Oxford Languages defines a “blog” as “a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, written in an informal or conversational style.” According to First Site Guide, a blog is short for “weblog.” It is like an online journal or an informative website where an individual or group of individuals share their views on various topics.
Blogs were born sometime around 1994, and they were typically a person’s “diary” shared online. In this online journal, you could talk about your daily life or share your thoughts on just about anything. As the years went on, blogs evolved into becoming not just a great way to showcasing yourself to the world through your writing but a legitimate way of earning money in the process.
How Blogging Can Make You Money
For writers, starting a blog for personal use is gratifying enough on its own, but people are now seeing the emergence of blogging for business and its solid advantages. You can earn money for yourself as a personal blogger or grow your business through blogging. Business blogging takes real commitment and tenacity. The purpose of business blogging is to get your website ranked higher in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). In simpler terms, you’ll want to up your online visibility.
AdSense is one way to earn money through your blogs. AdSense is a Google-owned advertising platform best suited for beginner bloggers. In a nutshell, you sign up with AdSense and allow Google to place ads on your blog site. In return, you can get paid when people click on the Google-placed ads on your site or by the number of views the Google-placed ad gets on your blog site.
The great thing about AdSense is that your site’s visitors are shown relevant ads. This means the ads your readers will see will be related to your blog’s actual content. This is an advantage because your site will not look like just some flea market of clickbaits. It is important to remember that the more internet traffic your site generates, the more you can make through AdSense.
Another way of making money through your blog is by affiliate marketing. An affiliate link is a specific URL that contains the affiliate’s — yours — ID or username. When you sign up with an advertiser, you will be provided with a particular link to their website bearing your username. That’s your affiliate link. The advertisers you are affiliated with can then record the traffic sent to their website from yours. With affiliate links, they will know that it was through your website that traffic came into theirs. You, the affiliate, may receive a commission if that click (from your site to the advertiser’s site) leads to a sale. The advantage of affiliate links is that it will be easy to track sales. There are almost endless opportunities for affiliate commissions if you are seriously interested in promoting other businesses’ services or products.
Blog Ideas to Get You Started
When you finally decide to blog for money, you should read up on the most profitable blogging categories. A forefront in web hosting ranks the most profitable blogging categories: finance, travel and lifestyle, fashion, and health.
From this list, product reviews might be ideal for beginner bloggers. Writing product reviews will open up substantially more opportunities for affiliate marketing. Product reviews entail sourcing different references and writing a comprehensive comparison between different brands or types of one particular product. This will mean you need to be very descriptive and perhaps show the comparison in tabular or graphical format.
Another avenue you can explore is to establish an online store. This way, you can earn from your profit through selling while also making money through AdSense or affiliate marketing. With an online store, you can publish blog articles and not just the items for sale. Stunning images will significantly help blog posts on an online store advertise what you have available or accompany the blog posts you publish here. If, for instance, you decide to sell engagement and promise rings, you can take photos yourself with a smartphone or a simple point-and-shoot digital camera and look into jewelry image retouching services.
How much money you make through blogging has a lot to do with how much work you are willing to put in. If you commit to posting popular and relevant content on your site at least three times a week, you can make anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a year. Not bad for a beginner blogger, right?
