How Blogging Makes Money
A cash cow is a metaphor for an enterprise that produces large amounts of cash, like milk produced by dairy cattle.
While most businesses need to grow their revenues in order to create more value (and thus be considered successful), some are so cash-generative they can support future expansion with the profits from their ongoing operations.
What Makes Money Blogging Possible?
1. Advertising:
The term "blog" comes from "weblog"; which was initially used to describe simply online journals of opinion or commentary regarding various subjects including politics, lifestyle, fashion, sports, hobbies and entertainment.
Advertisers started realizing the potential of using blogs and today, for many companies, blogging is a major component of their online marketing efforts.
2. Affiliate Marketing:
This is one way to make money blogging. You agree with the company you are going to promote that if someone clicks through from your blog or website and buys, you will get some percentage of the sale (5%-50% depending on what they offer).
The company selling the product typically covers all or most of your costs in exchange for this "referral fee."
3. Selling Advertising Space On Your Blog:
This can be very lucrative – especially if your blog already has a big audience! In addition to raising substantial revenue, adding ads to your site also increases its visibility, giving you even more exposure to potential customers.
4. Selling Your Own Products and Services:
Bloggers sell a lot of different products and services using their blogs, from books to diet plans to web design services, the possibilities are endless!
How Does Blogging Make Money?
It is very easy and will take you no more than 20 minutes to start your money blog but it can generate a lot of revenue for you provided that you follow some simple rules when blogging.
To make money blogging always focus on providing value. Don’t just throw up any old article on your site; provide thoughtful content that will teach someone something they didn't know before or leave them feeling better about themselves or their situation.
Remember that people respond best, not only emotionally, but also financially, to a story and you don’t have to be writing fiction.
7+ Easy Ways To Make Money Blogging:
1. Sell advertising space on your blog or website -
This is probably the easiest way to get started blogging because very few people are doing it yet. Check out popular blogs like TechCrunch , Mashable and GigaOm and see how many ads they have, then sell ad space on your site for their prices and keep 100% of the revenue (Adsense rates are low but I'll explain later in this article why they work).
Remember that your blog has to appeal to people who want to advertise so try not to alienate potential customers with too much opinionated content that may offend them.
2. Sell your own products or services -
Write an e-book, offer an online course which you can sell on the blog's homepage or start a local business and sell your goods from a booth at a local event; be sure to promote this in a way that makes sense for your audience.
You can also use affiliate marketing if it’s relevant to what you're writing about, but don't just jam affiliate links into every post (it's not very effective).
3. Offer Tips:
Everyone loves advice so why not start giving some? A lot of people are thrilled when they get free help with their problems so getting paid for helping them is pure win-win.
You could write a tutorial all about how to best use Wordpress or you could give advice about how to get more Facebook fans, create awesome videos or find your first freelance job.
4. Make a free report:
This is similar to the tip but rather than just giving out information for free, ask people who are interested in what you're talking about to share their email addresses in exchange for a free report that will make them even better at doing whatever it is they want to do.
For example if you're writing about football then offer some tips on being the best coach as well as sharing your secrets on starting a local team for kids and getting sponsors. You'll probably get tons of emails from guys who are too shy to ask you questions directly but would be willing to give you their email address for a report like that.
5. Sell your own product or service:
Look at the blogs you read regularly and figure out what their authors are selling. It could be e-books, courses, shoes/clothes, services (web design), software or anything really!
If they can do it then so can you; simply find a gap in the market of people who want to buy from YOU and exploit it! This is probably the most difficult way to make money blogging because once you have a product you need to get customers and that's not going to happen if no one knows about your work, but if done right it could really take off.
6. Paid Surveys & Polls:
I used these while traveling in Thailand but they aren't really lucrative if you're an American (you'll do better by taking paid surveys in your country). The reason is because there aren't many sites that will pay to a foreigner but if you have an address in a different nation then the sky's the limit!
I had someone paying me $50 a month for doing virtually nothing. In this case my blog just had some outdated posts and no actual focus, but it still made money which is why I recommend keeping one even if it isn't getting much traffic.
7. Selling E-books:
If you really want to make money blogging then use what you've learned from writing articles on how to make more cash as well as get thousands of additional visitors each day.
That's exactly what I did with my recent e-book which quickly got thousands of page views and even more downloads. The trick is to start writing about things you're already good at or what people are interested in, that way there will be no problem getting some takeaways from each article you publish.
This can lead to a successful book marketing campaign as well as several high paying offers for freelance work; just think about it!
8. Offers:
There are many different options here but the easiest way is probably to sign up with getpaidforit .com where you'll get paid by other countries every month through PayPal.
Just make sure that you do what they want if you don't feel like it then you should never make an offer anyway, but otherwise I've been paid hundreds of dollars for doing things like watching a few ads and filling out a single survey.
The best part is that you'll get paid again if someone does what you did, so it's simply a matter of spreading the word to make more money!
To Sum Up:
The truth is that the potential market for any given blog post or idea is virtually unlimited;
you just need to put some extra effort into selling your content and then all the magic will start happen overnight - this will be perfect for anyone who wants to make hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month writing posts from their own home.
It doesn't take much and you'll really only need to invest an hour or two each day into making more cash while enjoying your time off in a foreign country.