Tumblr is a social microblogging network where users can post anything from text, photos, GIFs and videos. It has around 292 million unique users globally. Despite its decline in numbers this year, due to the banning of adult content, it is still a great platform where you can make money. With over 120,000 new blogs every day, it has great potential for monetization. Read on discover just how you can make money on Tumblr.
Tumblr History
In order to start making money on Tumblr, it’s important to understand why it became so successful. Tumblr actually originated way back in 2007 but hit off in 2011 when it began to gain popularity with teenagers and youths. In 2013, Tumblr reached more than 20 billion views worldwide.
At the time, Tumblr was one of the most interesting communities on the Internet. At its peak, Tumblr was the place to share photos, graphics and snippets of text. Even celebrities and presidents such as Barack Obama would opt to use Tumblr which actually brought in more traffic than sites like Wikipedia and Twitter. Tumblr was even used to live-microblog the Grammys.
It attracted a lot of users as your privacy was respected. Through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity, a user could hide its identity while being able to share anything. This kind of anonymity was popular with youths because it meant that they couldn’t be found by people they knew in real life. This gave users the ability to express their true opinions more.
Tumblr had its fallbacks… but this proved beneficial
However, despite all this, Tumblr saw a decline in recent years due to a number of facts. The biggest one was the removal of adult content from their website (NSFW Tags). The platform was notable for its reformist community which provided a place to discuss issues related to identity, body image and sexuality. However, it was decided that NSFW content would be banned from Tumblr. This decision led to a lot of users fleeing to other social markets. Nevertheless, this decision also brought about benefits such as being restored to AppStore and allowing businesses to promote and advertise their work.
So now that you’ve had a rundown of its course of history, let’s take a look at why you should use Tumblr.
Why use Tumblr?
Despite having lost some of its active community, Tumblr is still going strong. With almost 300 million active users and over 120,000 microblogs daily. What’s interesting is that the majority of users are in the age of 18-27. Although young, 27% of Tumblr users have an annual household income of over $100,000. Therefore, Tumblr has a great potential to be a platform to earn some money.
The platform interface is also very simple to post and communicate with others. Tumblr is useful for creating a company blog to promote your brand, increasing your audience and boosting your sales. You can include ads on your page to make revenue and they can also be of any type. Additionally, there’s no added cost to create your domain as its provided for free. Apart from this, your blog page can also be customized fully to your liking with themes. These created themes can in turn be sold to others.
Aside from blogging, Tumblr provides the ability to find users that like certain topics and target them. For instance, if you find a blog that likes to showcase luxury, finding those users that liked the post may prove fruitful. That is the users that like these types of posts are more likely to want to spend.
Convinced? So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of making money on Tumblr…
How to make money on Tumblr
Build an audience
Before you can begin to monetize on Tumblr, you need to create a community. This means you need to be active and make yourself known in your target niche. To do this, you need to at least post a few times a week. There are several services you can find online that allow you to queue up your posts. This will keep your followers intrigued.
Try to follow similar bloggers, entrepreneurs or companies to learn how to create and promote your own brand. You can try and analyze their posting pattern and apply something similar to yours.
To keep with Tumblr’s code of style, post short texts with images using bright backgrounds. Make sure to add your target keywords and hashtags to let others find your microblogs. The first 20 tags you use will searchable on Tumblr. Adding hashtags will also allow Tumblr to add your microblog as a recommendation to the right audience. Once you built a community, we can see how to make money on Tumblr.
Affiliate Links and Sponsorships
Adding affiliate links is a great way to make money on Tumblr. Affiliate links work by joining an Affiliation program such as Amazon associate program and include Amazon links on your Tumblr page. When users who visit your Tumblr, click on your link, you will earn a share of money from Amazon.
Monetizing using affiliate links will serve well if your Tumblr is focused on reviewing products or showcasing the latest trends. There are thousands of affiliations you can choose to join such as ShareASale, ClickBank, DigiStore24, MaxWeb and much more. However, be wary that Tumblr will be on to you if it realises you are trying to spam with too many affiliate links. So it’s important to not overdo it.
You can also share your affiliate links without even using a blog. All you have to do is search in Tumblr for blog accounts that have a certain topic related to your affiliation. A good idea is to go through the posts and see which Tumblrs liked the post. Once you pinpoint them, you can send them a private message about the product you are trying to promote along with your link. Creating a template message will be a fast and convenient way to get your message across.
Sponsored posts are another convenient way of how too make money on Tumblr. It’s also a good way to keep Tumblr from detecting spam. You can also include links in the captions of the photos you post. These links also reappear when a user shares your post. This will help drive further traffic to your product selling website or ads through AdSense for instance.
Promoting your work via links in your Tumblr Page
Tumblr can be used as a shop where you can provide links in the left rail of your Tumblr page. You can also include links to your social media accounts such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Your YouTube channel can also be embedded on your Tumblr. You can enable ad monetization on your YouTube channel link and direct users to it.
Apart from these, once you gather a large following such that the content you posts gets a number of notes, users will find you from other sources. If this is the case, you can monetize and create ads such as on your Facebook business page for users that find you from Facebook.
Tumblr can also be used to promote your work and products. However, you need to keep it low-key as you need to minimize as much as possible the risk of your followers reporting you as spam.
As you can see Tumblr is a great way to interact with other social media for monetization.
Create and sell Tumblr themes
You will need to be highly creative in order to make money from this. Reason being, users can find decent free themes easily on Tumblr. So what you offer needs to be something unique that others would pay for. Try think of the different colour schemes, navigating menu styles, images and typography and spacing of elements. You can learn more about how to improve your skill in creating new Tumblr themes here.
Final thoughts and considerations
Tumblr provides an easy way to share your affiliate links and promote your work. With an easy to use interface and active community, it’s a great opportunity to make money using Tumblr.
Monetizing on Tumblr requires effort, time and sometimes creativity. However, the key advantage of Tumblr is its flexibility in producing quick implementations of all blog designs. Its benefit of being so simple will allow you to become an expert quickly.
So start today, create an account and begin making money!
Veteran content writer with focus on Technology and SEO.
