Event Blogging: What It Is and How to Make Money
You might have noticed that event blogging is a very popular activity amongst bloggers; that’s because of its ability to generate income without having to invest large amounts of time—that precious commodity—money, effort, and maintenance.
It never hurts to be familiar with all of the different ways there are to make extra money online, so that’s why today I’m taking up the subject of Event Blogging, and we’re going to explore what it is, how you can make money out of it, and what’s the best way to get started. Let’s dig in!
A Look into Event Blogging
Event blogging, also known as event niche blogging, is simply a blog that’s based on a specific event, holiday, festival, or any sort of national, cultural, international, religious, seasonal or popular event. These blogs target and capitalize on a specific event or activity because a high amount of traffic is generated. The earnings you make will undoubtedly depend on the popularity of the event you choose and, of course, on the quality of your content.
The objective is to offer readers detailed information about the event and answer important questions with the use of different resources like information, images, quotes, videos, and anything that the readers can engage with.
Some of these questions create opportunities for bloggers to serve as spokespeople for hundreds and thousands of products that are or can be related to each event. Through advertising and selling alone you can make a large amount of money.
One of the main characteristics of event blogs is that they don’t represent a long-term commitment. If you’ve ever run a blog, then you already know it’s a long-term engagement because you have to be constantly producing new content to keep your readers engaged. When it comes to event blogging, you only have to produce content for the duration of said event.
For example, if you choose a special day such as Valentine’s Day your blog will be active for a day or a week, but if the event takes longer, like a soccer tournament, your blog will be active for far longer, from 30 to 40 days.
One thing to keep in mind about event blogging is that it’s a highly competitive business. Many others have caught up on the potential of such a practice and people with SEO training take advantage of their skills to rank higher than others.
But the truth is that no one has a monopoly on anything on the Internet! There aren’t any champions that hold a claim on anything when it comes to event blogging; so if you put the effort and you provide high-quality material, your blog will be the better choice. If you’re not ready for some competition, then you’ve gone into battle already defeated.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Event Blogging
One of the biggest advantages of event blogging is that you can earn in a few days what you make in a month or even a year. It’s difficult to say how much money you can make on any given event because it will depend on many factors, but the average earnings range from $1000 to $10.000 and more. So the investment is much less than the potential profit you can produce.
Event blogging is a great option for those who, for one reason or another, can or want to work online only for a certain period of time. It provides the opportunity for them to make a year’s worth of income in a month or less, so they’re free to spend the rest of their time either traveling or focusing on other projects.
As for disadvantages, there aren’t many negative things to say about event blogging, but there are a few things that can be considered drawbacks, such as the fact that you need a server to handle all of the traffic that will be coming your way. You can have a great blog, and amazing high-quality content, but that won’t do you much good if your site is down.
This means you’ll need to invest in a high-quality server to handle the traffic. For event blogs, the best choice is a dedicated server; according to Techopedia1, a dedicated server is “a type of remote server entirely dedicated to an individual, organization or applications. It is deployed, hosted, and managed by a hosting, cloud or manager service provider, (MSP). This type of server is exclusive and it’s not shared with other customers, services, or applications.”
The average price per month ranges from $100 to $1500 or more. This varies depending on the resources you’ll need and on how much reliability you want. A few of the things you need to consider before shopping for servers are: how much CPU, RAM, drive space, and bandwidth you need and if you need a managed or unmanaged server.
When it comes to reliability, be careful with the cheaper options and shared hosting because they can be much more unreliable than you think; in order to charge less, providers have to unavoidably cut corners here and there which can lead to a bit of trouble. In the case of shared hosting, the problem is that you share the service with other sites. Remember that you get what you pay for, so the success of your event blog will depend on the overall quality of your tools.
One of the things you can do to save a few bucks without making a huge compromise is choosing a hosting service that provides service on demand. This means that as your traffic increases, the server package will adapt to the dynamic of your site and it will handle the traffic as it comes.
Also, you’ll need to remain vigilant during the course of the event so you can be there to take care of any hiccups that might come up; such as server glitches, script, plugins or theme issues, etc. If you don’t stay on top of your site, anything that happens can mean you lose all of the effort and money you’ve invested.
How to Start Event Blogging
Finding An Event and How To Choose
You won’t have any problem finding an event that produces a lot of traffic and searches; you only need to pick one and create a blog. You can either choose based on your passions and interests or on the traffic potential. If you choose based on your own interests, you’ll have a great source of inspiration, which makes for amazing content and this is all of the bait you’ll need to reel in visitors.
If you choose based on popularity, make sure that the event generates a great amount of searches. If you’re only just taking your first steps into event blogging you might also want to choose an event that doesn’t generate high competition so the challenge is something you can handle.
