Is it actually possible for a novice to profit from a blog? Is blogging a viable source of income or is it just another urban legend? “Yes” is the response to both inquiries.
It’s not just a theoretical idea; blogging for money actually exists and is serious business. Anyone can start a blogging business and make money if they have a working knowledge of SEO, blogging, and the Internet in general.
An Introduction on How To Make Money Blogging
The blog you are reading right now is an actual example of a blog that makes money.
This guide’s objective is to teach you how to earn money from your blog by avoiding mistakes and wasting time on activities that won’t advance your main objective.
It is geared toward beginners because I recall how difficult it was for me to understand how blogging could help you make money when I first started out (in 2016).
It took me a while to see the big picture, figure out what I was doing wrong, and figure out how to fix things.
This thorough step-by-step manual should start you off on the right foot and provide you with a sound strategy to follow that will produce results as quickly as possible.
Before I go into more detail, let me make a clarification.
It’s not an easy job; it takes skill, patience, and a lot of hard work, but it’s also one of the best and most fulfilling jobs in the world.
The benefits of starting a profitable blog are not just financial; they also include a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of starting a company using only your own skills and abilities.
Why are there so many articles on “how to make money with a blog”? Have you ever wondered?
Why do some people reveal their secret formula to the world when they could keep it to themselves and make more money?
There is an easy solution. Every blogger hopes to get to the point where they can start making money online and then teach the rest of the world how to do the same.
Of course, as we will see below, there are other ways to do it, such as by selling your own products or using affiliate marketing to your advantage.
Let’s go back and start at the beginning. How do the majority of bloggers earn money online, and how can you too?
How to Get Paid to Blog
These are the seven steps to earning money from blogging:
- Create a self-hosted blog.
- Start putting out quality content
- Increase organic website traffic with SEO
- Create a community centered on your brand.
- Ads can be sold to begin earning money.
- Sell your own goods or services to earn money.
- Enjoy financial gain from affiliate marketing
Get Your Blog Up and Running
Possibly the simplest step is this one. Nowadays, setting up a blog and registering a domain is incredibly simple. All you require is a little assistance and a few nudges in the right direction.
In conclusion, the steps below must be followed in order to start a blog:
- Get a domain name
- Get web hosting for your domain
- Install WordPress in your web hosting
- Write your first blog post!
When creating your own blog, keep these mistakes out of mind.
New bloggers frequently make blunders. As long as you learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat them, that is completely acceptable.
When you want to establish a blog with making money online as your primary goal in mind, keep these tips in mind.
Keep in mind that your goal is to develop your blog to the point where you can begin making money from it.
The reason I’m bringing this up again is because I’ve discovered that beginners frequently invest excessive time and effort in establishing the “ideal blog,” overlooking the fact that at the beginning (when there is little traffic), Google doesn’t genuinely care about the aesthetics of your website.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of website design, but not initially. Your major goal at this point should be to launch your blog and begin creating material that will draw readers to it.
It takes a lot of work to increase traffic (and potential consumers), so you should concentrate all of your efforts there right away.
1.Get a domain name
Both your own domain and a self-hosted blog are required.
As you can read in the how to build a website tutorial, there is a big difference between hosting your website on a free platform like medium.com and having your own domain and your own self-hosted website. When launching a blog, selecting the right hosting provider is essential. Hosting ensures that your material is reliable and secure when it gets to your target audience.
Choose the suitable platform as soon as possible and make the correct choice. Self-hosted WordPress is your best choice.
Less is more.
If you’re just starting out, make every attempt to keep things straightforward. Avoid overcomplicating things since you’ll lose your bearings.
You have a lot to learn and will change your opinion about many things as you go, so save your time and energy for the more challenging jobs.
Online Earnings Training
2. Start putting out quality content
You now have a functioning website, which is fantastic!
It’s time to start one of blogging’s most difficult and challenging tasks: coming up with the actual content for your blog.
Remember this:
A blog with poor content is just another one of the millions that have already been published, while a blog with excellent content is a money-making venture.
Having said that, it’s critical to recognize the significance of content for the success of your blog right away.
Great content will increase your traffic (we’ll show you how to do it below), credibility, and financial success (in different ways).
So what makes for good content?
Great blog content can be images, videos, infographics, audio, and more besides text. BUT your content should be primarily text if you want to rank highly on Google (and other search engines).
Keep it simple in the beginning, as I mentioned above. Later, you can combine text with other forms for the best outcomes to make your content more engaging.
