Passion to Profit: How to Earn Money Blogging
Blogging is rewarding in its own way: the joy of writing, sharing ideas, and the satisfaction from creating something meaningful. It’s an opportunity share your thoughts and connect with others. But it can also be a great way to make dosh. One big advantage is that you can create content and continue earning from it long after it’s been published. As your audience grows, these income streams can increase with it. While some of the most tried and test tactics are based around visitor traffic, there are certain other ways you can turn blogging passion into profit. Blogging is more than a hobby; for some, it’s a serious income source. How much bloggers can expect to earn will vary wildly. Glassdoor currently lists the average income for professional (i.e., salaried) bloggers in the UK at £21k-48k in 2024. The most successful bloggers in the world stand to earn sizeably more — even six-figure incomes. On the other hand, 33% of bloggers make no money at all, according to TechJury. And perhaps they’re not aiming to. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll hear it said that you can expect to earn £1 to £10 for every thousand views you get. It all depends on your topic, how engaging your content is, and exactly how you’ve decided to monetise. The most popular monetisation tool for bloggers in 2024 is Google AdSense, followed by the popular affiliate marketing platforms. However, when it comes to those truly earning the mega bucks, AdSense only ranks third. The most successful entrepreneur bloggers (blogtrepreneurs?) are 2.5 times more likely to be selling their own product or service direct rather than selling ad space. ❝The most successful entrepreneur bloggers are 2.5 times more likely to be selling their own product or service direct rather than selling ad space.❞ Blogging is big in the world of business, too. Brands that prioritise it see 13 times more ROI than brands that don’t. According to DemandMetric, companies with active blogs generate an average of 67% more leads monthly. Blogging is now the second most popular form of content marketing, second only to video, with 70% of consumers stating that they prefer blog posts to traditional ads. And according to ReportLinker, the content marketing industry is expected to grow by around £500 million over the next four years. But let’s keep it real – don’t expect to start earning big money overnight. Quality of content is still the number #1 most important success factor. When you blog about something you’re passionate about, it shows. Your enthusiasm leaps off the page, engaging your audience and keeping them coming back for more. This passion is what will sustain your blog in the long run. Whatever your reasons for getting into it, blogging is more of a marathon than a sprint. It takes time, patience, and a lot of hard work to get those views and clicks rolling in. See also: 123 Reg’s Blogging A to Z Glossary Guide. From Authors and Comments, to Widgets and WordPress, take this as your handy guide to blogging success. Top 7 Blog Monetisation Ideas 1. Affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways for bloggers to earn an income. It’s all about commission from affiliate links. The idea is that you promote a product or service and earn a slice for each sale made. This method works because it allows bloggers to generate revenue by recommending products they trust and enjoy to their audience. For instance, a tech blogger might include links for the latest gadgets they’ve reviewed. When the reader clicks on the link and makes a purchase, then the blogger earns a percentage of the sale. It’s win-win as it benefits the blogger but also helps readers find products they might be interested in. Statistically, those with the highest returns tend to be focused on a small list of the most popular niches, the big 3 topics being food (42.8%), lifestyle (13.3%), and travel (10%), according to RankIQ data. Food bloggers make by far the highest median monthly income compared with the other major niches (and that’s not factoring in all the free cheese and biscuits from sponsors). Depending on the platform and product category, it’s generally possible to earn around 10%-20% in commission. Some of the most well-known affiliate programs include: ☑ Amazon Associates ☑ Ebay Partner Network ☑ Awin ☑ Commission Junction ☑ Impact ☑ ShareAsale ☑ Rakuten Advertising ☑ Shopify Affiliate Program You’ll also find WordPress plugins designed to help with affiliate links, with various tracking and management features. Some notable options include ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links, and AffiliateWP. These tools work to manage and track performance of affiliate links, potentially leading to better promotion and higher earnings. While there’s lots of affiliate marketing options, it’s important to keep it real. If you try to push too many products or recommend absolute tosh, readers will soon catch on and surf elsewhere. Stick to sharing products that you truly believe in and your audience is likely to stay happy and engaged. Passion and expertise should go with integrity. Know your niche. In doing so, your blog can become a trusted place for unique information and attract readers who are really interested in that topic. You may even wish to conduct research to grasp their interests, challenges, and preferences. Use this understanding to tailor your content, tone, and style. You can’t appeal to everyone, after all. 2. Sponsorship and brand partnerships Brands are always on the look out for bloggers who have a strong connection with their target audience. Teaming up together can be a great way to monetise. The idea is that you create content to showcase a product or service, earning compensation in return. It’s win-win: the brand gets exposure with your audience, while you stand to earn from that authority you’ve built up. Sponsorships and partnerships are a little different to affiliate marketing in the sense that you’re only publishing content — visitors don’t necessarily
