Web Content Marketing: How To Blog And Earn Money

If you are reading this, I am guessing that you want to make money through blogging.

There are millions of people out there who are generating a good income by just blogging. If you want to know how the process runs, you are in the right place.

In this guide, I will help you learn the way you can earn money through blogging.

Before anything, let’s find out what is blogging.

What Is A Blog And Blogging?

A blog can be defined as a website where you present your content in reverse chronological order. The newest content first, and oldest at last.

You can also call a ‘blog’ as a personal online journal or diary.

A blog can either be a personal blog or a public one.

A blog usually consists of pictures, texts, GIFs, and videos. The best thing about running a blog is that you can choose any niche to write on.

Speaking of blogs, there is a difference between a blog and a website. A website can be anything, and they are generally static in nature.

Content on websites is organized in pages. Unlike blogs, websites are not updated frequently.

What is the blog business?

Your blog becomes a business when you start earning from it.

There are millions of people who are earning from their blogs and earning really good.

The best part is that anyone can start a blog. This means even you are employed; you have a chance of boosting your income by starting a blog site.

Some people are so much dedicated to their blogs that they have even quit their jobs.

Why shouldn’t they? Most of the successful bloggers make a 6 figure blog income.

The best way to make money through blogs is by affiliate marketing. Other than that, you can even display ads on your site.

We have already covered about online blogging business and how to find the best niche for such business.

Earn Money Online From Home

In the past few years, blogging has become quite popular. The number of blogs on the web is increasing by the day. This seems to be an easy way of earning provided you know what to do.

Just starting a blog won’t help! if you are not aware of the right blogging techniques.

Without any further delay, let’s get into the details. Firstly, let’s identify the best content strategies for your blog or website.

If you are to run a blog successfully, you need to get your content marketing right. In other words, content marketing forms the basis of your blog site. With a full-proof content marketing strategy, you can work wonders for yourself.

Let’s not forget that the competition is quite high out there, so you need to boost your strategy from time to time. This will help you to stay up-to-date with a strong and innovative content marketing plan.

Several factors can influence Your content strategy, such as

• who you are making the content for,
• what makes your content unique,
• the channels you will use to publish your content, and
• how will you manage the creation and publication of your content…etc.

All these things have a significant role to play at the time of formulating your content strategy.

The primary purpose of creating a content strategy is to have a cost-effective and reliable plan to get more website traffic and leads.

After all, your blog is nothing without your audience. The more traffic you get on your blog site, the better it is for you.

In other words, your chances of earning from your blog increases as your audience become bigger.

You need to have a step-by-step approach when creating your content strategy. The very first step is to define your goals. Once you have set your goals, you already know which direction to move.

What Are Content Strategies?

When it comes to content, blogs are not the only type of content that one can create.

There are different varieties of content that you can opt for. Some of the most popular ones include Posts, Videos, eCourses, Infographics, Podcasts and Social Media Marketing.

1. Blog Posts

Blogs are obviously the most preferred form of content available on the net.

When you have a blog site to run, you need to keep updating your site with new blog posts. This is important to keep your audience updated and engaged.

Blogs are known to provide informative content to visitors. However, you need to make sure that you post only quality content on your site.

Tip: Blog posts should be at least 1,000 words for Google to recognize your article and index it in the first five pages under the keyword you are targeting to rank the article. If the keyword is ‘competitive’, you should write over 2,000 words.

All these small things matter a lot in gaining the attention of your readers.

2. Videos

In comparison to all other types of content types, videos are considered to be the most engaging and powerful ones.

However, making video content takes a lot of effort and time. But it’s definitely worth the effort in the end.

With the help of videos, you can popularize your website even better. That’s because the majority of the crowd loves to dig on audiovisual content than just textual ones.

3. eCourses

eCourses or eBooks are the best way to generate more leads to your site.

These type of content are downloaded by potential customers to read and refer to. Also, this type of content is more detailed and contains in-depth information about a topic.

To create eCourses, it requires a lot of research. After all, you cannot provide incomplete or wrong information to your clients. Your reliability as a solid well-researched content resource is everything when it comes to your long-term success in the industry.

eBooks are also considered to be very useful for your marketing process.

Let’s say after reading your content; a visitor may want to know more. This is where you can make use of the call-to-action button. In this case, your visitors have to submit their details which you can use for the benefit of your business.

For example, for email marketing purposes, where you can email any sponsor offers or details of products and services you think are interest to your audience.

4. Infographics

Infographics are considered to be very useful as they provide graphical insights or provide data in an easy to understand in a more effective way than words alone.