The qualities listed below characterize excellent content:
- It is distinctive to your website (it isn’t a carbon copy of a previously published post).
- It is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
- It’s significant
- It’s instructive
- It is impartial
- It is an aid to action, comprehension, or learning.
- It is simple to read.
If the list above doesn’t make much sense right now, don’t worry; as you gain more knowledge, it will make more sense to you.
qualities of excellent content
Qualities of High-Quality Content
Let’s look at some concrete ways to produce quality content for your website.
Pick a subject you enjoy reading about, researching, and writing about.
You should be able to produce content for your blog that satisfies the requirements for quality content when you first start writing for it (as explained above).
This process will be very challenging, and if you are not passionate about the subject, you will give up before you even start.
When choosing your niche, keep in mind that a money-making blog requires a lot of content and that you must come up with a lot of ideas and topics to cover on a weekly (if not daily) basis.
Pick a subject with a respectable audience.
It’s not enough to have a passion for something; others should share that passion.
Keep in mind that in order to profit from your blog, you will need to sell your products to customers or charge advertisers for ad space.
None of the aforementioned things will occur if the audience for your chosen topic is not sizable.
Open Google and enter any phrases (keywords) that come to mind to conduct a quick preliminary search on the potential of your niche.
Look at the quantity and variety of websites that show up on Google’s first few pages.
Don’t be too general; be precise
Don’t choose a topic that is too broad because there are probably already thousands of websites on it, even though you do need a respectable audience for it.
Although they have a larger audience, popular topics are also very competitive. It would be simpler to compete with other bloggers if you were just starting out as a solo blogger than it would be with websites that employ teams of writers and SEO specialists.
To help you understand this better, let me use an example.
Let’s say you have a strong passion for “fitness” and “healthy living.” When you search for “weight loss” or “dieting” on Google, you will find thousands of results, many of which are from online publications or long-running websites with thousands of content pages.
A new website has no chance of competing with these and obtaining Google traffic for such general terms.
Instead, you could focus on a niche within your topic that has less competition while still being related to your area of interest. “Healthy living advice for kids” is an example.
There is a lot of interest in this subject, especially from parents who have the financial means to purchase a product (like an ebook) that will assist them in establishing a healthy lifestyle for their children.
Keyword research is the process of determining what to write in your blog.
It’s a procedure you must learn from the start, so I fervently urge you to spend some time reading the following articles:
3. Generate organic blog traffic
Let’s review what has happened so far.
Setting up your blog and registering your own domain should be your first two steps.
The next step is choosing the subjects for your blog and becoming an expert in keyword research.
The next step, which I will cover in this section, is to begin generating organic traffic for your blog.
Organic traffic: What is it?
Stats of Organic Traffic
You need organic traffic to your blog—not just any traffic—if you want to make money from it. Search engines generate organic traffic (mostly Google).
The “user intent” is what distinguishes organic traffic from other types of traffic as being more valuable.
A user who enters a search term into Google’s search box has a specific goal in mind. He or she is either trying to buy something, learn something, find an answer to a question, or find information.
The actual search terms they include in the search query reveal their intention.
For instance, it is obvious that a user searching for “how to do an SEO audit of my website” is seeking a step-by-step instruction on how to conduct an SEO audit.
It is very specific, and you must give Google a thorough manual audit guide in order to be eligible to rank for that term (or a related one).
Your blog posts will eventually rank highly on Google if you do this correctly, and you will begin to receive targeted organic traffic to your website.
Why should I increase my blog’s organic traffic?
Because it converts. targeted organic traffic is the most beneficial type of traffic for your blog.
Several things are meant by the word “convert”:
Users are more likely to read your post and stay on your page for longer, more inclined to sign up for your newsletter, tend to inquire about your services more frequently, and are more inclined to purchase your goods.
Let’s look at how you can increase search engine traffic to your blog now. We’ll go over each of these in more detail in the post’s final section.
You require quality content
Despite the fact that I covered this in step 2 above, I’m bringing it up again because it is so crucial. Whatever you read below won’t work if your content doesn’t meet Google’s standards.
You must correct your technical SEO.
Technical SEO is concerned with how well your blog is set up and optimized for search engines.
Your blogging platform is already SEO friendly (especially if it’s WordPress), but there are still a few things to check and adjust to make it even better.