Blogging A to Z: Your Glossary Guide for Success
Blogging has come a long way. From the earliest online diaries and journals, “web logs” became blogs, the noun turned into verb and, before we knew it, the vast array of topics and niches exploded into a blogosphere — with over 500 million to be found and 7 million posts every day. So whether you’re a seasoned blogger or completely new, you’ll need a smattering of the lingo for this journey. From the basics (Article, Feed) to the techy stuff (CMS, XML), take this as your handy A-Z for blogging success. ABC, D-F, G-J K-M, N-P, Q-S T-V, XYZ Article A is for… Article. An easily-digestible slice of written content. Once the preserve of print media, Articles can of course cover an infinite number of topics and themes. The idea is to keep readers informed, educated, and entertained — in a single sitting, or perhaps while they are on-the-go. Come up with a hook to engage the audience of your Blog Article right from the start. Choose a clear subject and take a unique point of view. Select a topic you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. Think about a current trend, an issue that piques interest, or a problem to be solved. Use your own words and ideas to develop to a unique voice and perspective in your articles. Finish with food for thought or a Call to Action (CTA). This will all help attract an audience and encourage social sharing. See also: Niche Author The creative brain behind the content. It’s their unique voice and perspective that breathes life into a text. Authors are named and credited with a byline (like “by Joe Blogs”) alongside a date of publishing. See also: Blogger Affiliate Marketing When readers click on links you’ve shared and buy something or take an action, and you then earn a little something each time, that’s Affiliate Marketing. Let’s say, for instance, you have a guitar blog, and you include sponsored link to a popular guitar manufacturer. When your readers click on that link and buy an instrument, you might earn a commission. It’s a way for bloggers to earn while helping others discover cool products or services. A potentially lucrative endeavour. But don’t mislead or overpromote: it’s essential to strike a balance between earning and bringing genuine value to readers. Plug that guitar because it rocks. See also: Monetisation Anchor Text The clickable text on a link, Anchor Text is there to act as a description for said hyperlink. For example, if I were to say that it’s so easy for anyone to buy a domain name and build a great website. Anchor Text also makes it easier for readers to find useful info on a page, but also helps search engines by detailing what your blog is all about. See also: Hyperlink Alt Text/Tag Alt Text (“Alternative Text”) is the brief description that you can add to an image on a webpage to give it more information or context. However, it exists within the HTML code. To describe an image to your readers you’ll want to use a Caption instead. These tags are optional, but useful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s also a good thing for those who may not be able to see an image. The text can be read out loud by screen reader software or Alexa (or your favourite). Some choose to declare image rights/authorship in the Alt Text, but this isn’t really the place — better to state this clearly in the Photo Credit and other copyright notices. B Blog, Blogger First coined in the late 1990s, Blogs are now staggeringly popular. It’s a way to share our experiences and ideas. The ease and speed of Blogging is arguably the main factor. It’s ripe for the modern age. Forego the smoky publishing house: you are the author, editor, proofreader and publisher, all rolled into one. And if you are, then you may call yourself a Blogger. There are millions out there all vying for our attention. Of over 1.6 billion websites, 500 million are certified blogs, according to hostingtribunal.com, and 7 million new articles posted every day. Blogging Platforms A collective term for all the apps, software or services that let you create and manage a blog. Some of the most popular Blogging Platforms include WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr. For more, see: CMS Blogosphere The Blogosophere is the entire network of blogs and bloggers on the net. Blogtopia, the Blogolopolis, Blogton-on-Sea, Blogstonbury Festival — none of these choices ever proved quite so popular. Backlinks Also known as an Inbound Link, a Backlink is a connection from one website to