Blogging to earn money is a versatile career path if you have the endurance for it. It lets you earn from anywhere and work in a manner which suits you. But there’s a tonne of competition out there so blogging to earn money isn’t a quick fix solution. It can take months or even years before you’re earning a consistent income from blogging.
Initially you should expect too much from your blog in terms of monetisation. You’ll need traffic to your blog and in large quantities. You can monetise a blog with advertising, your own products or other people’s products (affiliate marketing). But without traffic you won’t have any visitors to purchase from you or click your ads. So getting traffic to a blog is priority number one for any blogger.
Blogging To Earn Money – Traffic
Traffic is the number one problem for most bloggers when they start out. You’ll need to get good at creating content on your blog and sharing it throughout your online presence. This can be done with the help of a number of plugins. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Plugins can also help you write your content with SEO in mind. SEO or search engine optimisation helps you tell Google search bots (and other search engines) what your content is about. The search engines will rank your content appropriately according to the content on your site. In a very competitive area, your content may not rank at all, or it may rank several pages down the search engine results pages (SERPS).
To get more eyes on your content, you can target the longer tail keywords which offer less SEO difficulty. This can give you an advantage in the ranking results pages because there’s lower competition for longer chain keywords than for the short tail ones with more competition. For example, if you wrote an article titled “affiliate marketing”, you would be going up against millions of other websites who target this keyword. But if you chose the keyword “step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf“, there’s far fewer competing websites and articles (blogs) with this content. As such, you have a greater chance of getting free traffic from the SERPS.
Blogging To Earn Money – The “Right” Traffic
Not all website traffic is equal of course and depending on how you choose to monetise your content, some will be more valuable than others. If, for example you choose to monetise a blog with affiliate products, your visitors will need to be interested in your products to make a purchase. Therefore, before creating content for your blog, you should align this content with your product, in some way. Having the wrong kind of content on your site might bring traffic to your blog, but it might not necessarily result in a sale.
To give more context, let’s use the example of a review website. Before making a purchase of a particular item, it’s often useful to read a review. Reviews tell us about a product without having to buy it to find out. Perhaps we want some final information about a product before we make a buying decision. Review websites therefore are great at attracting a buying audience who wants something specific.
On the other hand, a DIY website might offer many “how to” guides which explain the process of fixing various things around the house. Someone looking at “how to fix a broken toilet” won’t have such a specific interest in a specific product they want to buy. So traffic on a DIY site may not convert into sales as well as that from a review website, for example.
Blogging To Earn Money – Target Audience
So before starting out with a blog to earn money, it can be useful to define what your site will be about. How will you monetise it and what will you write about? Having a topic you know about is really helpful because it means you can create content for a good, long time. Blogging is super competitive and there’s millions of blogs out there. To stand out, you need to be a little bit different and offer some great value on your site.
You simply can’t do this if you’re only half hearted about your blog. Expect to be working on your blogging for several months at least, before you start to see some traction. This of course will depend on your competition, topic, how much you can put in and your working hours. It also depends on the quality of your content and your ability to share and promote your blog posts.
Give yourself a head start by choosing a topic you’re at least interested in. There’s nothing worse than trying to write about something for months which you have a waning interest in! It soon fizzles out and you’re left with nothing!
It’s also worth defining who your target audience is. When you know who you’re writing for, you are better able to communicate with them in a meaningful way. Defining your target audience lets you get clear on your blog topic, and who you want to serve with your content and your products/service. See also target audience for affiliate marketing.
Monetising With Affiliate Products
You can monetise a blog in many ways including selling your own products, using affiliate marketing or pay per click advertising on your site. Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways you can monetise a blog because you can find products which relate closely to your topic and promote them using banners and contextual links in your copy.
You can also promote affiliate products through your email list. An email list is a good idea for bloggers as it lets you build longer term relationships with subscribers than you possible could from a website. On a website, a visitor will only hang around a few minutes. This is a very short period of time if you’re trying to sell them something.
But if you get your visitors to sign up to your list, you can communicate with them over a much longer time frame. This lets you build trust and offer more value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to trust your product recommendations and buy from you through your affiliate links. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Most bloggers will use an autoresponder and offer some freebie giveaway on their blog to build an email list of subscribers which helps them promote affiliate products and monetise their site.
A Long Term Strategy & Passive Income
The good thing about blogging is that over the longer term it can give you a passive income (see passive income affiliate marketing). Once you have put in enough work, you should see traffic coming to your site from free sources. However, this can take months or even years and there’s a lot of work to be done before this works.
To give yourself the best chance, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you’re passionate about. That way, working on your blog is a pleasure not a chore! Here’s a picture from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits which I think best explains the effort needed for making blogging profitable.
The graph shows results over time which you would expect to be linear. In fact, blogging is a very slow strategy to generate traffic which takes much longer than expected! But after some time, if you stick with it long enough, you should see the results increasing exponentially. Before this, you will put in a lot of work without seeing very much. In fact it is this time which is the most difficult because it seems very bleak! Especially if you’ve already put a huge amount of time and effort in! Stick with it and your older content will start generating views as you create and share newer content. Expect a sudden growth spurt at some stage when your traffic will suddenly “sprout”!
A Blogging Analogy
A good analogy is with the Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese Bamboo tree has several years of gestation underground before it sprouts from under the soil. If you are trying to grow the bamboo plant, and didn’t know what it was, you could easily assume that it was dead, and throw it away! This is what many bloggers do when their blogs fail to make them any money!
But after four to five years of gestation underground, the Chinese Bamboo will have a growth spurt and grow up to 90 feet in five weeks!
Knowing this, it’s definitely wise to choose a project which you will love while you’re building it. If you pick a topic you don’t know about (or care about), your blogging journey will be much more difficult! But if you choose a topic you have an interest in, your blogging journey can also help you learn and grow, so you’ll never grow tired of it!
See also choosing a niche for your blog and blog niches that make money.