Purchasing A Domain
After choosing the event you’ll be targeting, you’ll need to shop for a domain name. Recommended website for domain registration: Global Hosting Service
The domain name should definitely include a keyword referent to your event because this will increase the click-through rate. Click-through rate, according to Investopedia2, is “the percentage of individuals viewing a web page who click on a specific advertisement. It measures how successful an ad has been in capturing users’ interest.” So the domain name is not something you can afford to neglect.
Start Working On Your Blog In Advance
By working on your blog 2 to 6 months in advance, you’ll have time to create quality content and you can start working on your ranking. The more experience you have, the less time you’ll need to work in advance. Experienced bloggers who already have their own arsenal or ranking tactics can start working on their blogs 10 to 15 days in advance.
If that’s not the case, it will be very difficult to attract traffic to your event blog in such little time. Make a plan based on your abilities and what you can accomplish and follow it to the letter so you can have a successful event blog.
Choose A Platform For Your Blog
As for platforms, there are a couple of choices out there which you already know: Blogger and WordPress. Blogger is free and it’s very easy to set up and customize however you see fit in a small amount of time. It makes for a very good choice especially if your budget is on the limited side. Also, Blogger is known for its reliability and security, so you won’t have to worry about hosting downs. Whatever you don’t spend on the platform, you can invest in other things, but if you do have a good budget, you can go with WordPress.
Invest On Good Quality Hosting or Servers
We already talked about the importance of investing on a dedicated server for your event blog, so it’s time to discuss a few quality companies. That way you don’t have to resort to cheap, unreliable servers, and you’ll have the guarantee that your blog will stay up and running amidst all of the traffic.
A couple of good hosting choices are Global Hosting Service and Bluehost3:
Global Hosting Service: This hosting company offers its users several packages on a wide array of hosting services, 24/7 support and customer service, security, user-friendly platform, and more. I recommend you browse and consider each option. Dedicated server prices range from $60 to $200 a month, while shared hosting prices range from $5 to $80 a year, depending on the package.
BlueHost: They also offer several packages on different hosting services, as well as speed, security, user-friendly platform, and more. Take your time to consider their packages. Dedicated server prices range from $75 to $125, while shared hosting prices range from $4 to $25 a month, depending on the package.
Write Quality Content
High-quality content is essential to the success of your even blog. The first thing you’ll need to do is identify the main keyword related to your event and always target it with your content. Once you’ve done this, you can create lengthy, interesting, high-quality articles for your event blog and make use of as many resources as you can, images, videos, quotes, books, ideas, etc., to attract users to your blog.
When it comes to images, remember the saying: “A picture is worth more than a thousand words” and don’t make the mistake of choosing your images from Google Image searches because those are already ranked and you won’t get the traffic. Look for royalty free images on Canva, Shutterstock, and other sites.
Another thing you’ll need to decide is the length of your articles. If you want to go with articles of 1000 words or more, you can aim for 15 articles, but if your articles are shorter–500 or 800 words–, you’ll need to write 30 to 40 articles for your event blog.
Start posting your content 30 to 40 days before the event so you can rank on Google. Make sure that all of your content is reliable, well researched and overall informative and educational so that your visitors spend more time on your blog. The more useful you are, the better!
Keyword Research
Keywords are not something you should pick at random because your traffic depends on them. Do your research and find keywords relevant to your event that shows a good amount of searches. There are several tools you can use to find keywords, such as Semrush, Keyword Planner or KWfinder. Remember that short tail keywords are high-competition, so you’ll have to collect long tail keywords as well by using the tools I mentioned above.
Monetize Your Blog
The way to make money from event blogging is through the monetization of your blog. There are several ways to do this, but I recommend not using them all at once. You don’t want to saturate your visitors.
One way to monetize your blog is to look for deals and products you can advertise that are relevant to the event you’re targeting. There are many companies that offer a wide away of products and deals for each specific event or special occasion. So do your research and choose good companies to affiliate with so you can monetize your blog by sharing affiliate links and advertising for them.
You can also use Google AdSense4 to monetize your blog. This is a free program that “allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, targeted to site content and audience.”
Place the ads on the header right, on the sidebar, before the title of your post, throughout the article, and at the end of the post. The trick is to not overdo it, but you should have a healthy amount of advertisement.
Create Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are simply linked to other sites and they’re important because they will help you rank your event blog on search engines. The point is to choose other blogs, sites and forums that are relevant to the event you’re targeting and that are well ranked, and commenting on high-ranking blogs can also increase your traffic.
The backlink process should start once you’ve published about 6 posts. To do this you can use SEO Profiler, which is a free tool that helps you create backlinks but you’ll still have to do the research to find other blogs, sites, forums, etc. Remember not to use the same keyword in all of your backlinks. If you do this, you won’t rank.
Final Word
There’s nothing really complicated about event blogging. All you need to do is prepare yourself correctly and apply yourself to the task so you can profit from all of the major events in today’s world.