Items like:
- blog organization
- Building a URL
- XML Sitemap improvement
- Schema Markups usage
- Authentic URLs
- improving your tag and category pages
- Website Sizing
- Adaptive Mobile Pages and Mobile Friendliness
- SEO webmaster tools
are each crucial to the process.
You must perfect your on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is a step up from technical SEO and focuses on how to increase search engine visibility for your content and webpages.
On-Page SEO Strategies
The following issues will be addressed when you review your on-page SEO:
- title and description optimization
- Length of Post
- Including images and video in your writing
- Headings and post formatting must be used correctly.
- Best practices for internal linking to maximize SEO
You must improve your off-page SEO.
All the steps outlined thus far for boosting your organic traffic involve things you can modify or optimize on your website.
Off-page SEO is a crucial component of increasing traffic from search engines.
The process of promoting your website on the Internet in order to raise awareness of your content, goods, or services is known as off-page SEO.
External SEO
SEO off-page strategies
In other words, you need to make yourself known to other website owners. There are numerous advantages to doing so:
Websites with references (links) to other websites are more likely to be ranked higher by search engines.
More people will visit your site.
You’ll become recognized as an authority in your field.
As I’ve previously stated numerous times:
Both good On-Page SEO and good Off-Page SEO can propel your website to the top of Google’s search results.
Link building is the most well-liked and successful off-page SEO technique.
What exactly is link building and why is it so crucial?
The algorithms used by search engines to rank websites are constantly looking for new ways to evaluate a website’s quality.
A search engine’s primary goal, and Google’s in particular, is to maintain user satisfaction by showing users websites that are well-written, simple to use, and generally of high caliber.
External links from other websites pointing to the pages on your website are another strategy to persuade them that your website fits into this category in addition to the on-page SEO optimizations.
The website with the most incoming links will appear higher in the SERPS, all other things being equal.
Link building is a complicated subject that is challenging for new bloggers to understand. From personal experience and feedback from clients and readers of my blog, I am aware of this.
What you need to understand at this point about link building is:
It’s not primarily about quantity, but rather quality. This demonstrates that there is no magic number of links required to obtain high rankings, but there is a magic source of links.
Links from websites with high Google trust that are associated with your topic are more valuable than links from article directories or other low-quality websites.
Google will penalize you if you use black hat link-building techniques (such as buying links or trading links with others).
Your website will be penalized by Google’s algorithms for attempting to game the system, and you will consequently lose all of your rankings.
How can link building increase traffic to your blog?
The most widely used link-building techniques are:
guest posting on websites that are more popular and larger than your own
Link to other websites in your content and let them know by contacting them. If they find your website to be helpful, they might decide to pay you back.
Introducing your website and content to other webmasters
4. Create a community centered around your brand
The next step is to create a community around your brand once you have a blog with excellent content and visitors are beginning to pour in.
Beginners frequently make the error of skipping this step and going straight to the part where they can make money, but this is not the most effective course of action.
Gaining the user’s trust is the first step toward making any sales (conversions), and community building is how you do it.
It was intentional for me to use the term “brand” rather than “blog,” as you may have noticed.
Your blog should no longer be considered a hobby at this point; instead, you should adopt a business-like mindset and treat it as such.
We all understand that branding is a crucial component of any business’ success, and your blog is no exception.
Community building is one of the many branding-related things you can do (such as having a distinctive logo, original slogan, etc.).
What does blog community building entail?
Simply put, your goal is to build a community of readers who will interact with your blog’s content, subscribe to it, and purchase your goods or services.
These are the most typical methods for doing this:
Email Advertising
Your blog benefits greatly from the subscribers to your email list (also known as your newsletter). You can use your email list to let your audience know when new blog posts are available, solicit feedback from them, and make sales to them.
It won’t happen right away; you must first earn their trust by adding value to their inboxes, but in the end, this is one of the best ways to build a community around your blog.
My email list is responsible for 20% of the monthly sales of my SEO courses.
Online Social Networking
Some people prefer to use social networks to read the news, connect with friends, and spend a lot of time online in general rather than receiving emails.
You must make sure that you are active on the same social media platforms as your potential followers.
You can use a variety of social media platforms, but since you are just starting to set up and build your blog’s brand, it is best to focus on Facebook and Twitter because they have been shown to be more successful than other platforms at attracting followers.
Start by growing your Facebook fan base, and commit 10 to 15 minutes a day to Twitter.
Keep in mind that your objective is to connect with people who could possibly follow and buy from your blog, not just with those who are active on social media. Make use of profiling to select your target market carefully.
