If you’re wondering how to earn from blogging there’s a couple of popular ways. If you already have a business or a product to sell of your own, blogging is a great way to build your presence online to sell your own stuff. But if you don’t have a service or product of your own, you can sell other people’s products from a blog. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliates are third party referrers of products and services. Just by referring website traffic to a product, you can earn commissions based on sales you generate. Another popular way to earn from a blog is through advertising. Ad companies such as Google will pay you to place ads on your blog. When your visitors click on your ads, you’ll earn a small amount of the advertising revenue. With enough traffic to a blog this can give you a nice passive income.

But before you can earn from a blog you’ll need visitors/traffic. Without traffic, no matter what you offer on a blog won’t matter. This is important to recognise especially if you have never built a website or a blog. It can be an easy mistake to think that just by having a website, you’ll automatically find visitors to it. But sadly this isn’t the case. Just building a blog won’t get you any visitors, unless you promote your blog somehow.

How To Earn From Blogging – Traffic

Traffic is the key ingredient if you want to earn from a blog. Without it, you won’t earn a dime! So before you even think about your monetisation strategy it’s worth thinking about how you’re going to get traffic to your blog. Most bloggers get traffic organically over a long period of time through content creation. Although you can also promote your blog posts in various ways such as through social media, by back linking to them and even using some paid advertising. But ultimately a blog works through getting traffic for free.

To get traffic in an uncompetitive niche can be quite easy. You only need to publish a few blog posts and if there’s not much competition, you should find some traffic coming to your site fairly easily. However, there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and an uncompetitive niche is becoming more difficult to find. In a very competitive niche you’ll find a lot of other bloggers covering the same topic as yours. So for you to find the first page of Google with your content can be quite difficult.

The ultimate goal of bloggers is free traffic but ideally this will come from Google, and other search engines. Once you have created enough content, and done so wisely (more on this later), you should find visitors coming to your website more and more easily.

How To Earn From Blogging – Ranking On Google

Google is the most used search engine and although there are others, such as Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo, for example, most people use Google. This means your best chance of getting free traffic from the search engines is to rank on Google for the keywords you use in your content.

With the more competitive keyword terms, there will be more other content ranking on Google to compete with. So your best chance at getting a first page listing on Google is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This can be done using Google’s own keyword research tool – the keyword planner. Start by typing your main keyword into the planner and scroll through the list of keywords which come up.

You will see that the most searched for terms are generally two or three word combinations. These are typically more competitive. As you scroll through the longer keyword terms (3 or more words), you’ll start to see the monthly search traffic dropping for these kinds of terms.

At the very end of the list you’ll start to see longer tail keywords which get very little traffic. These are the terms which you’re most likely to rank for, should you decide to create some quality content for them. Although the monthly traffic for these terms is low, you have a much better chance of ranking for them on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

How To Earn From Blogging – Niche Websites

To earn from blogging will take some considerable effort and patience! Sorry to say, but there’s a tonne of other bloggers out there who have been around for a while. They have built a tonne of content, backlinks and online presence already, so your new blog probably won’t generate much traction without a lot of work.

You can also build a niche website which can give you a head start in terms of ranking. This can be done by purchasing a domain name with your main keywords in it. Although keyword domains don’t have the ranking power they once had, it’s still a factor and they can give you a slight advantage over other blogs in the same niche.

You’ll need to do a bit of keyword research before you buy your domain name. Find one which is suitable for your topic and which you think you can rank for.

Product Choice

If you’re planning on monetising your blog with an affiliate product, it’s well worth scoping out your products first, before you get started. I once built a website around a topic and only after months of work did I realise that it was very difficult to monetise. There were simply no good affiliate products I could align with my niche.

Your choice of affiliate product to offer from your blog is pretty important too. With a bad product, you won’t make any sales. But a good product won’t sell either if you haven’t aligned your blog topic with it. Think about who you are writing for and whether they will want what you’re selling.

Since it takes a fair few months as a minimum to generate sales from a blog, you’ll want to pick a topic you enjoy writing about. Otherwise, it can be difficult to keep going for long enough.

Turning Traffic Into Leads

Most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website. They need to trust the blogger and the product/s you are offering. The exception is a well known website such as Amazon of course, where people are pretty happy to buy from now because Amazon has built a lot of trust over the years.

But most people will visit your blog site and leave without actually buying anything. Only a tiny percentage will return and buy or buy on their first visit. To encourage more sales from a blog site, you can capture details of your visitors and follow up via email. Email marketing gives bloggers a much better opportunity to sell to their visitors. They can follow up with email messages over a much longer timeframe and build a longer term relationship with their potential customers.

You’ll probably notice some kind of giveaway offer on most profitable blog websites for this reason. By offering something to give to your visitors, you can capture their email address and start building trust. Email messages can be used to demonstrate the value and usefulness of the products you promote and build a long term relationship.

Summary

With an email autoresponder, bloggers can collect email addresses from their blog and automate a follow up sequence to help their subscribers with something. This lets them connect their blog visitors with their affiliate product/s in a relevant way.

Since this whole process can be automated, it means once all your “ducks are in a row” you can generate automated sales from the internet.

You can also earn from blogging without using affiliate products. This is done through using ads on your site. Google Adsense offers this service but there are others too. See also Adsense alternatives.

The main problem with putting ads on your site is the tiny amounts you earn from each click. You need huge volume of free traffic to make this work so it’s best to find some kind of affiliate product too, if you can.