another. In the context of blogging and SEO, the term generally refers to links that point towards your blog or website from external websites. Links that point from your blog to other websites are Outbound Links. These offer your readers chance to gain additional info or sources related to your content. Links are a fundamental part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Search engines take quality Backlinks as a sort of vote of confidence for the relevance and quality of content. By contrast, linking to less credible (or dodgy) sites can damage your rank. See also: Link Building Bounce Rate A certain number of website visitors may take one look at your website and run. Navigating away without so much as a click is, in the world of web analytics, a metric known as Bounce Rate. A high percentage isn’t good. It would suggest visitors aren’t finding that content very relevant or interesting. Fortunately, you can do things about that. See also: Quality Content C Canonical Links Technical stuff now. A Canonical Link is an HTML tag that directs to a primary webpage, preventing duplicate search results. That is to say: every website is made up of multiple pages and Canonical Links point to the most relevant one(s). Visitors can then arrive at a logical top-level page (eg., your Blog Homepage). With platforms like WordPress, this is
How to make sure your website comments don’t get you sued
If you don’t moderate comments on your blog or website you could be held legally responsible for any offensive posts your users make, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled.
8 WordPress Plugins you have to Install
WordPress is one of the most well known blogging platforms. In recent years it has evolved so much that people like myself use it as the CMS of choice for all their websites. As well as this you can install a wide range of plugins, acting like extensions/add-ons to the WordPress platform, that can really help your site or blog in many ways. Here are 8 plugins I make sure I have on all WordPress sites: 1. WordPress SEO by Yoast Joost de Valk is a genius when it comes to WordPress, and this plugin illustrates that. The WordPress SEO plugin helps you with many aspects of optimising your site including editing META data (page titles and descriptions), inserting breadcrumbs, enabling an XML sitemap to help search engines find all the pages you want indexed for people to find, and lets you add information within your RSS feed so that other sites don’t just steal your content and put it on their own site. 2. Google Analytics Another plugin by Joost de Valk, which helps you connect your WordPress site to a Google Analytics account. If you are interested in analytical data this is a great plugin as it lets you segment data directly from the plugin settings page so you don’t have to learn code yourself! 3. W3 Total Cache Google doesn’t like websites that take a long time to load. In fact, they actually use page load time as a factor on where to rank your site in their search results. This plugin helps this by using a number of methods to reduce page load time. 4. WP Smush.it smush.it is a service owned by Yahoo! that lets you compress your images to the lowest filesize without reducing any quality whatsoever. Simple really! If you already have a bunch of images on your site that’s fine – there is an option to “bulk smush.it” which will go through each image already uploaded and compress them for you. 5. Facebook Comments I developed this one 🙂 This plugin inserts the Facebook Comments system into your site and places it above the native WordPress comments form. Once installed and configured you can then manage all comments within your Facebook account. I use this for a few reasons: There is less spam activity as you need to be logged into your Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail account. The comments are now indexed by Google, which means they are more SEO friendly than they were a month ago When someone comments on a post or page, the comment can be posted to their Facebook profile. This adds a social aspect to your site as the comment will appear on their friends’ news feed with links back to your site 6. Twitter Feed Another one I developed. This feed is a more SEO friendly way to output your latest tweets, search results, hashtags, mentions and favourites into your site. Using a simple shortcode is all you need to do to insert the feed and is highly configurable. 7. Gravity Forms This last one isn’t free but I use it all the time and is, in my opinion, well worth the money. This plugin takes contact forms to a whole new level! This highly versatile plugin helps you insert forms of any kind into your site from a simple contact form and questionnaire to a fully fledged entry form to create new posts within your own site. Everything can be configured from what is asked, whether new questions should be asked based on what has been entered already, and your thank you message once the form has been completed. 8. Simple URLs This plugin lets you manage outbound links and track them by clicks. So, for example, your blog site is at myblogname.com. Your link to somewhere you want to track outside of the site is abc.com. Instead of directly linking to abc.com you can make a Simple URL like myblogname.com/go/abc. This is good for a number of reasons. The main reason I use, is to use them for affiliate links. This way they are easier to give out to people, they’ll be tracked and you can keep them within your own domain and change where they link to at any time. This article was written by Alex Moss, partner at Manchester SEO agency FireCask. He provides freelance SEO for all kinds of businesses as well as developing WordPress Plugins. You can find him on Linkedin or follow him on Twitter. Follow @alexmoss
