Month: April 2019

Bloggers are always seeking for effective ways to make money blogging. Different tactics suit different bloggers and niches. By far two of the most commonly discussed methods of making money blogging are Advertising and Affiliate Marketing.

Advertising

Display advertising involves placing third-party advertisements on a site. It usually includes options such as banners and videos. Visitors see these ads, maybe click on them and go to a website where they can be converted into customers. If you have a ton of traffic on your blog, ads can bring you a worthwhile income.

However, advertising conceals significant drawbacks for your blog. Visitors recognize ads and they know up front that you are trying to sell them something, so they probably won’t pay any attention to them. Also, when they stumble upon an ad, they aren’t actively looking for a product or service, so they may not be ready to buy.

When you place ads on your site, you don’t control the look or the kind of each ad or where the click might take you. In fact, you might appear next to products or services you wouldn’t recommend or even endorse. Due to various ad-targeting methods, products advertised from third parties on your site, may be from a direct competitor, breaking your business.

Affiliate Marketing

Another popular form of monetization that is at the top of bloggers’ preferences is Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing has a much higher earning potential and offers more ways to promote products that you love than advertising does. As a blogger you can write reviews promoting your affiliate products, organize promotion challenges with the products you have used in your projects and share them on social media, like Youtube and Instagram.

In affiliate marketing, you choose a product related to your blog niche, create product awareness, and then, when somebody buys a product using your affiliate link, you receive a commission from the seller. It should be mentioned here, that selling is not directly from you, but rather, from merchants you are affiliated with (thus “affiliate marketing”). In that respect, it is a more lucrative and beneficial way for community-based websites, like blogs, that want to be monetized. The cornerstone here is trust.

Affiliate marketing is most effective when the bloggers have gained their audiences trust and stick on their goal to provide value to them, a goal that ads undermine. A targeted audience that relies on your trustworthy recommendations converts more to affiliate product sales.

Regarding traffic

Many bloggers claim it’s easier to make money with affiliate marketing when you have less traffic than you would need for ads. Optimizing your conversion rates with visual affiliate lists, calls-to-action and spreading your affiliate links on all your socials maximizes your impact which yields better clicks, sales and money for you.

With Affiliate Marketing, you are also in complete control of what links are placed on your site. You choose to promote the products and brands that are the perfect fit for your audience, without losing the value you provide to them. Thus, it can be much more effective, even if you have a smaller audience.

If you have an online presence for a while, you must have noticed the rise of User-Generated Content on blogs and social media. It is certainly not a new marketing strategy, but if you consider that both google and popular social media websites have changed the way they measure organic reach, then it isn’t surprising that User-Generated Content is enjoying a renaissance.

What is User-Generated Content?

User Generated Content (UGC) is essentially any content created by unpaid followers. It is a more organic, authentic way to promote your blog and can include pictures, videos, blog posts or anything that can be created, uploaded online and thus easily shared.

People now share more than ever. Just think about Facebook. They love to share what they’re doing and this is happening for a number of reasons- probably to look to their friends for validation and recognition, feel part of a community, let others know about their experiences and of course, be in with a chance to win something.

User Generated Content has a personal feel and that makes it powerful. By harnessing this power, bloggers not only are able to connect with their audience in a more genuine and personalized way, but also they have a chance to boost engagement, strengthen audience trust and loyalty and ultimately drive affiliate sales.

There are plenty of things one can do with User Generated Content. One of the quickest and more effective ways to take advantage of UGC is by asking people to submit content as part of a challenge or a giveaway.

How to run easily a challenge or a giveaway

Running a challenge or a giveaway doesn’t have to be difficult. Simply give them a chance to participate in something and reward them for their participation.

Make it as easy as possible. When you need to tweet, you just go on Twitter. When you need to write a status update, you go on Facebook. To run a challenge, go to InLinkz.

InLinkz is a blog application that brings people together who don’t know each other, providing the glue to convert more people to prospect followers and buyers.

By running an InLinkz blog challenge, you build opportunities for your audience to share their experiences on a provided project which naturally multiplies:

• the time they stay on your blog (Dwell Time)
• the shareability of your blog posts
• Your online outreach
• your affiliate sales!

With InLinkz, any blogger can organize and run a challenge or giveaway the easy way.

Let’s say you have just completed a project, working with the products you want to promote. Taking advantage of your community’s creativity, you call them to use the same supplies on their own projects and then give them the opportunity to showcase how they have used these products. This only offers two appealing benefits for you; increasing of your sales, since they have used your affiliate links to get the products they need for their projects and having them promote the affiliate products for you.

But there is more! Increase your outreach by getting people to share their entries through the sharing functionality InLinkz offers. Anyone that has been involved in a project and feel part of it, will be more than willing to share their participation to your challenge with their friends on socials. After all, they have put time, money and effort on their projects, so they will be excited to spread the word. This not only will strengthen their social proof to their peers but also increases your own brand awareness and creates an opportunity for you to turn their friends into your new followers and, in turn, buyers!

Are you thinking of harnessing the power of a blog challenge?

If you want to seize the opportunity to leverage User-Generated Content to your blog and organize a blog challenges or a giveaway with InLinkz, we will offer one of your entrants a three month subscription to inlinkz.

Moreover the top five linkups in numbers of entrants will get a one-time $25 paypal voucher for a lucky entrant.