Are You Making Money Writing Blogs?
June 9, 2015
Writers need to have a blog in this age of the Internet.
It’s the law of the jungle that the more you have the easier it becomes- to make money to build a successful business, to have fun in life. This is true when it comes to selling your self-published book, or when it comes to writing in general on the web. The next question most people ask is are you making money writing blogs?
That’s generally not a hard answer: no, not really.
I’m sure everyone wants to say they have made some type of income through their blogs, but when it really comes down to it, the older posts you have aren’t helping. You can’t be sure what is quite wrong with them, and you aren’t too keen on spending hours fixing them up either.
Here are some fixes you can do to help your make money writing goals:
1) Use Google Analytics.
This may seem simple, but it’s the one thing writers, myself included have glossed over. You might go to Google AdSense and find you’ve earned a few cents here and there, but you might not know which posts, or pages are the consistent ‘big winners.’ This way you don’t copy your best content but you learn what is working and what isn’t. When moving the blog from Blogger to WordPress, this became apparent to me that the word count of the blog post were lacking.
When you know which posts help you, go back and do the next thing- don’t look back too much but look forward. It’s a long term win for a writer, but you have a list of which blog posts earn you income, and you will, similar to getting serious about publishing a book, you can update the posts and revamp them so that they will be found by readers, and search engines alike.
2) Get these posts found.
You know which ones are helping you, now carefully go on to some of the social networking sites and promote these posts, you have to get serious about being a writer. Don’t simply add them and hope for the best work at getting yourself seen as a writer. Your writing: books, blogs, twitter need to be cared for to be seen by the people you need them to be seen by.
Use Twitter and find a way to get an Author Facebook page for yourself or your blog. I personally don’t use my personal Facebook page much, but I’m active on my Author Facebook page. Of course, it might not work out the way you hoped, and there is a push to “pay to be seen.” Falling into that trap can seriously harm any writer and their business
The key to getting a good blog post found is by using some keywords within your post. And this means fixing up titles:
I could write “How I Make Money”
OR
I could write “Earning More Income with Your Blog”
Now, which one do you think will be found and clicked on by more people? Of the two, the second title is the one which will make people follow the link and read it. It look as if it’s for them and not simply my own personal experience. How I make money is good, but it’s not specific to your blog.
3) Fix up the post.
More often than not, my older posts need to get some good grammar and word count treatment, really, some editing and learning by me. This is the same with other writers. I’m not suggesting it’s not easy, and while most people only have one shot at a first impression, most older blog posts have some good things to start with, it’s a matter of adding and cleaning them up.
It’s time to look at how long your post actually is, sometimes what I feel is a long post, isn’t. Some bloggers will tell you that a post which is around 500 words will do well, whereas others will say something which has 100 words but the blogger posts five times a day will do better.
4) Keep blogging.
Don’t sit back and assume a blog will live without updating, it’s important to keep writing, use your new knowledge as a guide. Once you’ve done a post, look it over and take what you have learned and apply it to the new ones.
Although this means more background work, this will lead to a stronger, better blog in the long run. The biggest factor to success in blogging and writing is finding which posts worked the best. You’ll find your older post will still be strong but they will have some part of it which can be expanded, once this is done, you can take what you have learned and update it.
