There are so many reasons why starting a blog is still important today. Being a skilled content creator without a great number of audience, starting a blog can be the perfect opportunity to share your creations, ideas, thoughts, experiences, and your expertise with the world. In essence, starting a blog could help you accumulate quite a desirable number of audience, where you can relate your stories to the world, build your personal brand, market and promote products, thereby driving traffic to your website. In this article, we’ll be discussing what a blog is all about, reasons to start a blog today, and how to make money from blogging.
What Is a Blog?
Blogging refers to the process of writing, creating, and publishing highly engaging content online. It is the process of managing a blog. A blog (Weblog) is an online informational website owned by an individual or groups of individuals where informal content is published, ranging from sharing personal stories to ideas, thoughts, and experiences through writing, images, or videos.
Reasons to Start Your Own Blog:
There are several reasons why you might want to start your own blog today, which could be:
Connection with People:
Starting a blog is a huge way to connect with like-minded people. If you enjoy traveling and you feel like sharing your travel experience, starting a blog might help you connect with people who enjoy the same things as you do.
Money-Making Opportunity:
As your blog grows bigger and more popular, it provides you the opportunity to make money. Blogs are known to advertise products and services, which of course could generate extra money. Big companies that either want their new product to be known or want their old product to get more insight might need your successful blog for their mission, thereby making you some cool cash.
Improves Your Writing Skills:
Blogging hugely involves writing; hence, as you keep writing frequently, your writing skills improve.
Helps You Let Out Your Burdens:
You might want to share your stories with your audience—things that had happened to you, stressed you, and why it happened—with the aim of making your audience learn from it and to never try it.
Helping People Get New Ideas Through Your Blog:
Being a blogger, picking a niche and holding tightly to it makes you an expert in that niche. You might not quickly become an expert, but as time goes on and you keep on writing more about the niche, you’ll get an authority in the field. If it’s a fitness niche, as you keep on bringing in new ways to gym without the instruments, you’re providing your audience with ideas.
Opens Door to Great Opportunities:
After having built great authority in your selected niche, it can open new doors to great opportunities for you, such as media opportunities (writing newsletters, etc.), sponsored posts, brand partnerships, book contracts.
Brings Out Your Creativity:
Blogging gets you into the creative mode. You put your skills to use and create something so fascinating and engaging for your audience, which can be beneficial to their lives.
Makes You Become Your Own Boss:
Blogging makes you become your own boss, in that you coin your own words together. You don’t need a boss to order you on what to share on your own blog—whether it’s your personal stories, ideas, lifestyle, it’s all from your own creative mind.
Being Part of Your Resume:
Having started your blog and brought it to success, you can proudly add your experience to your resume, thereby increasing your worth.
Makes You Come Out as an Expert:
Starting a blog could show you off as an expert in the particular field you wish to blog about. If you hold strongly to a particular niche and write appropriately about it, you could quickly become popular in that niche and become a sought-after expert on that topic.
Makes You Bold and Confident:
Starting a blog and having the will to make it popular and successful would, of course, fuel more confidence in you, and you can be boastful about your achievement.
Makes You Have Fun!:
Once you select a niche you love and enjoy, you should be having fun while making money at the same time!
How To Make Money From Blogging
Through Display Ads:
Display ads are one of the easiest ways to monetize your blog. After your blog has gained enough popularity and traffic, media buying companies could rent a place on your website to display their ads. Whenever a visitor clicks on the ad, you get paid for it. Bloggers earn from these through an ad network such as Google AdSense (a big media buying company). Aside from these, there are other companies that let you display their ads on your website and make money, such as Media.net, PropellerAds, Adsterra, Ezoic, Skimlinks.
Affiliate Marketing:
In this method, you recommend a product to your audience by writing a positive review about the product, urging them to buy, and when they finally buy it using your link, you get your commission.
Digital Products:
Selling digital products such as online courses is another perfect way to earn money from your blog.
Physical Products:
Selling physical products that are related to your brand could be another way to monetize your blog.
Selling Books:
If you can create engaging content that your followers love, why not package it into a book? You can create your own book and urge your followers to buy it from you. Books such as self-taught books, life hack books, motivational books, novels, etc., are also commendable.
Sponsors:
This is another active way to make money from your blog. Sponsors are organizations, companies that are willing to pay you to have their products/services reviewed on your blog in order to get more insights and increase sales. As a blogger, you must be selective about the companies you accept sponsorship from. When reviewing a product, you must come out truthful about the positive and negative sides of it. If you feel the product is too much on the negative side, then maybe you should not accept the sponsorship at all to prevent you from lying to your audience just for your gain. Your followers trust you to recommend only the best for them; if you break their trust and disappoint them even once, they will leave your blog site. Hence, you will have to accept sponsorship that would be beneficial for you and your audience.
Using Your Blog to Gain Recognition in Your Main Business:
If you have a business that you were managing before diving into blogging, you can earn more by advertising your own business and gaining a desirable number of buyers through your blog.
