Blogging is a solid marketing route for home based and small businesses. It’s enjoyable, fun, and free. The availability of free online resources and websites such as Blogger and WordPress makes the building of a business online possible for smaller companies and individuals who may have a very small marketing budget.
When I first started, money wasn’t there for me. However, the resources were.
You’d be surprised at the stuff you could potentially get for free online these days. You don’t need a lot of money to start a blog, and this is why it is one of the easiest ways to get your business out there. Here are 7 ways to earn more money with your blog.
Setting up and posting content to a blog is actually pretty easy. However, what’s trickier is generating enough interest to increase your income opportunities, whether you sell informational products or consultancy services. Here are our top tips on growing your blog-based business:
- The right keywords that are relevant to your business are essential in everything that you do online, including your blog posts. Use Google to figure out which keywords and phrases are used by people searching for your types of products and services and incorporate them regularly (but not too much!) in your blog posts to increase your search rankings.
- Develop contacts with related but non-competing bloggers and ask them to guest post on your blog. Reciprocal link building can increase traffic for both parties without making your subscribers feel as if advertising is being forced on them.
- List articles (for example, ‘Top 10 Tips On’ or ‘5 Easy Ways To’) are great for SEO purposes as people regularly search using these types of phrases and love reading them. Make sure that your tips are of real value – advice on saving time or money is always in demand. Readers like to read posts which they can relate too and therefore, providing tips on a hot issue or matter is something which you will definitely get a lot of attention for.
- Sharing your blog posts on Facebook and Twitter will help to spread the word and gain you new followers. Linking to social media channels also makes good sense in terms of SEO. However, when doing this, make sure you don’t end up making the same mistake that I did when using social media sites.
- Freebies are a tried and tested way of growing your business. You could use competitions, samples and free guides among your blog posts to encourage your subscribers to share them with their friends. Make sure that people need to subscribe in order to get their free product and maximise your promotional opportunities by marketing your business within the free guide or alongside the giveaway. A good way to take use of this idea is to create an incentive to give away. This could be anything really. A few ideas are guides and eBooks which help cover the issues on a particular topic (such as SEO). You can then give this away in your blog sidebar by getting your readers to subscribe to your email list. This is a great way to build a healthy list without attaining it via spammy methods.
- Blog often and keep things fresh. Search engines like sites that are updated regularly and blogs are no exception. Writing entertaining content not only keeps your readers happy but improves your search engine rankings, bringing more traffic and potential customers to your blog. This is something interesting which I found out over the last few months. The months in which I had blogged the most had given me more traffic, and better SERP results. Similarly, my rankings had also decreased in the month where I had posted the least. Make sure you post regularly with the latest, in demand topics to keep readers interested.
- The tips mentioned above could be managed at no cost at all but, if you want to dip your toe into online advertising, consider Google’s advertising programmes. They’re targeted, based upon your keywords (which you already achieved from point one, right?) and controllable in terms of expenditure. The cost is based upon a per click basis and you can set a daily maximum budget.
Conclusion:
Of course, the underlying foundation of a commercially effective blog is the ability to apply your expertise and write well in a way that focuses on your business without making it look as if you’re selling all the time. If you’re completely new to blogging, there are plenty of resources online to hone and improve your writing and marketing skills to benefit your business.
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