When you started blogging, you may have only invested a small amount of time and resources on it. But after months or even years of working on your lovely little web project, you may have already given a massive chunk of your life on it, and you thought that it would be a waste if you didn’t get any returns on investment (ROI) from it.
You may also have realized that your blog already has the potential to help your business or job. Thankfully, it actually can. That said, these are just a few ways you can do to ensure you can get something back from it and earn a few more bucks on the side:
1. It can boost your social media and other online marketing strategies
A blog site is an excellent backbone to every social media and another online marketing strategy, and that’s especially true if you have accumulated hundreds of posts. For one, you can use all your posts as content on your social media. Just having a year’s worth of posts in your blog can easily translate to a year’s worth of posts in your social media accounts.
Using your blog for your marketing strategies might not precisely bring you real money, but it can significantly reduce the number of resources you’ll need to consume in marketing. Know that many online marketers spend a lot of good money on content creators just to feed the social media accounts they’re managing and on blogger outreach to get the word out about them and their products. By the way, if you want to know more about these processes, you may want to check this best practice guide.
It’s currently expected that many chief marketing officers (CMOs) in 2021 will need to spend around USD$119 billion on content marketing alone. Also, know that a freelancer blogger alone may cost you USD$0.15–USD$0.50 per word. That can make you spend at least USD$75–USD$500 per post. (1)
2. It provides a place on the web to let people find you
The beauty of blogs or personal websites is that they can serve as your virtual office. While your blog might have functioned as your sounding board on the internet, you can easily convert it as the front-face of your business.
Aside from that, people can check your blog to see if your business is still active. The recent posts you make inform visitors that you’re still alive and well and your business is still open for, well, business. Because of that, you can prevent losing customers and allow new customers to come in.
On the other hand, if your website has been up for quite some time and contains a lot of content, it will pay for itself if you turn it into your business’ site. Unlike a new website, your blog doesn’t need extra work for search engine optimization (SEO) and other money-costing services to put your website on the map. Of course, it may still need some optimization work. Still, at this point, your site is probably visible on search engine result pages (SERPs).
3. It can put a face on your brand
A blog can let people put a face on a business. If you’ve written professional and helpful content in your blog, people may think that your business or brand has the same traits. And if those traits match what people need from your company, they may effectively convert leads into customers.
Furthermore, you can utilize your blog to position your business as a leader in your industry or niche. You can use the blog to be an outlet for your specialized industry knowledge. With that, you can produce content for your business that lets you build trust with your readers, prospects, and customers, improving your conversion and repeat customer rates. (2)
4. It can be monetized
If you made it a point that you don’t want to mix your business or work in your blog, you could still profit from it. Know that many bloggers make a good amount of money with what they do. And most of them earn through the following methods to monetize their blogs:
- Click ads: You can do that by monetizing it through advertisements. You can easily insert cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM) ads on your blog site if you have a bit of technical know-how.
- Private ads: Another way of monetizing your blog is to accept private ad postings. This method is advantageous, especially if your blog already has clout on the web and garners a few thousand visitors every week or month. If your website already has significant traffic, you may already receive some messages in your email from advertisers or companies with advertising offers. You may want to check your inbox now.
- Affiliate links: Then, you also have affiliate links. This approach is simple. You can connect with an advertiser, ad network, merchant, or retailer and ask about advertising products through affiliate links. Whomever you contact, they will give you a specific link that you can insert into your content. If people click on that link and buy the product, you earn a small commission. (2)
- Direct selling: If you don’t want to get involved with other companies, you can just sell products directly on your blog site. You can pick a product you’re passionate about, write a review, and persuade your readers to buy it from you. Unlike the other monetization options, you have complete control over how much profit you can earn using this method.
- Guest blogging and link building: Unlike the other options mentioned above, earning from guest blogging and link building requires your site to be highly popular. Instead of inserting affiliate links, you can insert backlinks for website owners who wish to improve their rankings on SERPs. In some cases, you can charge them if they want to post content containing their backlink.
The beauty in all of this is that you don’t need to restrict yourself to one monetization option alone—not to mention that there are a plethora of other ways to make money from blogging. You can apply all these in your blog to further maximize your ROI.
Conclusion
Having a long-running blog is having an untapped gold mine. How you utilize it to maximize your ROI is entirely up to you. However, with the ideas mentioned in this post, you can definitely get started now.
