So many wonder what the benefits of running a blog are, either for personal use or for business purposes. I can’t stress enough how important it really is. A blog is a space for you (whether personal or business) to show off your knowledge, your skills, and find others who are interested in the same topics. Blogs also boost your search engine optimization so your target audience can find you online.
Another great aspect about blogging is that once you build up a following, you can begin to monetize your blog. I wouldn’t suggest plastering your blog with ads and pop-ups everywhere as you don’t want to “spam” your visitors. Here are three tips on how you can ethically and successfully monetize your blog:
Pay Per Click Advertising
Many people assume that pay per click advertising is only a strategy for those interested in acquiring traffic to their blog, but you can actually make revenue as a publisher with pay per click ads. To do this, you would create an account as a publisher and insert the code onto your website that will generate ads. You can control where the ads will be positioned, what types of ads you want (text, image, video), and what ads you want to show or not (you can block certain ads if you wish). You can make revenue off of these ads based on either cost per view or cost per click.
Selling Advertising Space
You can advertise real estate space on your blog to others who might be interested in paying a set fee per month (or affiliate link) to advertise. For example, you could offer a header ad position on your blog to a firm whose visitors would have similiarties to yours. A great example would be if you blogged about health, fitness, and nutrition, you could off advertising space to fitness clubs, fitness wear, etc.
Paid Reviews
This is a great way to get freebies! You can offer the service of reviews and giveaways on your blog. For example, if you run a fitness website you could offer a fitness club to give away a free gym membership and in return they can either pay you for doing a review or they will also provide you with the free product/service. Word of mouth is one of the most common and successful advertising strategies so if a well-known blogger with substantial followers writes a blog discussing how happy they were with a product or service, brands consider this highly valuable and are usually willing to pay or provide you with lots of free products.