Push notifications on the web
This is yet another way to engage with your neighborhood. When a new post is published and whenever you want to send them a new message, people who have signed up for push notifications are informed.
Answering comments
Not least among other things, remember to leave comments on blogs. I’m not talking about leaving comments on other blogs; I’m talking about responding to remarks that other people leave on your blog.
People who leave comments on your articles expect a response, so ignoring them is not a good idea if you’re trying to foster a sense of community.
You’ll see that some of my older posts have dozens of comments if you take a look at them. I try to respond to every comment and assist my readers in any way I can on a daily basis.
The fact that I only publish comments that make sense and aren’t spam or self-promotional encourages more people to post their comments because I don’t approve all of them.
Resources
An easy to follow manual on how to promote your blog using social media for beginners
5. Generate Money Selling Ads
Have you ever noticed how many tasks must be completed before you can start making money?
Although the topic of this blog post is earning money from your blog, almost 3/4 of the content is related to tasks that come before that, and this is how earning money from blogging actually functions in practice.
As a reminder, you must comprehend that you cannot profit from your blog if:
- You lack sufficient organic traffic.
- You lack a quality email list.
- You don’t have a group of devoted supporters.
- You lack conversion-oriented content.
Let’s look at how you can earn money online and treat yourself after completing the aforementioned tasks, assuming that you did.
Google AdSense: The Selling of Ad Space
I’ll admit it: I love AdSense! Since I’ve been an AdSense publisher for more than 15 years, Google Adsense is still among the best ways to earn money online, even though there are alternatives.
I use Adsense on my blogs, and thus far, I’ve made a respectable six figure sum.
As you will see in the paragraphs that follow, there are situations in which AdSense is not the best way to monetize your blog. This is why I do not use it on this one.
You should be aware of the following before using AdSense to earn money:
Simple and dependable
Adsense is dependable and very user-friendly. All you need is a blog with lots of traffic and excellent content.
When someone clicks on one of your ads, you receive 68% of the money paid by the advertiser (the remaining 32% goes to Google for providing this service). This is possible if you add AdSense to your blog.
It’s trustworthy because you can rely on Google to pay you on time and to take all reasonable precautions to keep spam and fraud out of the system.
You have a lot of control over the ads, including what kind, how frequently, and how they appear.
What kind of earnings are possible with AdSense?
Three factors determine how much money you can make using Adsense:
Your volume of organic traffic
the location of your ads
the quantity of potential advertisers in your niche.
Let’s examine these elements quickly:
Naturally, you can earn more money from Adsense if your site has more traffic. That’s all there is to it.
You must get users to click on your ads in order to earn money from Adsense, and the placement of your ads on the page is a crucial element.
When you use Adsense in your main content (as opposed to the sidebar and footer), you can anticipate higher click-through rates (CTR), which translates to higher earnings. The best way is to test different ad placements and discover which placements work better for you.
Above-the-fold advertisements also perform better.
The keyword-based auction-style system used by Adsense. When a user conducts a Google search and then visits a website with AdSense ads, the website will attempt to display ads to the user that are pertinent to the search query.
The amount of money the advertiser will pay and the amount of money you will make both increase when there is a lot of competition, i.e. many related ads.
Can you use AdSense to promote your blog or your products?
You certainly can using Google Adwords. The system that advertisers use to run ads that appear on Google search and Adsense websites is called AdWords.
However, keep in mind that you cannot use Adwords to direct PPC traffic to a landing page that also contains Adsense. This technique used to make some people a lot of money, but it is no longer effective.
When SHOULD you use Adsense?
On websites with a wide range of topics, use AdSense (news portals, magazines, newspapers, forums, etc).
Utilize Adsense on websites focused on healthy living (fitness blogs, weight loss, etc).
On websites with a lot of page views, use AdSense.
When should you avoid using Adsense?
When you can create and market your own goods or services, don’t use Adsense.
Use affiliate marketing to make money instead of Adsense.
6. Sell your own goods or services to earn money
I already stated that this blog does not use AdSense. It’s easy to understand why. This blog serves as a platform for me to advertise my SEO courses and digital marketing services, not to generate revenue from advertising.
Consider this: What happens when you sell ad space on your blog? Since 30% goes to the intermediary (advertising company), which benefits from your content and labor of love, you only receive a portion of the money.
You ought to take into account producing and marketing your own goods or services to lessen the financial loss.
Obviously, it’s not as simple as it seems. Making products that people will pay money for takes a lot of work, but it’s the best way to establish a successful online business in the long run.
