X# of Ways to Use your Blog

[Saavik]

Hi all!
Being a newbie to this forum, I have searched high and low for an appropriate blogging thread for my question, but - even though I found some useful advice - there was none. One of the previous threads even died after crypto mining was mentioned, which strongly suggests a crypto analogon of Godwin's Law. But I digress.

So, for those of you who have an established blog - older than, let's say, 6 month, and with more than 30 real and valuable articles - what are the ways that you use this blog to directly and indirectly increase your revenue and profits?

I know there is a lot of nonsense about this out there, like legions of blogs about "monetizing your blog" that are abandonded after 3 posts (as aptly described in UNSCRIPTED ). So, preferably, let's talk about blogs that are about any real world issues, not about "passive income" et al.

I'll start with a couple of entries:
- Using the blog as reference and source of work samples for freelance clients.
- Being found by potential clients through the blog, leading to service inquiries.
- Accepting sponsored posts for a fee.
- Advertising.
- Offering bonus content for paid subscriptions (also see TFF, which admittedly isn't a blog).

So far, I've done the first three of them on my blog (a non-English blog in a rather expensive niche with a B2B and B2C audience, but not a sufficient number of visitors yet to consider advertising, though an okay growth rate). My backstory is here.

All I know about advertising on blogs I learned from "Chaos Monkeys" by Antonio Garcia, an excellent description of his experiences with his ad tech startup and on the Facebook Ads team. It was not written from a website owner's PoV though, so I appreciate your experiences there too. (I've also been reading about the issue on TFF.)

Please:
- Add how you've been using your blog for fun and profit.
- Elaborate on your own experiences with any of the existing points.

Thanks!

 

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[Lex DeVille]

The main ways I see blogs used lately is:

- Informative evergreen posts for SEO
- Informative evergreen posts leading to email opt-in for list growth
- Review posts leading to affiliate links for Amazon products
- Blogs that are purposely extremist points of view so they get shared

More and more I find blogs combined with video channels on YouTube. The owner makes a video and then writes enough content related to the video to post on the blog (along with the video) to rank for SEO and send people to affiliate links.

 

[Raoul Duke]

GOLD! - Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

@Yoda dropped nuggets throughout.

 

[Saavik]

The main ways I see blogs used lately is:

- Informative evergreen posts for SEO
- Informative evergreen posts leading to email opt-in for list growth
- Review posts leading to affiliate links for Amazon products
- Blogs that are purposely extremist points of view so they get shared

More and more I find blogs combined with video channels on YouTube. The owner makes a video and then writes enough content related to the video to post on the blog (along with the video) to rank for SEO and send people to affiliate links.

Thanks!
So, in order to connect the first two and the last one to a concrete money-making mechanism: The blog in this context is a way of marketing
- a product of one's own or
- someone else's product.
Right?
Although the last one may also lend itself to generating inquiries for paid speaking gigs etc. Which does, however, suffer from the time-for-money problem.

Have any of you bloggers here:
- Started with a blog first and then
- developed a real-world product (not an info product or book) to leverage their existing blog?

 

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[Saavik]

GOLD! - Blogging for Profit (With Legendary GOLD Follow Up Posts)

@Yoda dropped nuggets throughout.

Thanks! Embarrassingly, I have started reading that thread previously, but closed the tab when it seemed to degenerate into a discussion of the "who would read Stephen King's blog today" question... So I failed to notice that there's lots of interesting content after that. Thanks for bringing me back to it, and for pointing out @Yoda's contributions.

Edit: Done reading it - it's genius!