Blogging started years ago as a way for people to connect to others and share pictures, stories and experiences. It was considered to be a great personal journal type tool that one could use to leave their mark on the internet through their encounters.
Blogs then evolved to become excellent Marketing Tools as well as a medium to make money off of. There are a few different ways to earn income from blogging. Here are a few:
AdSense Ads- The popular search engines offer a way to earn a little extra money with any blog or website. The idea is to place these ads on your site and when a visitor clicks on an ad from your site, you earn a pre-determined amount of money. The more clicks you can get from your site visitors, the more you can make. There are some rules, so if you choose to go this route, be sure to learn what not to do before signing up for their programs.
Product Reviews- There are some websites that you can sign up with that can help you connect with other companies who need people to review their products and get them some exposure on your blogs. Usually, the main requirement for this is to have a blog that’s been around for a while and has a fair amount of visitors. Those companies would pay you a specified amount to review their product on your blog.
Contextual Links- Some business or website owners will pay a blogger to post one of their links within their blog posts. It may be the owners themselves contacting the blog author or a company that acts as the middleman. Those businesses will find blogs that relate to their companies sites, so the links provided on the blogs will be search engine friendly. This is a great way to earn some extra traffic for a site.
Sell Products- Blogs are another way you can sell your products from. Those who have businesses selling home décor items or food container items use blogs a lot to help sell their products and make more money online.
What skills would be helpful?
There isn’t much skill involved in this type of business except the ability to market your blog. You would want to research blogging as much as possible to learn some of the tricks of the trade to get your blog popular.
Your main tool, besides a computer with an internet connection, would be a blog. There are many blogging programs out there to choose from. Some are free to set up with, while others require a monthly or annual fee to get started with.
The paid versions of blogging programs can help you connect with other blogs and increase your blog’s traffic. The free versions are extremely easy to set up and most are extremely popular amongst bloggers, so finding people to connect with wouldn’t be too hard to do.
How to get started?
Sign up with a blogging program and start posting entries to it. Make sure you’re blogging regularly, which would be about 2 times a week. Blogs that aren’t updated regularly tend to get lost in cyberspace.
Market your blog as much as possible. Get listed on blog directories, get on other people’s blog rolls and comment on other blog authors’ posts to get some exposure to your blog. The more traffic you can drive to your blog, the higher your chance of making blogging a lucrative way to make money.
Most of the blogging programs will have a sign up for AdSense ads already included in their setup feature, so getting started with that will be easy. If you want to provide product reviews and contextual links, you will want to be blogging for a while and have a fair amount of traffic coming to it.
When your blog is ready, find the companies that will help you connect with businesses that want to pay to have their products reviewed or have their links embedded with your blog post entries. Once that’s set up, you can start earning some extra income with your blog.
Blogging is an easy way to earn some extra cash if you plan to work hard at marketing it. The ones successful at blogging for money use every route possible to get their blog well known in the internet communities. The ones that don’t, tend to earn only a few cents a week.
Become one of the more successful bloggers and make your blog your business and not just a hobby to partake in once in a while. Your pocketbook will thank you for it.
This is an online business where you use your selling and marketing expertise to get consumers to buy other people’s products and earn income from the sale you made. Typically, you would earn a pre-determined amount of money based on the sales you make of those products, but in some cases, you could make money from the clicks from your site that get the consumers to the affiliate websites.
Sometimes you can earn money by getting customers to sign up for things on the affiliate sites, such as newsletters etc. Each affiliate program will discuss this further on how they work, so when you sign up for their program, be sure to check out how their process works. This will be kept track of through an affiliate link that you’re provided with to place on your site.
What skills are helpful?
You don’t have to be a salesman or a marketer to be an affiliate marketer. Knowledge on how to do these things will be important though. Learn everything you can about how online marketing works and learn how to be a successful affiliate marketer from other top marketers.
It will take hard work and much dedication to get your affiliate marketing business to be a successful one. If you don’t have the time nor the gumption to work hard, don’t consider this to be your online business.
What tools are needed?
The tools needed will be minimal. Besides the usual computer with reliable internet access, you will need a website to sell the affiliate products from. You won’t have to stock up on the products, just to sell them.
Your website will need fresh content regularly, so be prepared to either write some articles yourself or hire someone to do them for you. A blog to link to your site will be helpful as well to make the search engines happy with you.
How do you get started?
You will need to determine what niche you have for your affiliate marketing website. This helps you to stand out from your competitors. For example, you could use nutrition as your niche. Then create a website based on the niche you chose for your business.
Then find affiliate products to sell from that site. Make sure that the products you decide to sell for your business are related in some way to the niche you have chosen for your affiliate marketing business.
So, if your niche is in the nutritional field, you will want to offer affiliate products that are related in some way to nutrition. If you don’t offer related products in your business, you run the risk of appearing as unprofessional and the search engines won’t be too pleased with you as well.
Many people make quite a bit of money running this type of business. It’s important to remember that the most work you will have in this type of business will be marketing your website to get consumers to find you. When they find you, your site should be able to get them interested in your products to the point where they will buy using your links.