Starting a blog is easy, pretty much anyone with a tiny amount of technical know-how can get one up and running. What is more difficult is growing an audience and then managing it to make the blog a profitable enterprise. Here is our expert’s guide to consistently making your blog profitable for the long term.
Table of Contents
Know Your Audience
The first thing any blog needs to know is who your audience is? This will dictate to an extent your strategy for the rest of this venture. You will likely have a handle on this if you have a large following, but do you know how they might react to any commercial enterprise you might startup. You would see if they are likely to be hardcore followers or have a long list of casual readers.
Offer Private Services
Many bloggers offer expert guidance in a sport, hobby, or interest. If this describes you, then you could offer private tuition to fans of your blog. Take the example of a blogger who talks about golf and offers playing tips and strategy guides. This could quickly be ramped up to provide the paid-for service of analyzing a fan’s swing and give advice. The trick is to work out how much time this will take and how to charge enough to make it worthwhile.
Have an Online Store
You would be potentially missing an opportunity if you did not open a store attached to the blog. You could offer branded t-shirts, hoodies, and other gear or if you provide expertise in an area, then recommended gear, if you ran a jogging blog, for example (pardon the pun). We have seen a diversification in the ways customers can pay for products and services, and you can pay by card, bank transfer, and customers can easily convert Bitcoin to dollar or anything else.
Market Quality Products
A good blogger will inevitably receive offers to endorse and talk up products that are related to your blog if we take the previously mentioned example of the golf blogger. He or she may find that a club manufacturer will pay good money to have them talk up their latest driver or putter. But you should carefully consider these offers, not just in terms of money. If you talk up any product regardless of quality for the highest bidder, then your integrity may be compromised. One way many bloggers get around this is by explicitly mark sponsored posts.
Make use of Advertising Opportunities.
After utilizing all the other options mentioned above, you can sell advertising space on your website, and this is so simple these days. Our favorite way of doing this is the old favorite of Google AdSense. All you do is set up an account, and they provide you with a link code that links to your visitors’ advertising and browsing preferences and delivers adverts tailored to them. You then get a small fee for every clicked link, and as these are targeted, there is a decent chance of getting some revenue through this.