Digital Marketing

Blog for fun and profit

Blogging has become very, very popular in recent times and that popularity continues to grow by the day. Many blogs are run solely as a social outlet to share views, interests, information, etc. with friends and anyone else who wants to read. The vast majority of bloggers are not particularly interested in using their blogs as a means of generating income but some people have taken advantage of what is a huge profitable opportunity.

However, if you’re considering the latter option, simply sitting in front of your computer and typing won’t make the money you’re looking for. So how can you turn your blogs into a viable business? There are a number of ways this can be achieved. Here are some tips to help you get started and hopefully help you turn your hobby into a profitable career.

First of all, obviously, if you don’t already have a blog, you should create one. Two of the most popular platforms these days seem to be Google’s ‘WordPress’ and ‘Blogger’. A great advantage of blog sites is that they are generally free to set up and use. These are very easy to set up and there are plenty of instructional videos on You Tube to help you with this.

Second, you need to decide how you are going to generate streams of income from your blog. There are several ways to do just that. The most popular way is to place advertisements on your blog site. There are several Internet based companies that will place advertisements on your site for you. You will then receive a financial reward every time someone clicks on one of these ads. Google AdSense is one of the most used. An alternative is to sell a product or service from your website and use your blog to attract customers. A kind of combination of these two strategies would be to advertise someone else’s product on your site and then get some kind of commission from that person. Whatever method you decide to monetize your blog, you need a plan, a strategy to follow consistently to maximize your profits. Once you have your blog and your strategy in place, it will be your path to a blogging career.

The third and most important step is driving traffic to your site. Once your blog is set up, it will only be effective as a source of income if people visit it. Internet marketing, to a great extent, is a numbers game. The more traffic you can drive to your website, the more people will read your blogs and other content. According to the law of averages, more visitors equals more sales and/or clicks on ads. So how are you going to drive that traffic to your blog site? The use of keywords is important here. There was a time when keywords were almost the only criteria. That is no longer the case. Search engines now respond to activity (ie new regular posts, backlinks, etc.). You need high-quality content on your site to drive search engine traffic to your blog.

Blogging is an enjoyable hobby for many, but there’s also the potential to build a profitable business if you’re prepared to put in the time and effort to learn how to do it.