Blogging For Profit: 5 Ways To Actually make Money Blogging In 2013

With new blogs appearing all the time and everyone wanting to make money on the internet, it is becoming harder to make money blogging. When i first started blogging it was a lot easier to make money through advertisements placed across my blogs but now advertisers are not paying as much and it can be hard to find enough traffic to actually get big advertisers interested in your blog. There is  still loads of opportunities to make money with a blog but you just need to think a little different these days and try some methods that you may not have thought of trying before.

I used to make a lot of money from sponsored posts on my blogs but now advertisers and bloggers are a lot less interested in sponsored posts as it is effectively selling links and this is something that search engines do not like. This means that  I have had to look for new ways to make money with my blog and in this post I am going to share with you five ways that you can make money blogging in 2013. Before you try to start making money with your blog you need to have a decent amount of traffic first, otherwise it is going to be impossible to make any serious money with your blog so this should be your first aim before you try to monetize your blog. Checkout this post and learn how to improve your traffic first.

Affiliate Marketing

Bloggers have been affiliate marketing for a long time now but it often required a lot of traffic to actually make money affiliate marketing. however these days it has become a lot easier to make money affiliate marketing, even without a lot of traffic. Affiliate marketing basically involves selling other people’s products and getting commission for doing this. From my experience I have found that just recommending a product to my readers works best instead of trying to directly sell it to them. I just drop a link in a post and recommend the product to them. There are a load of different products that you can affiliate market out there. I personally like to use WordPress themes and web hosting because both of these can be easy to sell and pay high commissions.  What you are going to try to sell though depends on your blogs niche as you need to try to promote something that your readers are actually interested in and want to buy. I also use the WordPress affiliate link cloaking plugin so that readers do not see big links which could put them off clicking on a link.

Write an eBook

Writing an eBook can be a way to make constant money online and once you have created the eBook most of the work is done for you. I would recommend creating an eBook that expands on what you have been talking about in your blog posts so that it is something that your readers are actually interested in and want to buy. Furthermore I would not price your eBook too high as people will just not buy it. When writing an eBook for your blog it is all about how you promote it to your readers and no one wants to be directly sold to and therefore it is far better to promote it in a way that you are recommending it to them. A nice way to do this would be to write blog posts and recommend your eBook at the end as an expansion of the blog post. Furthermore it can also be a good idea to pay a designer to design the cover of your eBook to create an image for it that looks more expensive.

Freelance blogging

Even if you are spending hours a day on your blog it can often be hard to actually make a decent amount of money from it. This is why freelance blogging a great idea and is one of the only ways that bloggers can make any  serious money online these days. There are loads of job boards available specifically for bloggers, including the ProBlogger job board which is updated all of the time with new jobs  for bloggers. To find high paying clients when working as a freelance blogger, you are going to need examples of work you have done before and proof that you can manage a blog and this is where your own blog comes in.

As well as managing this blog I also do a bit of freelance blogging. I use this blog as an example of the work I have produced before and even when I am not making money directly with my blog I can use this to help me make money freelance blogging.

Create a premium members section

Creating your own eBook can be a good way to make money but eventually people are going to stop buying your book and you are going to be looking for new ways to make money with your blog. However with a membership section on your blog you are going to be making a regular income every month. For example if you had 100 members that each pay £5 per month then that is £500 per month profit your you.

Creating a membership section is going to create a lot of work on your behalf as you need something unique that is worth paying for, otherwise no one will be willing to pay but if you can create a successful membership website then there is a lot of money to be made. I have currently not tried creating a membership section but it is something I am considering in 2013.

Advertisements

Even though advertisements are becoming a lot less popular these days as people are not willing to pay as much, you can still make some money by placing advertisements on your blog. Nearly every blog or website you go onto these days seems to have advertisements on because you can still make a decent amount of money if your blog has a lot of traffic on it There are a few different types of advertising you can try including private ad deals and pay-per-click ad details.

I have tried all of these before and have had different success with them.Private ad deals are the best but it can often be hard to come across new clients who want to advertise on my blog and they never seem to stay around for long anyway. For this reason I am currently using Adsense but the amount of revenue to be made with that is lower than what could be made a few years ago.