The blogging game has gotten more and more competitive in the last few years with the explosion of social media and microblogging platforms. In the following article, we'll cover the best tips to make your blog truly profitable in this ever challenging market.
1. Know Your Target
First off, if you really want to make money from blogging, you have to be focused on your subject - ideally a niche you have an interest in, and knowledge about. There are so many blogs and so much content produced daily online that it can be hard to find a worthwhile target.
However, one tip is to blog about something that's largely ignored by the media and other online outlets. For instance, anything with a local focus is good. By concentrating on a single specific subject, you're de facto increasing the relevancy of the ads displayed on your site to your audience, which makes for a higher click-through rate on CPC advertising and in turn more money for you.
2. Use Social Media & Images Effectively
It's been said before, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is certainly the case in blogging. Images have a dramatically higher click through rate, so the efficient use of visual media can seriously increase your online readership and ad revenue.
On Facebook, for instance, the different conversion rates between a well-chosen edited image and a poorly chosen image or no image at all can be dramatic. If you're struggling for inspiration, Instagram and Pinterest are ideal sources of click-worthy images.
It sounds basic and it is, but making your blog discoverable to potential readers through carefully chosen keywords is incredibly important if you want to make money from blogging. Plus, the importance of SEO applies equally to blogs and websites. It's a topic that's perhaps a little too complicated to go into fine detail here, but this handy guide you should help you optimize those important keywords.
If you want your desired audience to find your blog, you have to make sure it's as 'visible' as it can be. To achieve this, you have to optimize your content for relevant keywords that will enable and encourage search engines to rank your site higher on their results pages.
Anyone who has invested time and energy in blogging knows that platforms and tools can change overnight. For that reason, it's essential to stay up to date with the blogging sphere. It not only applies to the latest updates and changes to technology but also blogging practices in general.
For instance, those bloggers who realized the power of video blogs, and how the format could forward their cause, are now reaping the rewards for their forward thinking. Be like them!
