If you have a laptop and access to the internet you could be on your way to making millions.
In my new book Get Rich Blogging, I use the example of Arianna Huffington who set up the blog The Huffington Post and became a multi-millionaire when she sold it to AOL for £160 million.
Martin Lewis from Money Saving Expert, Nikke Finke from Deadline Hollywood and Michael Arrington from Tech Crunch also set up blogs by themselves, built them up and sold them for more than £10 million.
These super bloggers share several common traits. There is a reason why they were successful and managed to stand out in a crowded blogosphere.
My top five tips for anyone wanting to turn their blog from a hobby to a cash-generating business are:
Use analytics software
A blog that makes money is a business and one thing all businesses must do is keep track of their figures.
Sign up for an account with Google Analytics and link it to your blog. This will monitor your traffic and tell you where the majority of visitors are coming from.
You should check your traffic several times a week and if the figures are not growing it’s a sign you need to change something. If you see a spike on a certain day then you can repeat the action that led to this increase in traffic.
Be disciplined – blog every day
Try to post at a specific time of day or week. Your readers need to know fresh content will go up at a certain time or they won’t bother returning. If you don’t have much time you can get a quick blog post up in five minutes and do a longer blog post later in the week.
Get into the habit of sending out a newsletter that offers additional content to what’s on your blog.
Data is valuable
You can make your blog instantly more monetizable if you have a newsletter that is sent to a large database of subscribers. It’s easy to send out a newsletter but much harder to grow a database as people are growing cautious about what they subscribe to. The difference between a rich blogger and a hobby blogger is the wealthy one goes the extra mile and gives people a reason to want the newsletter.
Give advertisers different options
There are three things you can offer potential advertisers.
You can offer them a banner/text-based ad of a specific size and dimension. You could link to their website in exchange for a percentage of sales resulting from your link (which is known as affiliate advertising). Or you could write an advertorial or a sponsored post where you promote a product through your writing.
The best bloggers have banner ads of different sizes and earn extra income through well-targeted affiliate adverts and occasional sponsored posts. A lot of bloggers fail as they get fixated on banner ads and fail to appreciate the value of a well thought out affiliate scheme.
Think about the earning potential of every single link
When you link to another website, you’re diverting your readers’ attention and most likely making them aware of a new product or brand.
In business, you can earn money from referrals and so you should make sure you get something out of every blog link. This could be affiliate revenue or a link back to boost SEO.
You should always contact the website you link to and ask for a return link because links helps get you higher up the Google page rankings.l
For more tips, read Get Rich Blogging by Zoe Griffin, available at Amazon and in most good book stores.
Zoe Griffin is the founder and editor of celebrity blog Live Like a VIP
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