Why every businessman and woman should blog
We’ve blogged before about why blogging works for your business but here’s six reasons why blogging is also good for you personally as a business person. 1. It encourages good time management A daily blog, even a weekly blog needs a degree of commitment and focus that too often our modern working lives lack. A blog may be a reflection of an event you’ve encountered or an emotion you’ve felt but what you write and publish will always be a result of your thoughts and that means stepping out of the daily grind, which in turn will freshen up your brain. 2. It gives you a reason to research Remember the days when you weren’t chasing your tail? One of the greatest assets the Internet offers is the quantity of information and ease of access to it. However, we often barely have time to get through our emails in a day let alone ‘surf’ for research purposes. Checking facts or finding inspiration for a blog post gives you a genuine reason to take time to ‘surf’ and you will be amazed at what you will learn. 3. It helps you stay in touch with the real world Long hours and sleepless nights can often mean work life overtakes personal life in a big blur. If you find yourself getting home and either going straight to bed or booting up the laptop again a blog may help you re-connect with the real world again. The research you do is likely to keep you more in touch with the news and trends than you think. Plus feedback to your blog is normally a good indicator of the public mood surrounding the topic you have written about. 4. It develops your communication skills In the age of 140 characters or less and quick email exchanges communication has changed. A blog gives you a chance to really get your teeth into writing with a bit more length. Not tomes though, blogs need to be succinct so the art of self-editing is one well practised by bloggers. Blogging can also help develop presentation skills, coaching and provide inspiration to your readers without you realising Writing a blog, being able to just assemble your thoughts, whether you get feedback or not can also do wonders for your confidence. 5. It encourages you to find your expert field You probably know a lot about many things, but blogging can help you find a focus on what your true specialist subject is. If you show you know what you are blogging about, others will quickly pick up on this and follow your words of advice. 6. Because you can Blogging has never been easier. With 123-apps you can self-host a blog using proven software like WordPress. That in turn can be accessed, written and managed via your PC, tablet or smartphone. There’s an app for that and, as this blogger currently is, you can even update your blog from a crowded commuter train and relieve some of the stress caused by ‘signalling problems’. Blogging really is the answer to self-development in the modern age. You are in control but if you get into it you will probably find yourself driven to blog more and more, learning, developing and improving yourself every post.
Roll over blogging and Twitter – Here comes Tumblr
Tumblr has been around since 2007 but in the last year or so has made a massive in-roads into the social-networking sphere as particularly the younger generation flock to take advantage of its micro blogging functions. If you’ve not seen Tumblr before it’s kind of Twitter meets a blog. A short blog that can often consist of re-blogging what you find elsewhere. It’s the kind of stuff that many now use Facebook for, posting their favourite YouTube videos and the like, but Tumblr is more out there in the open internet, broadcasting to the world and creating a few personalities of its own. Others have described it as text meets email which is another fair comment, but however you see it or others see it, nobody can deny that Tumblr is on the move up. Back in July 2009 it recorded monthly page views of 250 million. Earlier this month it recorded 250 million page views in one single day! The success of the platform is its ease and personal nature. Few see it as a business tool, it is probably too informal for that, but we recall people saying the same about Facebook just a year or so ago. The popularity of Tumblr is rooted amongst creative types. It allows you to show flair and an insight into your personality that other networks perhaps have more constraints over. Yet, the success of Tumblr means companies are at least taking an interest. At the moment this appears to be mainly publications and news sites like The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Rolling Stone magazine, where their profile sits more comfortably with the existing Tumblr user base, but expect more and more corporates to give it a try as they push for the social media lead.