With the growing importance of social media, as well as the plethora of blogging tools available, it’s clear that having your own blog is quickly becoming an essential part of entrepreneurship. After all, who doesn’t want to improve their personal brand online?
But how can you make money from your blog?
While getting paid to write is definitely the ultimate goal, there are some other ways to monetize your blog if you’re willing to do some work on your own. Below, we’ll look at the best blogging platforms and tell you which ones can help you succeed as a business owner.
WordPress
Although WordPress is easily the most popular blogging platform on the web, it’s also one of the most popular places to start a business, if you’re just starting out.
WordPress is all about making money, so don’t be surprised if you hear that some of your favorite brands started out on WordPress.
A great place to start is by creating a WordPress blog in a niche that you’re knowledgeable about. It may take a while to get your own blog to a point where you can make money, but there are plenty of resources available to help you.
Blogger
Blogger is the top blogging platform for personal bloggers and is the one we use at Make Money Online. We choose to use the free version for this post, as it allows for posts as large as 80MB, has some advanced features, such as video and audio, and offers some SEO benefits.
If you’re willing to spend a bit of money, you can make your blog more professional by paying $39.95 for the upgraded premium version, which also has tools like multiple custom CSS stylesheets, the ability to run contests, and more.
The hosting options for bloggers are also pretty nice. You can choose from 5GB, 10GB, 20GB, 30GB, and 50GB for starting blogs.
Freemium
If you’re an influencer in your niche and want to monetize your blog but don’t have the need or time to pay, you can do it the freemium route. Freemium blogs are designed to work on a variety of hosting platforms and give you a taste of the standard features of a WordPress blog, without requiring you to make any major investments.
To create a Freemium blog, you need to sign up for a hosting platform of your choice and pay to unlock all the basic features. By the end of your free trial, you will be able to make money, but you will need to spend money to make it more than a hobby.
If you don’t see what you’re looking for on a Freemium website, you can easily sign up for one of these services to start making money from your blog.
ReactPress
As an affiliate marketer, one of the biggest challenges I had to overcome was how to make money from my website.
For most of my businesses, it was very hard to start making any kind of money off of it until I found the right platform. I ended up signing up for a few different ones and spending many hours learning about each platform’s ins and outs before I got the site up and running and saw some decent traffic.
Once you find the right platform for you, you’ll have to spend a few bucks to learn how to make money from it. The most basic option is to become an affiliate marketer. This means that you will do the legwork to find new websites that you want to write about and then you will affiliate with them. By doing this, you will get money every time someone buys an item after seeing your site.
The upside to this is that you will also see some solid traffic, even if it’s only for a short time. The downside is that you will need to spend a lot of time trying to figure out which sites are worthwhile and which ones are not.
A great affiliate site is ReactPress. It helps you earn affiliate commission from the entire inventory of over 5,000 affiliate partners. You can also set up recurring affiliate deals that you can run for as long as you want. You don’t have to work for ReactPress if you don’t want to, though. There are plenty of other options out there if you decide you don’t want to work with an affiliate company.
Selling Products
You can sell almost anything on your blog if you can figure out how to make it work. Whether you’re selling products, crafts, or anything else, you can make money from your blog. The trick is figuring out how to promote your products the right way and make the money you deserve.
Some free resources available to help you with this process are Big Cartel and Amazon FBA.
Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA is a relatively new affiliate product that is useful for people. Who has a physical product they want to sell? To use it, you will be selling your product on Amazon and you can choose your own fulfillment center. This gives you the ability to sell your product at a much lower cost, while still being able to see some of the benefits that Amazon provides.
To get started with Amazon FBA, you’ll need to sign up for an Amazon FBA Seller account. You will need to purchase an Amazon FBA kit, which will give you everything you need to start selling products.
When you are ready to start selling, you will need to set up a landing page for your Amazon FBA products. This landing page should include information about your products, as well as photos, prices, and descriptions.
You will also need to select a warehouse in which you will be shipping products. You can either pick a location based on your sales or ship orders based on your geographical location. Amazon will automatically figure this out and will start charging you based on where you’re shipping products from.
If you’re not ready to launch yet, you can set up a preview page that will let you know if your items are ready to ship. Once you are ready, your Amazon FBA products will be available for purchase.
Hopefully, this article increased your knowledge of making money from blogging.