Did you know that some blogs produce 5 or 6 figures PER MONTH for their owners? Of course, it takes time to grow a blog of this magnitude, and that growth starts with a seed that you can plant today. How do bloggers make money blogging?
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How Do Bloggers Make Money?
If your plan is to make money blogging, you need to know what’s involved before you start. Bloggers make money in many ways, including:
- Affiliate marketing links
- Selling digital products and courses
- Sponsorships
- Newsletters
To make money blogging, you need one important thing – TRAFFIC.
Growing traffic takes time. After planting your seed (or launching your blog) today, you can watch it grow and produce greater profits over time with a newsletter.
Why Should You Start a Newsletter
Now, a newsletter may not seem like an essential part of a blog, but I assure you that it is. When nurtured regularly, that seed can grow into a mighty tree. It can yield benefits for years to come. What can a newsletter do for you?
- Establish new relationships with followers or customers
- Define and elevate your brand
- Cultivate brand loyalty
- Establish yourself as an authority in your niche
- And, yes, produce exciting profits
A newsletter gives you unparalleled opportunities. Starting your own newsletter isn’t just about disseminating information; it’s about creating an engaged community and unlocking financial gains.
You could simply throw out a new newsletter. However, if you are serious about getting the most out of your newsletter, you need to approach it strategically.
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What You Need to Monetize Your Blog
How do bloggers make money? Start at the beginning. Before you can monetize anything, you need a well-designed blog. I recommend using a WordPress blog. WordPress offers tons of themes and templates to choose from. After selecting your theme, you can adjust the various blocks, choose your colors and fonts, and add your content. A basic blog only takes a few hours to get online. A more complex design could be up in a few days. With WordPress, you don’t need to know code. Anyone can do it.
If you use WP Engine, you can use this code to save money- WPE4FREE – 4 Months Free on Annual Plans. There are five plans available, and they start at $20/month.
Once your blog is up, you’ll need a way to capture email addresses of your website’s traffic. OptIn Monster is a plug-in that’s pre-loaded into your WordPress dashboard. You can use the basic features for free. Essentially, OptIn Monster creates a popup for you that asks your customers to take an action. In this case, the action would be to provide their email address and receive your newsletters. There are more advanced features available with a paid subscription. You may not need the paid features today, but they serve a purpose as you grow. I recommend checking out everything that this plug-in can do for you.
When you capture email addresses, you can send your newsletter out to a growing audience regularly. You can drive traffic to your site to your newsletter. In turn, you could earn more money through your sponsorships, affiliate links and other avenues. Does your blog need a newsletter? Absolutely!
Do You Need Medium.com, Substack or a Newsletter?
If you already take advantage of Medium or Substack, you may think that a newsletter is unnecessary. This isn’t the case.
Medium and Substsack are excellent platforms for building an audience and connecting with your readers. However, a newsletter through a WordPress site enables you to expand your reach and produce new income streams.
Expand Your Audience
Consider, for example, that Substack is completely free to use. It only takes a few minutes to set up a new account. The platform is just as easy to use as Medium’s.
With Substack, infrastructure is in place for a new group of readers to find your work. In fact, Substack states that approximately 40% of its users’ new subscribers are generated inside the Substack platform.
Be aware, though, that you can only monetize Substack with paid subscriptions. Substack doesn’t work with OptIn Monster, and you can’t run affiliate links on Substack as you can through a WordPress blog. If you’re serious about growing your blog into a moneymaker, using a combination of WordPress and a newsletter is essential.
Create New Income
When you look at how do bloggers make money, it”s important to cover all of the base by looking at additional income streams.You can easily offer a paid subscription option for your Substack, but actually convincing people to upgrade from a free subscription to the paid subscription is easier said than done. With a paid subscription membership of $5 per month, you could earn $100 each month with only 20 paid subscribers. Some Substacks have thousands of paid subscribers. It takes time to build a large subscriber base, though. It may take you months or longer to even build your paid subscriber list to 20 and years to have thousands – if you ever get this many.
You can also earn money writing on Medium. My first month on Medium netted me $185. Is this normal? No. In fact, many writers who have been writing on that platform for years don’t make that in a year. Medium is a fun way for writers to make side cash, and it has a great community, but it won’t produce the kind of income that your monetized blog will.
Unless you are starting your blog with a huge stream of followers already, it makes sense to use your blog to generate multiple income streams. You’ll start seeing money faster, and you may enjoy greater income stability since your streams are diversified. Having a way to capture your visitors’ email addresses from day one is important for reaping the full benefits of a newsletter for your blog.
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