Supporting Blogging through other Revenue Streams

If you are thinking about going professional with your blogging, there’s going to be a point where you have to make a conscience decision to give up your current job and put in the extra time and effort professional blogging demands. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s quite likely you won’t match your non-blogging income immediately, especially in the first couple of weeks. So, while your blog is moving up the rankings, and establishing itself as your main source of income (see 5 Ways your Monetise your Blog), what else can you do to keep the landlord from banging on your door demanding rent when it’s overdue? I’ve come up with a couple of suggestions, all of which I use myself to earn a bit of supplementary income, if you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments.

Write and Sell an ebook

Ebooks are an obvious extension on blogging. You are still writing, focusing on an audience and providing value to your visitors. The only difference is, ebooks are nicely bundled and can take a bit of extra effort to publish. Because of that you can charge for them, if appropriate. The best ebooks are those that build upon the content freely available on your site. You can then come up with a nice proposition, if a reader enjoyed an article but felt it ended a little soon, or have followed the suggestions in the article and want to know what the next steps are, they have a natural progression. A word of warning though, don’t purposely sell your readers short with the aim of hocking ebooks. The content has to be special enough to warrant a purchase. You will also want to set up a specific landing page to sell the ebook and this alone can take some work.

Prostitute Yourself

No, not in that way. It’s entirely possible that you can sell your writing services to other blogs and publications, both online and offline. Your blog is a perfect place to advertise yourself, so take advantage of the platform that’s already there. This doesn’t have to be limited to writing, you can go for web design, graphical design or any other sellable skill you have. You may also gain some handy links back to your blog in the process.

Create Some Stock Content

The odds are good that you have a skill in producing something that can be sold on as stock content. These days there are markets for a whole load of stock content, such as photos, web design, Flash and written articles. Pick something you’re good at, research the best place to sell it, and wait for the cheques to roll in.

Domaining

If you’re taking time out to concentrate on blogging, it’s likely that you’re going to spend some (read: alot) of time reading other people’s content. This puts you in a great position of being able to identify trends early and act on them. A really cheap way to do this is to buy up domain names with the hope of either parking them, or selling them on for profit. Domains are the equivalent of stocks in my eyes, you buy it with the hope it will go up in value and you can sell it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The beauty of domain names is, while you own them you can park them and earn money, and you are never going to lose more than the price you paid for the domain, which will rarely be above $10. On average, I make a few dollars a day from parked domains and I sell, on average, one domain a month at around $100. If you want a cheap and reliable place to buy domains, check out 123 Reg.

Reselling

There are a number of ways you can get into reselling. You could use drop shippers to supply and deliver products that you sell (low risk, low profit), you could act as a middle man to sell goods and services (medium risk, medium profit) or you could invest in some goods and sell them yourself (high risk, high profit). You will have to decide which approach suits your situation best, and be prepared to move when opportunities present themselves. I recently made $70 by buying something in bulk on ebay, and then reselling them individually, again on ebay. As long as you can buy for significantly less than the sell pric, you should be ok.

I hope this post gave you some ideas. In the first few months it’s quite likely every source of income, no matter how small, will make a difference. If you are looking to boost the money you make from advertisments, check out 5 Ways I TRIPLED my Adsense Income and Knowing your Audience, and what yo Expect from them.

Not By the Hour covers some of the points above in a little more detail.