, offers free short stories on a scheduled basis, but the expanded stories and books are only available as a purchase item. Granted, this is a simplified example, but building targeted website traffic through the free offerings in order to sell your expanded content is an efficient method of getting more income.

Providing an exclusive or subscriber only area

Similar to the idea of providing expanded content via e-books, once you have established sufficient blog backlinks to ensure ongoing traffic and a marketable level of page views, you can offer dedicated visitors a chance for ‘something more’ for a subscription fee. This members-only area allows the dedicated subscribers to feel like they’re receiving something special above and beyond the masses who visit the free to the public side of the site.

In short, there are ways to have your blog make money, and nothing with it is very complicated, but it will take time. Blog posting is not something that will make you rich and famous overnight, but, with time and dedication to the endeavor, as well as a little creativity in marketing your brand to the right people, your blog can earn enough to justify the effort of maintaining it.