How To Make an Extra $100-500 Per Month Accepting Sponsored Blog Posts?

Today’s post is an exciting one and in my opinion one of the easiest ways to make extra income from your blogging efforts.

The method and strategy we will be discussing is accepting sponsored blog posts.

Before reading further however, if you’re a blogger, make sure that money/income is NOT your sole motivation for running your website.

This is a sure fire way to not succeed in the blogging world.

Focus on providing value first and the income will follow.

With that being said, let’s go over exactly what sponsored blog posts are, how to get them from other webmasters and how to turn this into a monthly recurring income stream.

(Note/Disclaimer: $100-500 per month is what I personally make using this strategy currently, but there’s potential to make a lot more or less than that depending on various factors. There are different variables at play here as you’ll see in the steps below but this could be a great strategy for many bloggers looking to increase their income).

What Is A Sponsored Blog Post?

A sponsored blog post is a guest article submitted to your website, written by another blogger or company, that you would publish to your blog for a fee.

The great thing about sponsored blog content is that it’s a win-win for both parties involved.

Let’s discuss briefly below:

How Does This Benefit The Guest Contributor?

• They get exposure to their content, brand, product, name and/or business.
• They are allowed a link to their website (also known as a backlink which is good for SEO) to be placed in their sponsored article. This overtime can help with their search engine rankings in Google.
• They can receive good referral traffic from people clicking on their link within the article (also, the more sponsored posts a person gets published on different websites, the more referral traffic they will naturally generate overtime).
• If they post their content on an authoritative website, there’s potential that the article could get plenty of social shares and even rank highly in Google for a given keyword, which means traffic on autopilot!
• They’ll make great connections and collaborate with other bloggers/webmasters in their niche.

How Does This Benefit The Website Owner/Publisher?

• They receive fresh and unique content to publish to their website which Google loves.
• The website owner has the ability to charge $50, $100, $250 or even $500 per sponsored post which can add up to a nice side income. Many companies have no problem paying good money for sponsored blog posts for the benefits described above.
• Saves website owner time of not having to write the article for themselves. They can also pre-schedule these out far in advance which frees up time and allows the website owner to focus on other areas of their business.

Something I’d like to note is that sponsored blog content should be mixed in with the content you personally produce as well on a monthly basis. You do not want all of the content published on your website to be from external writers.

Your readers most likely found/followed you because of the relationship you’ve built with them through your own content, so make sure you continue to write articles yourself. Do not just rely on sponsored content or your momentum/following might suffer.

Now let’s discuss exactly how to get sponsored posts for your blog!

How to Get Sponsored Posts for your Blog?

Getting people interested in publishing a sponsored post on your blog becomes fairly easy after a certain point, but you do have to go through the steps laid out below first.

The more established your blog is, the more money you will potentially be able to charge external writers.

The process below will provide you with certain checkpoints to focus on so you can begin getting sponsored post submissions and create a new stream of income for your blog.

1.) Write Compelling, Engaging & High-Quality Content

First things first, you must have a healthy dose of high-quality, compelling and engaging content on your website. I wouldn’t even think about accepting a sponsored post until you have at least 50 personal articles published to your website. If someone is interested in publishing content on your blog, they will need to see that you produce really good content to begin with and on a consistent basis.

If they were to come to a website that didn’t look updated and only had a few articles published, there would be no benefit for them to even bother writing a sponsored post. The first area you need to focus on is fleshing out your website with loads of high-quality and top-notch content.

2.) Build Up Your Domain Authority (DA) & Website Traffic

Simply put, the higher your domain authority the more you can charge for sponsored blog posts. The same goes for website traffic. Domain authority is a metric created by MOZ that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s on a scale of 1-100 (1 being a low domain authority, like a brand new website and 100 being a super reputable website like a Forbes.com). Read more about domain authority here.

In order to build up your own domain authority, you will need to be building backlinks for your blog. You can do this via guest posting or sponsored blog content. I recorded a step-by-step and in-depth video on exactly how to build backlinks through guest posting here. This should be very helpful if this process is new to you.

I recommend building up your domain authority to at least a 15 or higher before you start accepting sponsored posts. In order to see your domain authority score, you can use a free tool like this one here: https://smallseotools.com/domain-authority-checker/ and just plugin your website. Below is a screenshot of where to find your domain authority using this tool:

This is not an overnight process and will indeed take a little time to build up your website’s authority but be consistent for a couple of months and build as many quality backlinks as you can. Focus on building backlinks on websites that have a higher domain authority than yours and you’ll begin to notice your own domain authority increase as well.

3.) Create a “Write for Us”, “Contribute” or “Advertising” Page

Once you’ve completed the two steps above, you are now ready to create a designated page on your blog to let people know that you accept sponsored content. I recommend using “Write for Us”, “Contribute”, “Sponsored Posts” or “Advertise” as the title of the page. A lot of times people searching for sponsored or guest post opportunities use these keywords in Google to find various opportunities. I know myself and others have seen a lot of success with “Write for Us”.

You can make this page super simple and it’s basically a place for you to explain to potential writers what type of content you accept, your guidelines etc. For example, you can take a look at my page here to get some ideas: https://evanhoeflichmarketing.com/write-for-us

A few sections I would incorporate into your “Write for Us” or “Contribute” page are:

• General guidelines
  • 100% unique and high-quality content only
  • The wordcount you are looking for
  • If an author bio is required or preferred
• Topics You Accept
  • List out a bunch of topics you’ll accept that make sense within your niche and area of expertise
• Contact Information or Contact Form
  • Provide people with direction on how they can get in touch with you to submit a sponsored blog post

4.) Share Your Page & Field Responses

A lot of times, the inquires you will receive will come from people finding your website in organic search once your DA is high enough and you create your “Write for Us” page. You will want to come up with a price range that you will charge for publishing content (make sure to only accept high-quality and well-written articles). Feel free to experiment with your pricing as well. You will get better at negotiating and gauging what people are willing to pay with the more experience you have under your belt.

Also, be sure to share your page with other bloggers and let them know that you have sponsored content opportunities. People are always looking to get their content published on other relevant websites for the additional exposure and SEO benefits.

Wrapping Up & Final Notes

When you get to the point where you are accepting sponsored blog posts, you will need to run every article you receive through a plagiarism checker such as Copyscape. You do NOT want to publish any duplicate content or in other words, content that’s been previously published elsewhere. This is an SEO best practice to make sure that the content you publish is 100% unique to your website. Copyscape is super affordable and only a couple of cents per article search.

Also, as a reminder, the more you build up your own domain authority and website traffic, the higher you can charge for sponsored posts moving forward. Keep building backlinks to your website and also constantly work on increasing the amount of traffic your blog receives on a monthly basis. This will allow you to charge top dollar for sponsored blog content!

Are you currently accepting sponsored posts on your blog?

Interested in one-on-one blog coaching? Get in touch with me here to see if you’d be a good fit for my program!