If you’re looking to add an income stream to your small business, blogging can be a lucrative revenue source. You might want to start by doing it for free, to perfect your craft and build your audience, but once you feel like you’re established in your blogging community or niche; you must stay focused on publishing a well sought after blog, grow your audience, and research additional ways to increase your earnings. To start, here are 5 ways to get paid to blog!
Join an Advertising Program
Advertising is the classic, most effective way to earn money in publishing, and professional blogging is no different. However, for an inexperienced publisher, negotiating with advertisers can be quite tricky. That’s what programs like Google Adsense are here for – they will help you select the campaigns that best suit your blog and its audience, set a fixed price for your work and make sure you get what you’ve earned, so you don’t have to worry about anything but choosing your ads and continue to pump content to your website.
Write Reviews
Why not write reviews on products or services you like… and get paid for your opinion? This has been quite controversial among the professional blogging community, namely the readers, but it is a great way to ensure that you are compensated for your EXPERT opinion. In this case, you can have an agreement with a company or a content provider who will pay you to post a review for a price. You can do this directly if you’re experienced, but like with advertising, there are websites, like PayPerPost and Social Spark, who can make the connections and conduct the negotiation for you, so all you have to do is choose and post the content.
A word of advice: it’s a better bet to choose products or services which allow you to post a disclaimer to protect your reputation and integrity as a professional blogger.
Sell Merchandise
As a professional blogger, you have a huge forum and power to promote any product, so if you’re doing it for others, why not do it for yourself? For instance, blogs in the crafts niche can easily start a small web shop and sell the fantastic pieces they show in their blog for a price and build a small, profitable business very quickly by combining their crafts. You don’t need to make your own merchandise though; you can become a reseller for one of your favorite brands instead. This works especially well for hard-to-get and niche brands that your readers might want to get their hands on because of you, but can’t otherwise.
Join a Blogging Network
Blogging networks, as the word indicates, are places where bloggers converge and interact, mostly among themselves. There are a lot of perks to being a member of one, for instance obviously creating new relationships and sharing knowledge. However, there are also good opportunities to get paid to blog. For instance, you can improve your blog’s traffic and ranking by being active in these networks, which will increase the income you make from advertising. Even more, you can also find advertising programs there that are usually geared towards your specific niche, meaning they will most likely work the best with your blog and be more profitable. Also, you can often find guest blogging and sponsored post opportunities in these networks, which have already been mentioned in this article as great ways to get paid to blog.
Become a Professional Blogger
This may seem strange at first, but what it means is that you can start selling your own work to other blogs, by offering your service at marketplaces for writers, for instance. There are several ways to go about this: you can take orders from marketplaces, or you can sell original work from your blog or something else you created. You can also offer to be a guest blogger, who would stand in for someone else while they’re away, or tackle a subject on their blog they’re not comfortable with. The key to becoming a successful professional blogger is to write extremely well, be very organized (so as not to miss deadlines, for instance) and to stick with what you know best, as you will do better when working on something you already know. If you have these qualities, there’s no reason you can’t succeed.
Becoming a professional blogger can be quite hard work, but surely at least one of these 5 ways should be helpful to anyone who’s looking to get into blogging professionally, if you add in a little luck and talent to the mix.
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