Monetize

How to Start a Gardening Blog and Monetize It

Are you inspired to blog about gardening? The easiest way to share your passion for gardening is to start a blog. In addition to sharing information with the world on your blog, you also have to take advantage and make money in the process.

If you find the idea of starting a blog confusing, you can follow a  helpful guide to make an informative site that you’ll be proud to own. Learning how to write a blog and make money is not as difficult as you think. This article explores how to start a gardening blog using the easiest steps.

Here are some basics to get your blog up and running.

1. Set Up Domain and Hosting for a Gardening Blog

Create a keyword-rich domain name that reflects what you’ll be writing about on your blog. Expect to pay at least $15 per year from popular domain hosts. Dedicated hosting providers are flexible, they offer enhanced security and performance, and you also have the assurance that your personal information is protected.

Next, use a WordPress hosting platform that offers reasonable prices. The process is simple for you to connect your domain to a reliable WordPress host. There are many free WordPress themes and plugins for you to install.

Be sure to select a WordPress theme and design layout that represents your blog’s niche. 

2. Share Your Gardening Expertise

There is so much information that you can write for your readers. You can inform them about house plants for sale, how to set up a garden and other essential details.

Write search engine optimized content for every blog post you publish. SEO is an effective technique that helps your content to be found in all major and popular search engines. You can even install and activate SEO plugins on your WordPress blog.

These plugins are designed to help you save time and to gain more readers. Sharing your content across popular social media platforms also gives you the advantage to grow your traffic.

3. Earn Money

Once your blog has a constant flow of monthly traffic,  you can have it monetized with affiliate products. Affiliate marketing involves selling products and services for merchants that commissions for each sale. 

Almost all online merchants have affiliate programs that you can join for free. With just a few steps, you can install gardening related affiliate links and banners on your blog to earn money. 

A simple step for you to earn affiliate sales is to write quality SEO content that includes your affiliate links. This is a lucrative technique you can use to monetize your blog from your target audience. 

Create a Unique Blog That Attracts Readers

One important rule to make a successful gardening blog is to create helpful information for people.

To get long term success, be consistent writing valuable content people want to read. Readers love solid, engaging content and it makes them inspired to keep returning to your blog to get more updated information.

If you’re interested in learning about content strategy, keep browsing our site.

How to Monetize a Sports Blog

So you want to turn that love of baseball or football or hockey into a sports blog? And you want to monetize that sports blog to break the stereotype of bloggers living in their parents’ basements?

Someone did a calculation of that, by the way. In case you need encouragement.

Before you jump off the deep end of how to make money on your obsessive love of the New York Jets, read this to find out how to do it the smart way.

First Steps to Monetize a Sports Blog

Step one: don’t just start a sports blog.

There’s an art to writing a blog, and an art to monetizing a sports blog. Jumping in blind won’t help you on the path to having your passion pay your electric bill.

Let’s start from the ground up. Before you ever type one word about baseball, you need to have the right framework.

It starts from the moment of building your website. Because if you want to outcompete the thousands of sports blogs in existence, you’re going to have to play smarter.

Build Your Website

If you want to build a house, you’ve got to build the foundation.

Or, in this case, register the domain name.

Your domain name should only be relevant to your sport of choice – don’t name your site hoopdreams.com if you’re interested in football.

It should also be something catchy – easy to remember, rolls off the tongue. A reader should be able to hear your blog name and immediately recognize it.

You can search for a domain using Google’s domain service, or go straight to the site you plan on using to host.

Add Killer Content

Step two to monetize a sports blog: write some killer content.

Let’s have some real talk about blogs. No successful sports blog ever became a successful sports blog without high-quality blog posts to back it up.

So, how do you write blog posts that don’t skunk up the place worse than the Detroit Lions? Or, better yet, how do you write blog posts that are actually, you know, good?

Start by checking out this list of 7 tips. You can also post related game updates, news stories, and even sports videos (with the right permissions).

As a rule of thumb, you want to only post information that your readers would find useful. You could, for example, post information on what to do for sports injuries or link to relevant sites for injuries, like Axis Health.

Oh, and while you’re at it? SEO. SEO like a pro.

Next Steps: Ideas to Monetize a Sports Blog

Now that you’re done batting for the little leagues, let’s move on to how you actually monetize a sports blog.

A lot of this comes in handy after you’ve taken the time and effort to build a strong community around your blog. If you provide genuinely useful and interesting information to your readers in a readable format, they’ll reward you for those efforts.

Here are four ideas to get you started.

Targeting

This one only works to monetize a sports blog if you’re also selling something.

Translation: if all you’re doing is reporting the events of last night’s LA Lakers game, you’re going to have a pretty hard time using targeting to sell yourself.

How do you find out if targeting might work for you, you ask? Simple: ask yourself if your visitors have a need which you could meet through a product or service you sell.

And no, a subscription to last night’s sports scores when someone could Google it for free does not count.

Affiliate Marketing

Wait, what in the name of the Stanley Cup is affiliate marketing?

Here’s how it works.

You use a product. You like a product. You become an affiliate of the company or site that sells it, and you have an affiliate link on your website. You get a cut of sales every time one of your visitors uses your link to buy that product.

So, you’re essentially getting paid to recommend a product. It’s a great way to earn recurring income without even trying.

A word of advice about affiliate marketing: no one likes spam. Don’t be that person who spams their site with affiliate links. Take the time to use products, review them and only become an affiliate marketer of products you’re genuinely hyped about.

Sell Your Own Products

Ah, the golden rule of making money blogging. Sell your own stuff.

Now, if you’re knitting coasters with team logos on that, no one’s that interested in finding a website just to buy those. Leave that to Etsy.

If you want to take the time to sell your own products, make sure they’re products that are actually worth people spending what you charge. Otherwise, all you’re really doing is wasting money in the production process.

And a side note on the production process: make sure that you have the production system and overhead costs already ready before you dive in.

Allow Donations

Alright, this one isn’t so much a reliable income source as a friendly suggestion, but it’s still worth keeping in your back pocket.

If you’ve built a strong online community of loyal, dedicated readers of your posts, many of those readers would probably be happy to support you in return for putting out the content they love so much.

Just don’t be obnoxious about asking.

Welcome to the Big Leagues

So you’re ready to go big or go home, are you? Good for you.

We can help with that.

ArticleCity covers a range of topics to help your fledgling blog shine (and a few topics that speak to the true sports fan in all of us).

For ideas on how to write killer content, check out the content strategy section of our blog for posts like 5 tips for attention-grabbing online content writing.

For posts that speak to the sports fan in all of us, check out our recreation and sports posts like the guide to the latest fantasy baseball draft.