Your profit margin will be maximized if you have your own products, and you are aware that any efforts you make to increase traffic will result in more sales.
Ebooks and online courses are the most simple products to make and sell online using a blog.
You should research before investing any time or money to produce your own product.
You must respond to these 4 inquiries in more detail:
What kind of product should be made?
Who might possibly purchase your product?
What should the price be?
How can you test your product idea before you actually produce it?
You must conduct research to determine what is currently offered on the market, who sells it, and how much they charge for it in order to respond to the first three questions.
The most crucial thing, however, is to know whether your product idea will sell before you actually make the product, which is what I will explain below, even if you have access to this data.
When I considered offering an online course for sale through my blog, I wasn’t sure if my readers and community would be interested in doing so. After all, there are a huge number of free SEO resources available.
In order to test my theory, I did the following:
I developed a course sales page (that is similar to the one you see now).
To direct traffic to that page, I added banners (also known as call to action boxes) to my articles and sidebar.
When a customer clicked the “BUY NOW” button, they were taken to the checkout page, but when they tried to complete the transaction, they were informed that the item was temporarily out of stock.
Although I’m aware that this is not the best user experience, it gave me the motivation and energy I needed to develop the course.
After conducting the aforementioned test for two weeks, I discovered:
How many individuals clicked the CTA buttons? (I tested different messages and found the one that was converting better)
the number of visitors to the sales page
the number of times the Add to Cart buttons were clicked
How many customers visited the checkout page and clicked the buy now button to confirm their intent to complete the purchase?
Along with many other details, I was also aware of their nation of origin and the gadget they were using.
After carefully examining the data, I came to the conclusion that my readers would be interested in and willing to pay for an ebook about SEO.
I therefore stopped the test and produced the final item. The first version of the course took me about 6 months to develop, but it was a difficult task that I am glad I completed.
Since last year, the course sales have generated a healthy monthly income and the actual sales figures were even better than the test results.
The bottom line is to conduct research, identify a concept, then test it. Start the process over if the test is a success before moving on to the implementation.
sources for more information
12 tested strategies to generate money online using digital marketing: how to make money with it.
Earn more by putting your SEO knowledge to use when learning how to generate money online.
Enjoy the financial gain from affiliate marketing
Last but not least, selling other people’s items (physical or digital) in exchange for a commission is another approach to generate income from your blog.
Typically, this is referred to as affiliate marketing. Here is a description of the procedure.
You decide which goods to advertise.
When you sign up for their affiliate marketing program, you are provided with a special URL and banners to use.
You include banners and links in your blog.
The links lead to the provider’s website when someone clicks on them.
You receive the agreed-upon commission when they make a purchase.
Right, it sounds good.
Obviously, it’s not as simple as it seems. You still need to research the best products to endorse and evaluate whether your audience and community will pay for the items you recommend.
Observations before engaging in affiliate marketing include:
Don’t advertise goods or services you haven’t used yourself. You do not want to erode your users’ confidence. Promote only goods that you personally know will be useful to your audience.
Google disapproves of websites and web pages that exist solely to generate revenue from affiliate marketing. Without being overly commercial, your website should offer the user true value.
Don’t go overboard. It’s acceptable to make product recommendations in your blog posts, but not all the time. Effective affiliate marketers don’t constantly push products. They initially offer their readers value before making product recommendations.
Read this article on how to manage your affiliate links if you use WordPress (the white hat way).
One of the most successful affiliate marketers on the Internet today, Pat Flynn, has a blog you should read if you want to learn more about affiliate marketing
Conclusion
It is not just a theoretical idea to blog for profit. Numerous bloggers earn money from their blogs by selling advertising space, their own goods, and services, or by participating in affiliate marketing.
These successful bloggers all share the following traits:
- They publish blogs with excellent material.
- Their blogs have been able to attract communities.
- They employ a variety of revenue streams. Although they sell their own goods, they also profit through affiliate marketing and the sale of advertising space.
- They had been blogging for a while, and it took them some time to reach the point where they could support themselves with their blogs.
I’ll let you go with this if you’ve made it this far:
How to generate money blogging is something that anyone can learn. The quantity of money you will make depends on the amount of work you are ready to allocate to make it happen.
It’s not an easy job and it’s not something that will create results in a few months or even years, it will take time and it demands a LOT of patience. BUT, as I indicated above, once it happens it’s one of the best professions in the World!
