Making Money From Blogging: Is This Still Possible and How?

People have different reasons for setting up a blog. These include wanting ot drive traffic to an e-commerce site; making it another source of income; or they might want it just for a hobby to have fun with. Often it's a mix of these, sometimes event all three.

Whether set up on a blogging platform, such as Google's Blogspot, or on an independent website, a blog won't make money without visitors. Be warned, there is no quick and easy route to getting lots of traffic. It takes time which you might be prepared to invest yourself, or employ someone else for.

Content

The first element of this is publishing regular, quality content. Generally blogs do better traffic-wise if their content is themed to match a niche.

Thus, if you are a wine importer, your blog can be a series of articles about the wines you offer, whether they should be drunk chilled, and what food they go with. Occasionally you might want to digress and give information about a wine tasting trip or an area where the wine is produced. But somehow there must be a wine connection, either direct or more subtle. Many of your readers will find this interesting so it should be easy to find ideas for your content.

If you own a direct delivery transport business, you might have to think of some other way to keep your readers coming back for more. For example, your blog could be a kind of travel journal, filled with the interesting places and things you or your drivers see from the cab or at break time. But don't forget to mention the satisfied customers at the end of the journey, too, if the website is for raising awareness of your services and getting more customers.

Content should be interesting, well written, in an appropriate tone, and updated regularly, preferable more than once a week. To bring visitors from search engines, it should also have a smattering of key words and phrases sprinkled around. Think up a catchy title that includes a keyword or two as well.

Reading and Commenting

Once you become a member of the blogging fraternity, you can't just write your own blog, you want other bloggers to read your content, and make comments, and if you reciprocate, you will build up a following and become popular. Anyone blogging as a hobby will soon make virtual friends this way.

Don't forget that, if you belong to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can set up a feed to let your friends know about your blog posts and get more traffic that way too.

Advertising for Cash

When you accept adverts on your blog that will bring you an income, you are participating in affiliate marketing. You will receive a commission either on the number of views and clicks the ads receive, or on resulting sales, or both. You can display ads from any number of affiliate marketing schemes to have multiple income streams, but remember that a much cluttered blog page can be off-putting to the majority of visitors, so it's best to select just a few.

One of the most well-known way to make money blogging online is Google Adsense. You select the size of the space you want to make available and Google fills it with ads. However, the earnings from just one blog are very meagre, and Google only pays out once you have $100 in your account (60 in the UK and 70 in the Euro zone). Google does give you lots of tips on how to maximize your earnings but you really need to have Adsense ads on multiple web sites to reach payout in a reasonable amount of time.

You could also put Amazon products and referral links on your blog. They pay a slightly better rate than Adsense and will probably have a higher conversion rate. This is because Amazon is so well known, and trusted for internet trading.

ClickBank, Commission Junction and LinkShare are affiliate networks representing many business clients whose products and services you could advertise in your blog. You will get a much higher rate of commission on sales through these networks.

If you sell your own products on-line, you will also advertise these and set up links to your sales pages.

Content for Cash

Some advertisers prefer a more subtle way of raising awareness of their products. They will pay you to write about it in your blog. Sites like Blogsvertise, PayperPost and Social Spark act as agencies for this, putting advertisers and bloggers together for their mutual benefit. The more traffic you receive, the more likely it is that your blog will be selected for a particular assignment. Some of these agencies will not even accept your blog unless you have a Google page rank to prove its popularity.

You've probably gathered from the above that blogging is not likely to make you a fortune. Given time and effort, however, it could give you something of a supplementary income on a regular basis and yes, you can make money blogging online!