How to Make Money Blogging?
When you think about starting an online business, most probably what you think to start a blog, start a website, that’s how you’re gonna build your online business, and then you start doing a little more research and you figure out okay! maybe freelance writing is the best way to go, or it’s SEO or design or affiliate marketing or products.
But for most people, it all comes back to blogging. And the thing about all those online businesses is they all come back to blogging. Because even if you’re not a blog person, you’re still gonna have a website, you’re still going to create some sort of content for it. In the end, most all of us are bloggers, and we need to know how to make money off our blog that’s what we’re gonna talk about today if you’re starting from scratch.
And if I were starting from scratch, this is exactly what I would do to start making as much money on my blog as possible.
We’ve got a lot to cover. This is a very broad topic. I’m gonna do my best to make this as useful as possible without rambling on to unnecessary things.
Let’s dive into the stream!
Post Contents
What Are You Going to Blog About?
So, the first thing you need to do if you want to make money blogging is you have to figure out what you’re gonna blog about. I want you to be as specific as possible these days because there are millions, tens of millions of blogs and websites are out there. So, what are you gonna do? That’s gonna be different than what other people are doing.
Don’t worry about the fact that there are millions of other mommy bloggers or cooking bloggers or fashion bloggers or whatever you want to do. Only worry about what can you do that’s gonna be just a little bit different or maybe just a little bit better.
The internet is a very big place. There’s plenty of room for everyone. You just have to be good at what you do and more importantly, you have to know exactly what it is you do. So, these days, it’s probably too much just to say, “I’ve got a vegan cooking blog”, you’ve to get a little bit more specific. With that example is minimalist baker.
They do a really good job of saying we’re going to only share recipes that take 30 minutes or less or 10 ingredients in less or could be made in one bowl. Very very specific healthy recipes and so that’s garnered them a large following. Because it’s very clear what they do when they do a really good job with it.
You need to be realistic that you can’t be everything for everyone. You have to be able to carve out a unique niche for what you are doing that people resonated with. So the people that wanted to see your specific niche, are able to find you and find really really good content around. So, for you, the best advice I can give is to pick your industry and then find a niche within that industry and then niche down even further.
Find your niche within a niche. I have this post on that. The more you can niche down even if it feels like you’re reaching a fewer number of people, the more people you will actually end up reaching. Because you have found something unique. You’ve created something different from what other people have done and it’ll show that you’re passionate about those things. Find your niche, really get clear on what it is you’re gonna write about.
That’s the first step to making money blogging
Brainstorm 50 pieces of content
Okay, the next step to make sure this actually is a good idea and it’s not something you’re gonna get burnt out on or bored with is to brainstorm, is writing 50 different pieces of content.
Can you write 50 posts? Can you come up with 50 headline ideas for your new blog? Because if you can’t then you’re probably not gonna have enough content or enough interest to be able to actually sustain this and make money off your blog.
Ideally, you’ll be able to rattle off 50 posts in 20 minutes and these don’t necessarily all have to be posts that you can write right by now.
Maybe they take more research or maybe you’ve got to buy a product to do a review, but these should be post ideas that could be a great fit for your niche and for the site that you want to create.
Decide How to Monetize Your Site
Decide how you want to monetize it. But you don’t want to start monetizing it just yet. So, there are lots of different ways you can make money. It could be through using your platform to market your freelance services, it could be through affiliate marketing, it could be through ads, it could be through sponsored posts, it could be through creating an information product or a community. There’s a lot of different ways you can monetize.
So, figure out over the long term what’s the type of monetization that you want to start to pursue and it doesn’t necessarily just have to be one. You have to create your roadmap so that you say okay! Month 1 through 3, this is what I’m gonna focus on. On months 3 through 6, this is what I’m gonna focus on. So, everything you’re working towards it’s not just hey! Let’s create a bunch of content and hope that eventually it makes money because that’s not a business strategy.
You want to be able to start creating content and promoting in a way that’s gonna lead you towards the goals you have for your monetization. So, if your goal is to monetize through affiliate marketing then you should be creating a bunch of review posts in building relationships with those potential affiliate partners.
If your goal is to create your own products then you should be building your email list as quickly as possible.
