How to make money from blogging

In my previous post, I wrote about making money from blogging. As promised, in this post, I shall elaborate how you can make decent money from your blog. Bear in mind that this article is written solely based on my personal experience. It may not be the only way of making money from blogging. After all, I am not a full time professional blogger and my main source of income is not derived from blogging. So if there are better alternative ways, feel free to share.

Passion
There are many people who think that they can make a living from blogging full time. In reality, this is very difficult to achieve. Indeed, you probaby can make a few hundreds or thousands here and there from affiliate marketing or sponsorships. But in most months, there might be neligible or even no income at all. Over the years, I have seen so many local bloggers fizzled out from the scene after only a few months. I supposed most of them gave up blogging after realizing that it really cannot bring food to the table on a daily basis. So if you wanted to make a career in blogging, your first priority should not be in making money from your blog. Rather, you must first have the passion for sharing a niche in your blog. The money will come in after you have build up a high traffic blog with established reputation.

Content
The only way to build up a following is to have a content driven blog. There is a need to update your blog frequently with content rich original material. This may requires a lot of time and energy, especially if you are writing articles on very specialized topic. For me, I am often guilty of not being able to post as frequent as I like due to work and family commitments. There are local bloggers out there who can blog full time and update their blogs frequently. Some of them wrote very long articles, some just published short editorials with links to other web pages. It all depends on individuals’ preferences. Personally, I don’t set a target on the length of my articles, but my principle is to ensure that my readers learnt something from reading my articles. I try to make sure that the key messages are brought across to my readers. But I do admit that developing a content rich blog is a huge challenge for every blogger as very often, you are not just relating events that took place in your life. Sometimes, you need to do backgound research and back up your statements. Otherwise, you will lose credibility.

Traffic
Eyeball is the key for a blog to be considered successful. In general, there is no short cut to build traffic to your blog. The only way is to post quality articles in your blog as frequent as you can. Generally, you can see results after one to two years if you can post quality articles twice a week. For a start, you may want to seek allies and exchange links with fellow bloggers who share the same topic as yours. Most bloggers would be happy to exchange links with you. Alternatively, do provide email address or avenue for readers to subscribe to your blog postings. Most importantly, engage in discussions in other blogs or forums. Over time, after you built up your reputation, people will be directed to your blog. Remember, Rome was not built in one day. You must have patience and put in efforts to nurture and grow your blog. Blog is the window to your soul and it reflects your thoughts and kind of person you really are. You will not have a fan base by posting outrageous remarks in other blogs or forums.

Marketing
If you have a blog that have Google PageRank of 1 or 2, it means that your blog has very high traffic. Once that happened, you are in a good position to market your blog. Chances are, you might even be approached by companies interested in marketing their products through your blog. This has happened to me and I have accepted quite a few assignments over the last few years. Most of these assignments provide in-kind rewards, such as books or free tickets to investment seminars. I accepted these offers because in return for helping these companies promoted their products or services in my blog, I also learned some financial stuff. I am also able to share the things that I learned with my readers. So, its a win-win situation. Going forward, I hope that more Singapore companies recognize blogs as an effective medium to market their products or services. In-kind rewards are great but I still think that most bloggers prefer monetary rewards.

Hope the above article can encourage more bloggers to come on board.
Look forward to your comments.

Magically yours,

SG Wealth Builder