Close to a decade after the Wall Street meltdown, people are still
finding it tough to recover past losses and make ends meet. Fewer and
fewer of us can count on steady, lifelong employment, and for those
who are so fortunate, the salary and benefits (if any) are barely
enough to meet our basic needs.
Second job, anyone? In America, two income families are the norm, but
think of the havoc it wrecks on your daily life. You're so exhausted
by the time you get home from work, you barely have enough time and
energy to make dinner and help the kids out with their homework. Even
that becomes difficult if you work at more than one place, whether
evenings or on weekends.
The Internet has made blogging mainstream, to the point where there
may be over half a billion blogs online as you read this article.
While income generation is not the only reason (or even the best
reason) to blog, opportunities do exist for people to create
supplemental income via this activity.
If you are new to blogging, or have just recently started a blog,
congratulations! I hope your main motivation is to provide valuable
content for your readers, because that's how you will establish expert
status in your specialization (niche) in the long-term.
However, there is nothing wrong with making some extra money through
blogging, and several simple methods exist for getting the ball
rolling:
Google Adsense
Google Adsense might be the fastest and easiest way for a beginner to
start earning so-called passive income with a blog. As the name
implies, Adsense is a contextual advertising network that places
partner (business) ads on your website. It's easy to set up - a quick
copy and paste of some Adsense code and you're good to go!
Don't worry that your blog niche won't be able to draw quality ads to
your site. Google Adsense is one of the biggest networks on the Web,
so you should get a healthy enough list of clickable sites to attract
your readership.
Just make sure your content is of the highest quality.
Amazon associates
Amazon Associates is the long established in-house affiliate program
run by Seattle-based Amazon.com - the biggest online retailer in the
world today. It offers bloggers the chance to earn commissions (up to
8.5per cent) by advertising Amazon products on your website - provided
visitors click-through from your blog to Amazon.com and make a
purchase.
The one caveat about Associates is that it probably suits bloggers who
write about merchandising, retail products and shopping a fair bit.
Logically, it will help your performance if visitors arrive at your
website already predisposed to buying.
Create e-books
Regular blogging is the ideal training ground for creating e-books,
still one of the most popular forms of information products being sold
by online entrepreneurs today.
Consider your blogs as "free" information that you offer to readers to
demonstrate your expertise. With time, they become your fans and are
ready for more in-depth material. This is your opportunity to make
money - by presenting your e-books for sale alongside your free blog.
Just make sure that the e-book builds on your blog output - don't
simply rehash what they have already seen! After all, these people are
now paying customers and will get upset with old information. Later on
as you become more established and your archived material becomes more
extensive, poll your readers to see what topics they'd be interested
in learning more about and potentially what topics of e-books they'd
be interested in purchasing.
Notice that I avoided putting a specific dollar figure on the amount
you can make from blogging. It will come down to your work ethic, your
skills as a writer, your ability to generate targeted traffic, and
plain old good luck. It's a bit like baseball: everyone played it as a
kid, only a small fraction make it to college ball, an even smaller
number become professional, but only the cream of the crop make it to
the majors.
You have to decide where in the blogging "big leagues" you want to end up.
The reality is that as more and more people from all over the world
come online, the harder it will become to get attention and generate
income. As of February 20, 2014, according to their respective
websites, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million
WordPress blogs. Blogger.com does not release statistics, but is said
to be the most popular blogging site.
That being said, there are countless success stories out there, and
the formula for success is surprisingly simple. It's just up to you to
get it done!
Source: about.com
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