Due to this reason, modern-day bloggers consider info graphics to be an important content format.

5. Podcasts

In case your audience doesn’t have time to read through your content every day, starting a podcast would help you a lot.

Since 2018, the number of podcasts listeners have also increased in the market. Well, this should give you the confidence to start one.

6. Social media

Once you get your blog running by posting regular content articles, in parallel, you should distribute them on other platforms as well. This is where social media comes into the picture.

You can either share the content of your blogs or create original ones for the external sites; the choice is yours.

Content Strategy Development Checklist

You cannot make any progress in your business if you don’t have a documented content strategy to follow.

As already mentioned in the previous section, you need to have a step-by-step approach to create a content strategy.

To help you out, we have listed a checklist of steps below.

1. Set your goals

The first step is to determine what your goals are. This will help you to focus on what is more important for you.

Your strategy should outline the following statements:

• deciding who your target audiences are,
• the type of content you will create,
• the channel you will use to reach them, and finally,
• how will your content benefit them (your audience).

You also need to figure out how your strategy is going to help your goals. Speaking of which, your goals may include:

• Increased revenue
• Driving more traffic
• Increased sales
• SEO success, and more

Once you determine your goals, the entire process becomes much easier.

2. Establish your KPIs

The most effective way of achieving your goals is to make them measurable and specific.

To put it differently, you need to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content strategy. This will help you to know how close you have reached your goals.

3. Know your target audience

Just creating content is not enough, if you don’t know who you are targeting at. You need to know who your target audience is so that you are able to organize and tone the content in the right way.

4. Assessing your content (Content audits)

Once you have your content out there, you need to check whether it is helping you to meet your goals. For this, you need to do a content audit.

Auditing includes:

• identifying the gaps
• editing to improve readability
• comparing the performance of your content with your competitors, and
• assessing and improving the usefulness of your content.

5. Choosing the best content channels

Your priority should be to reach your content to your audience. For this, you need to figure out the best channels for your content.

Once you start to work through the process, you will slowly get an idea of the channels that are used by the audience more.

6. Decide the type of content

You also need to give a good thought on the type of content you want to create. This is important because your strategy is based on the type of content you create.

We have already discussed types of contents above.

7. Allocate your resources

Once you have decided on the content type, the next step is to decide who is going to produce content for you.

Also, how often you wish to generate new content.

Tip: if you doubt your writing skills, you can consider outsourcing writings to a freelancer.

8. Schedule your content

You also need to schedule your content on each of the platforms in the right way. To make your work easier, you can create a content calendar.

9. Create content

After preparing all the above mentioned, you need to finally create your content. Make sure you have everything you need to create quality content for your audience.

For example, grammar checkers such as Grammarly comes very handy for content writers.

AD/Grammarly

10. Promote your content

After the creation of content, marketing is the next most crucial step in your agenda.

Remember, unless you share your content and take them to masses, you won’t get any results.

11. Measure results

Lastly, you need to measure the success of your content and refocus your online business based on the stats and feedback from your audience.

This will help you know how well, your content is doing. You will also get to know if you got your strategy on point.

What is a blog in marketing perspective?

Most of the companies have started to rely on blogs in order to promote their business.

From a marketing perspective, blogs can be described as a really effective form of marketing. That’s because it helps your brand to get more visibility online. In other words, it can help your business grow.

Why is content marketing not just blogging?

If you think that content marketing is the same as blogging then you are wrong.

You can say that blogging is just a tool, whereas content marketing is the operating system its works within.

Blogging alone is not enough to promote a business. Instead, blogging should be a part of an effective marketing process that is capable of driving results. This is where content marketing comes to play.

Content marketing can be described as a strategic marketing process. On the other hand, blogging is creating content on a niche of your choice.

In order to promote your blogs, you need the help of content marketing.

Why Should Blogging Be Part Of Your Online Marketing?

If you have to run a successful online marketing campaign making use of blogs is a must. This is to get better results.

Here are some of the main reasons why you should include blogging in your online marketing campaign.

1. Blogging is considered to be an effective content marketing technique.

2. With the help of blogging, you can provide the details of a topic more elaborately. This helps your audience to know more about your online business.

3. Most people these days tend to trust blogs when it comes to making a purchase.

4. Blogging is one of the best ways to drive more traffic to your website.

5. You can even encourage inbound links with the use of blog posts.

6. Blogging is also considered to be a great way to interact with your customers.

7. In order to become successful on social media platforms, you can make great use of blogs.

How To Make Money With A Website?

