A blog is a powerful tool simply because its contents are quickly indexed by the major search engines. There are 2 main type of bloggers, let’s have a look at how these blogs are monetized!
1) Lifestyle Blogging
Are you hip, fun, outgoing, entertaining, cool? Then a lifestyle blog may just be for you! The idea of a Lifestyle blog is to come across as friendly, FUNNY and upbeat.
Lifestyle blogging gives you a cool “celebrity” status, especially if your content is interesting, has nice photos, quirky, humorous.
If your viewership is high enough, advertising space or product/venue reviews can be used to monetize your blog. Perhaps the best way is to blog a post where you try a certain product, or visit a nightclub as part of your lifestyle then write your experience about it (and be paid to do so by the company). Just as they advertise products in movies, an Aston Martin or BMW in James Bond, if you’re a lifestyle blogger you can do the same, where you creatively showcase the product by weaving it in as part of what you did today.
Couple of examples of Lifestyle blogs you can check out are:
- Xia Xue (xiaxue.blogspot.com)
- Angela Leow Gray (angela.blursotong.com)
So if you’re young, write well and good with the digital camera, you might like to create a lifestyle blog. An Alfresco Dining Restaurant or NightLife Club may just approach you to visit their venue and pay you $5K to $10K just to have fun at their event and blog about it.
2) Professional Niche Blogging
A professional blog gives specific tips and ideas to a particular niche that solve a certain problem. The dynamics of a professional blog is different from a lifestyle blog and so is the monetisation.
A professional blogger writes from the reader’s point of view and perspective. In other words, he does not write about himself. He writes about how he can offer value and benefit to another person, and often to solve a certain problem.
For example, say you’re a Golf Coach, then you would want to share ideas about the golf swing, create videos on YouTube on “how to stop slices”, “how to hit the driver” well. That is the “marketing” aspect. There is always an end objective in mind, where you will offer a golf coaching program or video or CD, a product that monetizes your marketing.
Preferably there is some sort of online payment where they can pay for your product and a sale.
3) Professional Blogger Or LifeStyle Blogger?
Its much easier to make money blogging professionally because you don’t need a very large audience or ton of traffic to earn a huge income from this blog. People that visit these blogs are ready to spend money to gain from a product or program. I’ve seen certain niche markets where customers pay up to $50,000 for a service that solves a certain need or problem.
Meaning that when someone has something in their life that needs fixing, they will pay a lot of money to do so, and that is why a professional blogger doesn’t need a big, general audience when all they need is a small, targeted audience with a big problem.
A lifestyle blogger on the other hand entertains a wide audience and folks that visit these blogs usually aren’t in the mindset to buy something. They’re mostly there to be entertained!
Think of it as a huge audience going for a movie compared to a small niche audience with arthritis. The specialist solving the arthritis ailment for a small group of patients can expect to do very well (income wise) even though his customer base is much smaller.
As a lifestyle blogger, most of the income will come from sponsors and advertisers pertaining to your particular lifestyle. The more traffic and eyeballs you can get to your site, the more money you stand to make. The blog needs to be creative, updated, to keep people coming back. And that’s more of a labour of passion. Most lifestyle blogs start of more as a hobby rather then a 6 figure marketing/advertising/product endorsement platform.
I would have to say from a monetization angle that its easier to blog professionally because you can quickly & easily connect with a unique audience and be well rewarded (financially) for helping solve their problems.
But that’s just me, feel free to experiment with blogging and decide which works best for you!