Once you’ve got the product you’ve got people to promote it to. There’s no right or wrong way but it’s really important to start thinking about how you want to monetize before you actually start to do it
Build Trust Before You Build Income
I work with a lot of blog readers that are starting their own websites they want to make money blogging. And this is one of the biggest mistakes I see is that they try and monetize it from day one.
You have to build trust before you build an income. I repeat! Build trust before you build an income.
So, for the first few months, three months, six months. I didn’t really try to monetize the site, for like two years but I know we don’t all have that much time but focus on creating really good content before you start focusing on making money.
Because once you have trust with your audience, they’re gonna buy whatever it is you’re selling as long as it’s useful and relevant to them.
You don’t necessarily have to spend years doing it. This can be done over a period of months but if you start out and everything, you’re doing on the site is just trying to make money, then people are gonna see right through if you’re gonna be successful making money blogging.
You actually have to have a brand. You have to have a blog that people want to read and if all you’re doing is trying to sell them, they’re not gonna want to read it. So, build trust before you build an income. If you keep that in mind, good things are gonna happen.
Okay, we’re about to dive deep into the specific how to’s.
But let’s just recap what we’ve covered so far
- Figure out your niche
- Make sure it’s really specific
- Can you write a bunch of blog posts about it?
- Can we make sure you’re going to be excited about this topic and you’re not going to get bored?
- Figure out how you’re going to monetize it again you might have multiple strategies but at least have a little bit of a roadmap so you know what you’re working towards over the course of the coming months in the coming years and
- Then finally build trust before you build an income. Got that!
Those are the things that when you’re starting your blog and you want to make money with it make sure that you’ve got answers and you’ve got a plan for all of those things.
Okay, I’m gonna go into if I were starting from scratch, say I was starting a new blog from scratch which I actually kind of hmmm I’ll tell you about it in a future post, but we’re just getting going with this new blog and a completely different niche I haven’t really talked about it at.
So, I’m going through this personally but in this, we’re gonna talk about exactly how I would go about monetizing a new site and doing it as quickly as possible while still building the trust that’s necessary to build a long-term brand so does that sound good!
Cool! Let’s jump right into it
Okay! You got a new blog; you want to make money with it what do you do first.
Types of Contents
Well, there’s four types of content that I would start creating in order to set yourself up for monetization
The first one is product review posts. Find a niche within your industry.
Second up best posts.
It’s similar to product reviews but you’re looking at kind of a whole segment of a product like
best baseballs
best travel gifts
best locations to travel
best cuisines to try, like that
There’s the reason behind creating posts like that because when people are searching for say, best smartwatches, they’re looking to buy something and so if you’ve got a valuable resource that compares and contrast the different products on the market then they say okay well you think this one’s the best. I read all the different things yeah, I agree that’s the one I want and they click your amazon link and they buy the product then you’re gonna get a commission.
By starting to create content thing has the potential to rank for those you’re gonna set yourself up to be able to make more money in the future.
The third type of content is list posts like
10 best national parks,
10 reasons to not do this,
10 things I hate about blogging
Whatever it is.
People love list posts. One of the great things about them is they’re really clickable like the 10 best beaches in the world.
It’s like you gotta click on that you gotta know and so creating content like that specifically around a keyword, not ignoring the keyword.
You want to make sure you do your keyword research so you make sure that there’s traffic. It’s actually coming to that term that people are actually looking for this thing but by doing that you’ve got a clickable headline, you’ve got an interesting blog post you’re able to add your personality to it and it’s something that you can start to rank for overtime.
So, product reviews best posts and list posts are basically three of the four types of content I would really focus on when you’re getting going.
The fourth type of content is personal content. That’s the stuff that’s gonna build trust. What’s the stuff that’s gonna make people like you one of the stories you can tell that people are gonna relate to.
You can write about your early days of starting a blog. I had posts like when I left my last job, and face the ups and downs of life, I wrote about what to do when you don’t know what to do. And for other people that were thinking about quitting their job or they wanted to make big changes in their life, they could read those posts and say oh I get it! This guy is right where I am! I like him! I trust him! And that’s what you’re trying to do.
So, by having the review post, by having the best up posts, you’re establishing your expertise and a topic but then by creating some of the personal content. Maybe talking about how you got into this industry how you started falling in love with this niche. Why you decided to start this website that’s what’s gonna build repute and get people to trust you, want to read you and want to have a relationship with you.
