Ways to make money through your blog and social media accounts

I started my blog because I love books and I wanted to join in with the community of people writing about books and sharing their love. Since then I have continued to grow in this community and I have now reached a point where I’m lucky enough to earn an income from my blog too. So here are a few ways to be able to make money from your blog and social media accounts.

Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no extra cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

First things first, create a media kit

A media kit is a document that lists your stats and a bit of information about your blog and social channels. This can be as little or largely detailed as you like and ideally will match the branding of your blog. Creating a media kit is a great start to being able to offer something to send to brands. Ideally, you would want your media kit to contain the prices for working with you, this can be something you keep private or share publicly on your blog, either is fine.

Once you’ve created your media kit, you can use it to send to brands you would like to work with. Take some time writing an email template that is friendly and professional, whilst also conveying what your blog is about.

Set up an email address for your blog

This doesn’t have to be a paid-for email address, I initially started off with a yahoo account for my blog. Now that I am self-hosted via Lyrical Host, I’m able to have a custom email address which is even better.

The goal behind this is to:

• Look more professional
• Offer potential collaborators a place to contact you
• Separate blog emails from normal everyday emails

Use affiliate links

If you’re blogging regularly and linking to content your audience could buy, why not use an affiliate link? The best services that help with this that I’ve found are Awin and Amazon’s affiliate programme. You’ll see small increases in revenue through these services, but it will eventually add up so it’s worth giving a go!

Use Ads on your blog

This can be quite hit and miss and is certainly a slow burner to start with. But working with Adsense for example, will display adds on your site and slowly build up revenue that you can withdraw at £60. For an estimate, it’s taken me about a year to earn £24 through Ads on my site. It’s certainly a slow passive income, but it doesn’t hurt to have set up.

Once you hit 25k in sessions that more options available to you for better Ads, such as Mediavine.

Grow your audience to a number of people that brands will pay to reach

Ultimately the goal of brands working with influencers is to reach a wider audience. So by working on your social channels and blog and increasing your readership, you are also increasing your chances of being noticed/appealing to brands. The main steps to do this are creating regular content and marketing yourself. Using SEO effectively on your blog will also increase your ranking on Google and make you more searchable for brands.

Here are some tips to help you grow your Instagram followers:

5 tips to help you beat the Instagram algorithm
Instagram tips and shortcuts to save you time and help you to engage more

Create promotional packages for your social media

I mentioned about adding promotional packages to a media kit, these can really help you reach out to relevant brands to work with. I have four packages on my media kit at various prices, they range from a singular post on Instagram and to my story, to a dedicated blog post and two Instagram photos. I’ve seen a range of success with these plans and love working with brands on them. I’ve seen really positive stats come from them too so I think they do really help the brands I’m working with.

Examples of this work include:

How to write a fantasy book
From writing on Wattpad to being published

Don’t be afraid to ask

I think a big thing people have an issue with when it comes to charging for content, is asking. Especially within the book blogging community, it’s often discussed that publishers don’t have the biggest budgets and more should pay for hero content promotion. My take is there’s no harm in asking. I judge when the situation is right and will approach brands I feel I really want to work with. I also find a lot of brands reach out to me for posts in exchange for a product etc, I will always email them over my packages just to see if they’re interested.

A big thing for me is to maintain my integrity and post only content I am passionate about. I try my very best to only work with brands who I think are promoting something I agree with and enjoy.