5 Underrated Ways to Make Money with Blogging!
As a blogger, there are myriad ways to collaborate with brands and monetize your influence and I'm not just talking about sponsored blog or social media posts. Self-branded products and services are creative and underrated channels for bloggers to share their expertise and make money. Executing a branded campaign is relatively simple. All you have to do is produce the content while adhering to the pre-approved campaign guidelines. The real challenge is landing and negotiating the campaign. Here are the tips to pursuing paid collaborations with brands,
whether they’ve reached out to you or you’re approaching them:
1) Consulting
Consulting is a popular way to earn from your traffic and expertise. Plenty of influencers receive requests for advice and insight regarding blogging as a business or topics in their particular field. Why not charge $20-80+ per hour for your feedback via a real-life meeting, phone or Skype call? Your knowledge is valuable and has the potential to help a client out!
2) Webinars
Tying back to the rationale behind consulting, you can offer the same useful information to a slew of your audience members (as opposed to just one) through planned and paid webinars. Live Streaming websites like uStream and LiveStream can help facilitate this and are complete with live chat components so you can easily interact with your viewers. Be sure to advertise what topics you’ll be discussing; for maximum optimization, split those topics into separate webinars and market them as a series!
3) eBooks
If you’re passionate about the writing side of blog endeavors, write an eBook! It’s a great way to sell a unique product in your particular niche. There are many self-publishing opportunities available, so you can even partner with major retailers like Amazon Kindle directly on your site.
4) Events
It’s one thing to be approached by a company who wants you to host their branded event — it’s another thing to throw the event yourself. Whether you put together a panel or a party, promote like crazy and charge tickets in advance/at the doors.
5) Online Shop
Last but certainly not least, open an online shop connected to your blog! Top bloggers like Fashion Toast’s Rumi Neely, Love Aesthetics’ Ivania Carpio and The Haute Pursuit’s Vanessa Hong have all veered into selling real-life merchandise — and they’re reaping in tons of profit! There are so many routes you can take this, but you can choose to sell products you made/branded yourself, products you have exclusive rights for by brands you’ve partnered with, digital products like art prints or custom coded themes… the list goes on and on!
