Can blogging literally feed you?
Well, the answer is yes if you are willing to put in the work and keep overhead down. One of the most common failures of a blog is overhead. I am not talking about the hosting company because that’s very little expense; you are the highest cost of your blog. You require food, water, shelter, plus any expenses you have acquired. If the overhead of supporting yourself is high, you may have to find other means to do so while you are starting your blog.
What is the Overhead of just the Blog?
Our overhead for just the blog is around $150 a year. This includes our host fees as BlueHost and the domains we own, but this could be much lower depending on the package you get and the domain cost. For our domains we pay to keep personal information private, you may want to do the same if you are not brick and mortar. We also highly recommend BlueHost after moving from the WIX platform but that is another story. To keep the cost down on host drive space we keep all videos on YouTube, there are others you can use but this is where we started.
Advertising your blog is a huge challenge, besides writing blogs this will be the most time-consuming or costly thing you do. You could pay a lot of money to do this on social media sites and search engines, but it is going to add overhead and it’s no cheap. What we do is post our content on places like FaceBook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and others once we have a new blog or video. We really make sure we link things together like YouTube to our blog, interconnections are a big deal.
Once you have all your self-advertising or pay for ads, you have to track what is working. If you are using WordPress in Bluehost like use there are many tools to do this. We use tools that come with Jetpack in WordPress and we have also linked our account to Google Analytics. If you are advertising yourself or paying, you have to know what is working or not, and where you need to concentrate your time.
How to Make Revenue from Blogging?
Once your off and blogging, you want to get paid right? Well, when you first start it will be like falling pennies from heaven, literally just pennies here and there. It will take persistence, learning, and a lot of blogging to turn them pennies into dollars. These are the things we are doing, you may know of something else, as we all are learning as we go.
- In site ads, probably the most common thing you will see and the easiest thing to start. One of the largest platforms out there and the only one we use is Google Adsense. The revenue from these ads are very low and you are going to need a lot of clicks to make a living here.
- Affiliations is a great way to make a little extra coin as you share in the profit on a sale. One of the largest platforms out there is probably Amazon and one or best performing. There are plenty of others you could use, just do your research and find the best fit for you.
- Product reviews and product testing has a huge market of vendors looking for you to test and write, or video a review of their product. This can be a lot of fun, vendors send you stuff, plus a little coin for your pocket, or an affiliation based on sales. Be careful here, make sure the vendor is going to care for the customers you send them. nothing like having people yelling at you cause of a product review you did. Also never go out-of-pocket for a vendor, there are a ton of them that will ask, then never pay, or go out of business.
I hope this has helped, blogging is a lot of work but is a very rewarding experience. We in blogging terms would be young to this world, and welcome advice you may have to help us all grow.
Us chilling in the kitchen.[/caption]