Empower Network

Many bloggers don’t understand how to earn a living with their blogs, or if it’s even possible because they have no idea how to do it. Can blogging make money? Sure it can, but only if you get a few of the basic concepts.

The first thing to understand is that blogging is all about trial and error. Since there are an almost unlimited number of blogs along with an unlimited number of topics and target markets, what works in one market might not work in another.

That’s why setting up your testing and tracking is the first step towards making money from your blog. So what should you test and how do you do it? At a minimum, set up tracking of the number of visitors you are getting, how long they stay on your blog and whether they click on or buy anything you are offering.

Google provides free software you can put on your blog that will keep track of all of this. It’s a tool called Google Analytics and you can find it under webmaster tools in your Google account. It will even keep track of your conversion goals and their monetary value.

Can Blogging Make Money? It Can If You Have Good Content

As long as you focus the topic of your blog so people never have any doubt what it is about, your monetization options are much better than if you don’t. This is because any advertisers, joint venture partners or affiliate offers that are precisely targeted to your reader’s interests will not be seen as objectionable.

Partnering with product owners in a promotion of their product on your website can be one step to take. With partnerships like these, you have the control over what you want and can always negotiate a deal. If your blog has a large readership, this option will be your best choice. If you are just starting, save the advertising deals and joint ventures for later when you have traffic.

You can sell a sponsorships to your individual posts or of the entire blog itself. You might consider offering advertisers text links in your content so as to not appear intrusive. Text links tend to convert better than banners anyway.

Offer affiliate products that are relevant to a specific post with text links in the post itself. You can search sites like clickbank, paydotcom, or commission junction for products to sell. Don’t forget to consider physical products, not just downloadable ebooks.

If you’re considered an authority in a certain field, then you can offer consulting or information products on your blog. If you have developed a relationship with your readers and they know, like and trust you, offering them your products and services can appear more helpful than hype.

Can Blogging Make Money? It Can If You Have Traffic

So you have good, relevant content to your blog. You have several monetization strategies in place. Your content is targeted to a hungry market that wants to hear what you have to say. So, now what?

Having a blog no one ever sees is pretty useless. So how do you get visitors?

If you would rather not pay for traffic, you can do quite well using simple SEO strategies. SEO consists on on-page factors and off-page factors.

On-page factors mean having keyword optimized content. To keep it simple, put your keyword in your headline, your subheads, the first paragraph, the last paragraph and sprinkled throughout the post. See how I have done it here. The keyword phrase I’m optimizing for is “Can Blogging Make Money?”. See how many times that phrase appears in this article.

Off-page factors mean the creation of links to your post from other sites – these are called backlinks. You can “spin” your article to create unlimited variations so each place it’s placed will have it’s own unique content so you avoid the duplicate content penalties.

Once you have your “spun” article, then you can distribute it to hundreds or thousands of other web sites automatically. There are several software tools that will automate this process for you. Getting into reviewing each tool is beyond the scope of this article, but if you click on the links below you can learn more and get my help.

So, can blogging make money? The answer is not only “yes” but emphatically yes!