Making money with mummy blogging: Blogfest 2014

A few weeks ago I went to my first ever blog conference - Blogfest. I wrote about my experience as a newbie at her first blogging conference. There were more things I wanted to say however, mainly about the things I learned. One key session stuck to my mind, and that was the "How to make money from your blog". I found it fascinating, and thought I would share some of my notes and thoughts around the topic for you guys.

The speakers were from Zone, a digital marketing agency, Tara from Sticky Fingers blog and Skimlinks CEO. And it was all about the different ways you can make money, and why as a mummy blogger (and parent bloggers in general) you should know your worth. 

 Know your worth!

• Mothers are difficult to reach through traditional advertisement.
• Mummy bloggers offer reach, credibility, and cut-through (e.g. visibility)
• You spend lots of time on your blog, don't sell it cheaply, value your time and your own platform.
• How much is your time worth? Think about this when you think about what you charge. Some posts can take hours to write.  

How to get commercial opportunities?

• Don't be on the "grumpy blogger" black list (e.g. don't be negative or whiney online)
• Be a "good bet" for a brand and work like a business - this means have a USP, a professional look and have a same look across all social media channels
• Make it easy to contact you, PR yourself and build your following
• When you get commercial opportunities, be creative and show them off (e.g. make sure people know who you have worked with)
• If you do reviews constantly, how are the brands going to stand out?
• Have a PR/media pack, and when emailing your rates to companies, make sure to include what you offer for the money (e.g. blog post, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, how much promotion you will do... etc.) 
• New bloggers: joining collaborations and commercial competitions can bring visibility.
• Using affiliate marketing (if successful) can also get you noticed by brands (as they get to see who refers paying clients to them). Skimlinks is one affiliate marketing site that automatically converts your links to affiliate links, whenever there are campaigns.

 

How to make blogging pay?

• Top factors affecting reputation and remunerations: statistics, quality of the blog, social following, previous successful brand work, reputation, level of work involved, added social media support. 
• Charge different rates for different works - e.g. featuring in something that is very popular on your blog should cost more than a bog standard commercial post. 
• You can get non-monetary benefits too - reviews of events and products can bring traffic which can also be valuable
• If old posts are particularly popular, there is nothing stopping you from revisiting them and adding / redirecting links to new marketing campaigns, to re-freshen the commercial ability of the post. It is also a good idea to add affiliate links (I've done this with one of my old popular posts, and it regularly brings in the pennies now!) 

All in all, pretty interesting stuff. It was fascinating to learn more about blogging from a business/money perspective, always good to increase your knowledge I suppose.

Did this session change the way I think about blogging or my blog? Not really - I am a hobby blogger. I have an interesting career that pays the bills and has the potential to really go somewhere fascinating. Blogging would be a great sideline to have, but that is about as far as my ambition for it goes. Did I monetize my blog? Sort of - I did sign up to Skimlinks, and will investigate Affilinet (another sponsor of the event) when I have a bit more free time. 

 

As a final note, in addition to making money, there were few other interesting thoughts that stuck to my mind. First, children today grow in an environment without the online/offline distinction. Secondly, writers find it difficult to write, and that is how you know you are a real writer. Thirdly, truth will set you free but first it will piss you off. On that note, Suzanna Moore's 10 tips for better writing were great.

If you want to know what it was like attending a blogging conference as a newbie, I wrote a lengthy post about my experience of Blogfest 2014 here.

What did you think of these tips? What was your favourite session and did you learn anything new?

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