3 Ways I Make Money From My Blog Using Competitions
When I first started working online I struggled to understand how I could make money without having an online store. This is why I set up an online store and sold my own products.
Then I found Wealthy Affiliate and this changed the game for me in a huge way. It took just 6 months for me to decide to close my online store and pursue other ways of making money online.
Now while Wealthy Affiliate will teach you how to make money in a number of different ways the truth is that your online money making limitations are only restricted to your own creativity and the work that you are prepared to put in!
One of the ways that I make money now is from running competitions on my website. Now you may think oh but that costs loads of money to do... well no actually it doesn't cost me much to run competitions.
Once you have traffic to your website you will have companies lining up to offer you products to give away to your readers in return for a little exposure!
So companies give me free products to give away to my readers.... and this is what I do with them:
SMS Income
I have run a number of sms competitions and I have made money from it. There are 2 ways I have done this. One is a simple competition where people SMS to enter the competition and the other was a little more complicated but a lot more lucrative, where I run baby competitions and people can vote via SMS. The baby with the most votes wins.
Some moms go absolutely insane with voting. The most I have ever made in one month with SMS income was about R13000 (approximately 1000 USD).
Yes to have a competition SMS line set up it does cost a little bit of money, I think last year I paid about R400 for the facility for one year which is about $33. It is a small expense in comparison to what I made.
VOTE Via Paypal
I kid you not, I actually added this option to my website for the baby competition and people used it! The thing with the SMS voting is I had to wait 3 months for each payment to be made and also every baby competition I had to manually add up votes on an excel spreadsheet - oh what a drag.
With vote via Paypal the money was available immediately and I could add different voting options for example $5 for 20 votes... So this was so much easier than adding up lines in a spreadsheet! The first month I did this I made an easy extra $400!
Plus I made more money since there was no company in the middle taking half the SMS Income.
Subscribers and Readers
When I run competitions on my website that are not via SMS I make money because people must firstly register on my website to leave a comment on the blog post to enter the competition.
This means I am gathering leads with every entry that comes in, I can now send all my offers to these subscribers.... YAY!
It also means engagement and comments on my website which is what we are all striving to achieve.
I hope you have found this helpful and maybe it has sparked off some ideas for you to make money from your blogs!
The point here is to take what you have and get creative with it.
Recent Comments
15
You are SO creative. I wouldn't have thought of a competition. Way to think out of the box! You go, girl!
~Debbi
How fascinating, Lynne! Thanks so much for sharing. Can't wait to get my page views up so I can start trying out these techniques. I've run a couple of competitions on my site - sweet of people to offer me giveaways - but really, none of my sites are ready for this yet.
You will get there. My favourite is the "vote via Paypal".... easiest thing ever. However those baby competitions do take a lot of administration and the moms go crazy so I need to deal with a lot of inquiries while running it!
Thank you for sharing Lynne. This is a good idea, and one I wouldn't have thought of.
Hoping for your continues success!
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Awesome strategies, Lynn!