3 Best Ways to Make Money Blogging for Beginners

 

 

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What’s the link between making money from blogging and your daily life?

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:

1. 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 acontextual 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!

2. 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 8.5%) 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.

The program works by getting Amazon links, banners, or widgets (e.g. slideshows, ‘My Favorites’, ‘Wish List Widget’) onto your pages.

3. 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 formore 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!