Give back to your blog readers (and make money while doing it)

 

1. Give back to your blog readers (and make money while doing it)

More than just way to make money as a blogger, affiliate marketing also presents bloggers with a unique opportunity to further nurture that sense of trust and loyalty with your audience.

When it comes to learning how to grow a blog by providing value to your audience, one of the most helpful things you can do is to direct them to products and services you know they’ll love.

Any time a reader takes your advice and has a positive experience with a product that you’ve promoted on your blog, they will feel rewarded and grateful for having placed their trust in you. It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way in further developing that relationship you have with your reader.

For myself, not only does affiliate marketing make up a large chunk of my blog income, but it also gives me a chance to give back to my community. Through affiliate marketing, I can demonstrate how in-tune I am with my audience’s needs and challenges, and I can reward their loyalty with discounted offers for things I know they’ll find helpful, while also increasing my own passive income at the same time. For example, in my guide about taxes for bloggers, I recommend a couple of extremely useful tax and finance-related tools that I personally use to better manage my blog business plan and printable blog planner resources.

2. Teach online courses for your blog readers

Most articles will talk about how online courses are a great way to generate passive income, but one critical element we often overlook is its ability to deepen the relationship you have with your audience.

From the get-go, teaching an online course immediately sets you up as an authority and expert on whatever it is you’re teaching. Anytime someone signs up to your online course, they actively acknowledge that they respect and trust your expertise, which is always a great foundation to build a relationship upon.

With an online course, you can dive deeper than you normally would into a particular topic and all its intricacies, as evidenced during my interview with Adda Birnir of Skillcrush.

Short of doing one-on-one consulting, an online course is probably the most engaging and personal ways you can grow a blog and communicate your knowledge to your audience. By regularly engaging with your students, answering their questions and sharing advice, you can turn every single one that takes your course into a loyal fan.

3. Regularly ask your blog audience questions

As I mentioned earlier, in order to grow a blog, you must be able to consistently provide value to your audience.

The only way to achieve that, is to be intimately familiar with who they are and what they care about.

In the latest blogging statistics, marketers often stress the importance of knowing your audience’s demographics. While that information is certainly helpful, just knowing where your audience lives, their gender, or their level of education doesn’t provide any real insight into what makes them tick.

The only way to truly gain insight into your audience is to simply go directly to the source and ask them yourself.

By regularly asking your audience questions—whether via a tweet or customer survey—you’ll be able to gain a more complete understanding of what their pain points are, the kinds of solutions they’re looking for and the best way you can address their challenges. This’ll provide valuable insights about new avenues to grow a blog that benefits both you and your readers.

As an added bonus, while regularly questioning your audience is an effective way to keep them engaged, it also shows that you care about what they have to say and that you’re willing to speak with them, not just to them.

4. Make commenting as easy as possible on your blog

If you want your readers to keep coming back, then you need to make it as easy as possible for them to engage with you—and that means making it as easy as possible for readers to comment on your blog posts.

One of the most undervalued pieces of real estate on any website is the blog comment section (where I have an over 6,000 combined comments on my posts). One of the reasons you chose to learn how to make a website in the first place was to connect with people, right?

Much like your email list, you actually own your blog comment section and you don’t need to rely on other platforms in order to build a community around your brand. By creating a thriving comment section for every one of your blog posts, you’ll be able to converse, swap ideas and engage with your audience in a way that just isn’t possible through other mediums.

Another benefit with encouraging blog comments, is that it gives new readers immediate social proof that you have a post that’s worth reading. And it certainly also doesn’t hurt that your blog gets that extra little kick of SEO juice anytime someone mentions your target keywords in their comment.

Consider removing friction points, such as requiring readers to fill in captchas, or forcing them to register before they’re able to comment. While you might be making it harder for spammers to get through, you’re also definitely making it harder for your audience to engage with you.

5. Pack your blog with social proof

Humans are naturally social creatures. When confronted by the unknown, we typically look to others for advice and confirmation before even attempting to make a decision.

In fact, our desire for social proof is so strong that it was listed as one of the six major principles of persuasion in Professor Robert Cialdini’s book Influence.

With that in mind, one of the best ways to cement your status as an authority within your niche, is to include as much social proof as possible on your blog—this’ll also help to grow your blog in meaningful ways.

You can start incorporating social proof into your blog by prominently featuring the logos and positive testimonials of people you’ve previously worked with on your homepage, or showcasing the amount of subscribers your blog or email list has.