If you can communicate with people directly, you can send an offer directly to their inbox and they trust you great things can happen. So, in those early days of your site and even the later days of your site, I would do everything you can to optimize your site around collecting email addresses.
So, there are lots of different ways you can do this. Come up with a compelling newsletter and a compelling hook, that you put out every week. Instead of just having a generic sign-up for my newsletter, figure out what your newsletter is and how can you make it unique and different and make people want to sign up for it.
You can take your blog post and take it a step farther if you’re really going heavy on the product reviews. Maybe you’ve got a little eBook you put together about the best products within whatever your industry is or something like that.
Figure out what you can create that’s going a little bit farther than your blog posts. Going a little bit more in-depth providing a little bit more information. Put it in an e-book and then give it to people when they sign up for your newsletter.
So, figure out what version of that you can do in your own niche because I cannot stress the importance of an email list high enough. Google can change its algorithm and you can lose search traffic. Instagram can delete your account because you broke terms of service you didn’t even know existed.
But no one can take away your email list. It’s that power that is your way you can ensure that you can always communicate with your readers.
So, one final way to grow your email list really quickly is you can run ads. You can do Facebook ads, you can do google ads, if you don’t want to wait to play the long-term SEO game and wait for google to rank your site and start showing it up in search rankings you can run ads to a landing page that gives away that free gift that we just talked about.
So that can be a way that if you’re trying to speed this up, a little bit ad can be a good way to do it.
Okay so you’re creating your review post, you can start making money through affiliate marketing, you’re creating your email list, you’ve got a built-in fan base of people that trust you that you can send offers and valuable content to.
Now what? Well from there I would start looking at higher paying affiliate programs within your industry .so what are products that are out there that have high affiliate commissions that you can review.
So, in me, I teach people how to build online businesses, and let’s face it there’s a ton of you know 2,000, 5,000 even 10,000-dollar courses. All about how to build online products and how to build an online business. A lot of those pay really good affiliate commissions. Maybe there’s a 20 percent commission on a ten-thousand-dollar product. So, if somebody clicks my link, reads the review, buys the product, then I could get a two-thousand-dollar commission off!
Just one product which is crazy!
Once you’ve got some review posts, you should start looking around for some higher-paying affiliate programs so that you can start making a little bit more money off the reviews.
So, it basically teaches you all of the what, and then once you figure out it’s like okay, I realize, yeah, I read through all this freelance writing. This is definitely the way I want to go. Then you have to go to the higher-priced product and that would be the next step for you.
Once you’ve got your entry-level product that solves a problem and you’re getting your audience used to buying from you, then you create a more in-depth flagship product you can charge hundreds if not a thousand dollars for because once you have these higher-priced products and once you’ve got this trust.
Alright! You’ve established yourself as an expert that is one of the best ways to monetize. You can make more with one sale of a high-priced product than you could in a month or even a year with amazon as your first starting out.
My Opinion!
Personally, I really like the community aspect of it. I think there’s a lot you can do with small niche-focused communities but for the person that is the right fit, it hits them perfectly and people are willing to pay for it. So, once you’ve got that entry-level product start thinking about what your flagship product is. How can you go into more depth about how can you help people in a bigger way? How can you bring people together through a community and how can you create something that you can charge more money for?
So, you’ve got your affiliate stuff starting out, you build that email list, you find higher paid affiliate programs, you create an entry-level product of your own that you can market to through the email list then you create your flagship product which you might build a more in marketing funnel around and that’s kind of a whole different story.
We’re not gonna go into how to market the product. But I would start building that so that you can start bringing in more significant money on your own without having to rely on affiliates.
Its time to Display Ads
Now throughout all of this, as your traffic on your website grows, once you start getting to the point where you’ve got tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of visits a month. That’s when I might consider ads. Not running ads on your own, but hosting ads on your site and this was something for a long time.
You shouldn’t already be doing just putting ads in the content in the first place. You can make some seriously big money if you’ve got traffic and in some ways, it’s kind of like free money.
So, when you combine that with affiliate stuff when you combine that with your own products, it can be a great way to continue to monetize the site.
Summing Up
Okay, there you go. I mean that is essentially the blueprint, that’s the roadmap for how to make money blogging.
Find your niche
Create content
Build trust
Start finding affiliate programs
Build your email list
And then create products that are going to cater to your audience in a nutshell.
That’s exactly what I’m gonna do with my new site.
Cheers!
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