We always talk of making money in Kenya blogging. The question that I then hear from a lot of newbie bloggers is how exactly do you monetize your blog?
Will Blogger and WordPress start giving you cash the moment you open a free blogging account with them?
What is the trick to making money from blogging?
These questions might appear dead simple to an accomplished blogger but they are a cause of many sleepless nights to a lot of newbies. Blog monetization is not easy and you will need more than a free blogging platform and a knack for writing to finally start seeing any considerable income from your blog.
There are several ways in which you can make money from your blog in Kenya. Here are some of the ways that I personally use.
Ways That You Can Use to Make Money With a Blog in Kenya
Ad sense Advertising
Most of my niche websites are monetized from Google ad sense. And contrary to what some Kenyans say, you can actually make money from ad sense in Kenya if you have a high-traffic niche website. I have cashed more than $5,000 from the time my first niche site was accepted by Google adsense one year ago.
Affiliate Marketing
Simply put, affiliate marketing is the modern day .com salesmanship. You sign up with an affiliate program, If there is one area where you can make thousands of shillings almost overnight, it has to be with affiliate marketing programs. Join Commission Junction or Linkshare and start promoting merchant products.
You will however need a US-based bank account to withdraw from the two mentioned affiliate programs. This can be achieved by signing up for a Payoneer Card, which comes with a US Payment Service. Click here to sign for a Payoneer MasterCard and get $25.00 deposited into your account for free now.
Sponsored Reviews and Mentions
You can make money from your blog in Kenya by running sponsored reviews on your blog.
When you run an authoritative and high traffic blog, you can offer businesspeople a chance to have their post/article appear in your blog in exchange for money. You can easily find businesses that do sponsored reviews by visiting http://www.sponsoredreviews.com.
Selling a Product or Service through Your blog
This is the surest way to earn money from your blog in Kenya. In fact, a lot of people believe that in order to have a sustainable income from your blog, you need to sell a product or service on your blog.
I for instance sell an e-course on how to make money online in Kenya. I also promote my freelance writing services on this blog, and that keeps me afloat. Very soon, I will be launching an ebook on this space. You can also have a look at some of the other services you can create and sell in Kenya for a profit info products.
I will point out something before I show you how you can make money using the above methods. A lot of Kenyan blogs on this topic make it look like it is dead simple to start a bog and start counting the dollars. The sad truth is that it can take you up to a year before you taste your first online dollar generated by your blog. It is not entirely impossible to make money blogging, but it requires a lot skills and patient.
Before you even think of monetizing your blog, here are a few considerations to make
Blogging is Not a Hobby, It is a Business
I am not saying that you cannot make blogging your hobby, but show me how many of your hobbies are making you money. The reason why a lot of Kenyans are not making money from their blogs is because they do it as ‘a side thing’. This is different from what you will find bloggers in other countries do. They start a blog primarily as a source of income. Here are some of the things they do that a lot of Kenyan bloggers are not willing to do.
- They target profitable keywords and have an audience in mind before they put their first words down.
- They spend time working on search engine optimization (SEO) for their blogs.
- They build quality links to their blogs.
- They hire professional copywriters to come up with content for their blogs
- The bottom line is- they treat blogging like a business
It is only when you get into this mindset that you will start to make money blogging.
Start Blogging Professionally
I hear a lot of advice that lean towards starting a free blog in blogger.com or wordpress.com to first test the waters. My mind cringes every time I hear this. Starting cheap is not the way to go if you want to make money blogging. These is the reasons why:
- It is much harder to monetize a free blog than a self-hosted one.
- A lot of advertising networks balk from free blogs.
- You will hardly hear a product buying reviews from a free blog.
- Selling your products on a free blog is even harder
- WordPress.com does not allow you to carry any ads on your free blog
- Migrating your blog from a free service to a paid one is a headache
If you really want to make make money blogging, you have to treat it like any other business. My advice is that you sign up with a web hosting company like ipage. You will get a free domain name for one year and their charges for one year hosting are less than $20. (1500/=).
Start Blogging With a Plan
If you have decided that you want to make money blogging, start out with a plan. At Blogscheme, we basically start by researching keywords for our niche websites.
These are websites that are restrained to a particular profitable niche and keyword. Our latest niche website for example is an informational resource website about surfing boards. (remember we are in Kenya) but this does not stop us from serving information to guys in Iceland. This is why I also mentioned that it is absolutely possible to make money from ad sense in Kenya.
We did our keyword research, bumped across this one and vroom! We are headed towards the top page of Google. Now, that is what I call conscious blogging. This is how we make money blogging in Kenya.
Search Engine Optimization
There is something that a lot of bloggers don’t tell you.
One of these facts is that even the best designed blog won’t make money without conscious on-page and off-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Onpage optimization is easier to achieve. By installing the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast and following the provided guidelines, you can start to take effective control of your onpage SEO.
Unfortunately, off-page SEO is not as easy. It involves quality link building through social media sharing, blog commenting and guest posting. You can hire me to take care of your offpage SEO at any time.
Writing high quality articles will also attract other bloggers to link to you naturally. The role of SEO in the whole matrix is to make your content discover-able by your target audience. Keyword help point Google bots to what your content is about. It uses these signals to fetch your pages to users who are typing those queries in the search box.
Would you like to make money blogging too? Join my Blogging for Money e-course.
How Much Do Bloggers Earn in Kenya?
Professional bloggers in Kenya make at least 50,000 KES per month.
Patrick Mahinge is a prolific digital marketer and "serial webpreneur". He runs multiple profitable niche websites and blogs monetized through affiliate marketing and advertising. Patrick generously shares his expertise in affiliate marketing, blogging, and online business through his Facebook group of over 5,000 aspiring entrepreneurs.
Adsense isn’t as it used to be and won’t give a large income at all.
Affiliate marketing and created products/services is the way to go on today’s Internet.
Thanks for sharing,
– Sam
Nice lesson thank you.how can i make a blog website.hw can i join to make money too