Blogging has seen a rapid rise in popularity in recent years and has transformed from a niche activity to something that is capable of generating significant amounts of income for an individual. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are now as many people earning a living from blogging as there are lawyers, fire fighters or professional computer programmers. There are an estimated twenty million bloggers in the US alone, with four hundred and fifty-two thousand of them using blogging as their main source of income. The question is, ‘How do they actually generate money?’ There are several ways in which this is done and it is a lot less complicated than you might think.
Google’s Adsense Program
One of the simplest ways to earn money through blogging is to host a regularly updated blog and use Google’s Adsense program. It will find adverts that are relevant to the entries that you have written and display them next to it. You will receive a small sum of money for each person that clicks on the advert. According to USA Today, some bloggers are earning up to fifty thousand dollars per year from this method.
Product Reviews
Some companies will recruit you to review their products for your blog. Many of them don’t even require you to give them a glowing review; they just want you to be honest and will pay just for your opinion. Items that you might be asked to provide your opinion on can range from foodstuffs to gadgets and electronic devices and even health products such as e-cigarettes and labs to order for frequent urination tests. Sometimes the companies require you to fulfill a certain criteria, for example in order to review the latter item, you would obviously have to suffer from a condition that made you need to empty your bladder more than usual, as otherwise you would have no way of gauging the results. However the majority of product reviews are open to anyone who runs a relatively successful, regularly updated blog.
Direct Advertisement Sales
You can also generate money by selling advertisement space directly to companies. In certain niche markets, this can be highly profitable, although it is likely to be less successful for more general blogs. It is important to ensure that you charge the right amount for ad space. In order to do this, you need to take into consideration the popularity of your blog, the size of the advert that the company wants to put on it and the position that it will appear in.
Sell Other Products
Another way of making cash is to provide the option to download additional content from your blog at a price, whether it be in the form of short, informative e-books or specialized articles centered on a topic that there is a lot of interest in. You can use your blog to give your readers a preview of what type of content they would be getting and promote the product that they have to pay for. Alternatively, you could sell a physical product that is in some way related to your blog, for instance if it is an arts and crafts blog then you could sell arts and crafts materials.
What Are You Waiting For?
Earning a living from blogging is not easy; it takes time and dedication to build a blog up to the level where you can generate enough income to live off from it. However once you get going, it is a hassle-free way of earning money that does not require investing large sums of money in equipment or stock. Running a successful blog can also lead to other moneymaking opportunities. Numerous popular bloggers have gone on to produce books based upon their blogs after amassing a cult following. Others have been offered jobs by mainstream magazines and newspapers and have been able to work from home as freelance journalists as a result. Starting a blog is simple and requires very little technical know how. Sites like WordPress can provide you with a template to use so that you do not need to know how to create your own website from scratch. What are you waiting for? Start today and reap the benefits of writing blogs about your area of interest in order to earn a living.
