Income Diversity For Bloggers

The first step towards making money blogging is finding a topic that interests you. This will help you find readers who share your interest, and it will keep you motivated to write new content. Once you’ve found a topic, it’s time to start building up traffic. There are many ways to do this, but the most effective way is through guest posting. Guest posting allows you to get exposure for your site while giving you a chance to promote yourself and your brand.

When you build a blog to the point it becomes a business for you, it can seem like you’ve got it made. You’ve found a niche you’re comfortable with, got an audience, and got enough advertising revenue to make it a viable success.

At this point, you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labors. Well, not really – to keep your blog relevant there is a lot of background work to do including:

• CMS, site template and plugin updates
• SEO
• Removing dead links
• Updating existing content
• Social media marketing

There really aren’t enough hours in a day to keep your blog at the top of its game.

Plus, your blog has a lot of competition, with over 500 million active blogs all vying for rank in search. However, an enthusiastic blogger willing to work hard will make their blog a success.

Diversifying Your Income

Deriving revenue or income from your blog can come from many avenues, including:

• Quest posting
• Marketing and advertising
• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsored product reviews

Remember, your blog is a website. Once your site has constant organic traffic, other businesses will want to reach out to your visitors. It may seem hard to believe, as your visitors are probably also on social media, so why wouldn’t the businesses keen to work with you not just use Facebook or another social media network? The answer lies in cost and accessibility. With your blog, your audience is a niche, and there’s no need to segment it to get a good ROI on marketing or advertising.

For example, a property or real estate blog for investors. When the content is targeted at people who invest in real estate, the audience is most likely to be investors or people keen to invest in property. A business providing accounting services to property investors will get a high conversion rate on banners or inline advertising on this site.

Marketing and Advertising

All bloggers need to be good marketers as it’s how they pull visitors to their site. Bloggers need organic traffic, and they get it from understanding SEO and writing high-quality, relevant content that Google understands, and other sites link to so it can rank well in search.

Email Advertising

Grow an email list, and once a month, create an email newsletter of your top blog articles once a month. This action is email marketing.

Once you have a few thousand subscribers, you can sell advertising in each newsletter. Niche blogs do better with direct marketing, like the example above of the property niche blog. Using that same example – professional service providers like tax and accounting or law or rental property management want to reach your opted-in subscribers.

The ROI on email marketing is high and measurable, so your clients can get feedback on the views and clicks on their insert in your newsletter.

Product Reviews

You are a good blogger, so you write quality content naturally. Now you can use it to diversify your income to include reviewing products. Be careful with this service, however. Always add the rel=”sponsored” tag to your client link. Many bloggers avoid using this tag and use “nofollow” instead. Either works however, “sponsored” is more transparent for Google and the other search engines.

Affiliate Marketing

Use placeholders on your site for sponsored affiliate banner advertising and content links. Always use the sponsor tag or nofollow remember, the income is derived when your blog visitors click the affiliate link – it’s not the actual link placement that earns the income.

Quest Posting

Writing or accepting guest blog posts is allowed, but you must add the sponsor tag to the promotional links. Ensure the content’s quality is up to the standard expected for your site. You don’t want your blog reputation to drop due to poor-quality content.

A Final Note

Blogging is fun, and it can be profitable. There are ways to diversify your blog income, and it’s legal. Be sure to adhere to search engine requirements so your blog is ranked favorably and considered a trusted source of relevant informational content.