Blogging could be a very fruitful hobby for you. That’s because it gives you the chance to earn a six-figure income from it. It may sound strange to you but you can actually write about something you like and earn from it.

Blogging is the ideal option for people who want to be self-employed. When you can earn good right from the comfort of your house, there is no need for you to sign-up for a day job.

If you are desperate enough to know the ways to earn money from your or website then you should take a look at the pointers given below.

Let’s jump into the ways you can monetise a website or a blog.

1. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of earning money from your blog site.

By affiliate marketing, we mean when you recommend a product or service to your audience. This is done with the help of special tracking links. Every time someone clicks on the link and make a purchase, you will earn a commission from it.

It may sound all easy, but it takes time to become a successful affiliate marketer you have to honestly add value to your reader by providing valuable content to your reader. That require lots of research, experiments and effort. However, you should not give up and continue to work hard for it.

If you remember, we already covered the best training courses on affiliate marketing.

2. Display Google AdSense

Another easy way of earning money from your blogs is through Google AdSense.

Many bloggers have already chosen this path to be their main source of income from their blogs.

All it takes is for you to add a script from Google to your blog site and then start displaying ads.

You will receive a payment every time when someone clicks on the ad regardless of the visitor purchase something from the vendor (advertiser) or not.

3. Sell sponsored blog posts

If you are one of those bloggers who do not like to display ads on their site, then you can opt for sponsorships.

This way, you don’t have to lose control over what is displayed on your site. Also, you don’t have to worry about your audiences to get annoyed by the ads.

Sponsorships are one of the most profitable ways to earn from your blogs.

All you need to do is display the product or service of a company on your site. In order to promote it in a better way to your audience, you need to talk about it a little.

In case of putting up a sponsored ad, you need to be aware of the disclosure laws in your area or jurisdiction.

4. Write reviews and get paid

In this case, you need to review products and services as provided to you by a company.

It can be any product or service.

In case of a product, the company may send you the product to use it for a few days. Then, you need to write a review based on your experience. For each review you write, you are going to get paid for it by the company.

Review writers usually pick products from their niche so that it becomes easier for them to review it.

In order to choose this path as your source of income, you need to approach companies to write paid reviews for them. Once you become popular, companies may approach you on their own.

5. Create content for members only

When you have a loyal base of audience, you can even charge them to read your content.

Many people are willing to pay to read good work.

In this case, you need to provide high-quality content to your visitors. You can create a members-only area for your visitors to read in-depth blog posts, download audio or video files and do more.

You will get paid every time you get a new member. However, maintaining a members-only site can also incur a huge budget for you as you have to provide premium quality content to your audience continuously.

6. Create a question and answers community

Communities such as Quora and Exchange are epic examples of question and answers community on the net. Setting up such a website helps you to drive a lot of traffic to your site.

Not just that, but such sites are also very engaging for the audiences. However, it will take some time for you to build a sizable community. But once you fulfill that you can monetize your site by using affiliate ads and other methods.

In case, you didn’t know but popular question and answers communities are able to get direct sponsorships and advertisements.

7. Sell eBooks and eCourses

Even selling eBooks and eCourses could get you the right amount of money as a home-based income.

All you need to do is provide your visitors with in-depth and quality eBooks to download. For every download, you can earn an income.

You can choose any niche to write a book on. However, you need to make sure that your book will be popular with the audience.

In the case of eCourses, you can prepare detailed courses for the learners out there. You will get paid every time when someone downloads the course developed by you.

Affiliate Links vs. Banners: Pros And Cons

When it comes to affiliate marketing, you can either make use of text links or banners. Now the question is which better than what?

Text links can be really effective for contextual affiliate marketing. Not just that, but it also gives you the chances to intermix affiliate links into the content of your site. Also, it allows you to produce a well-focused call-to-action.

On the other hand, banners are usually small or large squares. One of the main advantages of using banners is that they can attract the attention of the audiences easily.

Banners are usually nicely designed animations or graphics that are used by an affiliate marketer.

If your site has plenty of banner ads, then you should use text links for your affiliate campaigns. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use banners at all. They can be really effective in creating awareness. Along with that, it also helps you to gain the attention of your customers.

The right way to do is to balance out both text links and banners on your site.

Conclusion

Thus, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that earning money from your blog site is a big deal these days. Anybody can make it possible with just a little dedication and hard work.

Now that you know the ways to earn money from your blog site, it should be easier for you to make it happen. At the same time, you should also look into your content strategy in order to get better results.