how does blogging work Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What is blogging and how does it work? The term “blog” is short for “weblog“(website log) which refers to an online journal. Blogs began as personal mini-websites that people used to record their views, stories, hobbies, and other writings as well as photos and videos. A blog can be used to share insight into a particular topic or niche.

Blogs are also useful for business owners who can attract customers through creating written content online.

In 1996 Amazon launched its affiliate program which was the first program that was available to the general public. Since then more people started using blogging as a means to make an income online. (See when did affiliate marketing start). Many thousands of bloggers have written content on websites in order to attract visitors through the search engines; Google being the most popular one.

Affiliate marketing has allowed anyone to generate an income from blogging by referring blog visitors to products and services online.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work?

Blogging works by creating written content and uploading it to the internet by means of a digital platform such as WordPress. The current platform I’m using to write this blog post is a WordPress website. You can also use free blogging platforms to write blog posts such as:

Blogger.com
WordPress.com
Hubpages.com

Free blogging platforms like these allow anyone to create and upload content to the internet. Once up there, people can find the content if they are looking for it, and manage to find it. Because there’s so much content on the internet, getting eyes on your content is the main issue for new blog post writers. Since most people will use a search engine to find the content they are looking for (e.g. Google), the main goal of bloggers is to get free traffic by creating a lot of content which can be easily found.

This can be difficult though given the huge amount of other bloggers out there. It’s estimated that there are over 600 million blogs on the internet today! Yes 600,000,000! That’s a huge amount of blogs. So depending on your blogging topic, it can be extremely difficult to attract an audience to your content.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work: Tactics Of Bloggers

The main search engine people use to find information on the internet is Google. While there are others such as Bing.com, Yahoo.com and duckduckgo.com etc. most people still use Google as their main “go to” for online research.

Any simple Google search will bring up millions of pages of results but the top few will receive the lion share of visitors. Bloggers aim to be in this select group of the search engine results pages (SERPS). Unless they are, their visitors will need to come from other sources or nobody will even see their content!

Other sources of traffic can be found through social media, back linking or sharing content elsewhere on the internet. However, it can take a lot of effort to achieve just a small number of visitors. If you intend on making money from blogging, you’ll need a huge amount of website visitors (traffic) to be successful.

One strategy bloggers use is to find the search phrases people are looking for by using Google’s keyword planner. The keyword planner shows searches which have been made already on Google for terms which you choose. For example, if you type “CD player” into the planner, you’ll find all the searches which have been done for terms relating to the “seed” keyword “CD player”.

By creating written content on a blog which targets specific keywords which you want to be found for, you can target those which you have more chance of obtaining a top Google ranking for. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

SEO or search engine optimisation refers to the “tweeking” of content on a blog in order to improve the likelihood of it obtaining a higher position on the SERPS (search engines results pages). By optimising your blog posts, you can potentially increase your positioning and get more visitors from Google and other search engines. However, there’s no guarantees of getting a page one listing on Google (or any other search engine for that matter). Whether you do will depend on how Google perceives your content. Google uses a number of factors to determine how to rank content in the SERPS. These are some of the most well known of them:

Content – quality of your content (and quantity) is a huge factor in determining the authority of your site
Backlinks – often top ranking blogs have tens of thousands of backlinks from other high authority websites
Domain age – the domain age is a factor and older sites tend to be given greater authority
Time on page – how your visitors interact with your content (do they click away or stay on the site and for how long?)
Social media presence – how much is your content shared on social media
Interaction – do visitors interact and engage with your content (leave comments, share and post etc.)
Plus many more

Making Money From A Blog

To make money from a blog you need to monetise your website somehow. This can be done in a number of ways even without a business or product of your own. Many bloggers will monetise their blogs by promoting other people’s products from it (affiliate marketing) or using advertising (e.g. Google Adsense).

With affiliate marketing, you can attract an audience which is aligned with a certain product. When visitors come to your site, you can offer the product directly, or give away a “gift” in order to get visitors to sign up to your email list. From your list you can then promote affiliate products. See the power of email marketing.

With advertising platforms such as Google Adsense, bloggers can place adverts on their blog and get paid for clicks made by their visitors.

Summary

So, what is blogging and how does it work? By uploading written content to the internet, bloggers can attract visitors who might be interested in what they have to say. Blogging can be a hobby where bloggers write a diary, journal or “log” but it can also be used for business. Business owners write content which will attract customers to their business. Or they use content to help answer common customer questions.

How does blogging work to make money? Bloggers make money from their content usually from a couple of methods. They can partner with an advertising platform such as Adsense and make money from placing adverts on their blog. When visitors click on their ads, they earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue.

The other most often used method of monetising a blog is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing involves linking out to other people’s products and services. You can promote affiliate products directly from the text in your articles/blog posts, or use banners and images to sell other people’s products from a blog. Often, bloggers will give something away for free on their blogs too, in exchange for their visitors email address. They can then follow up with email marketing messages, promoting affiliate products.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Traffic

The main problem many bloggers face is finding enough visitors (traffic) to make their blog profitable. Depending on their niche or topic, this can take several months or even years to accomplish! Even with great content and a great product to offer their visitors, without enough visitors, it can be tough to make a blog profitable.

So the challenge for bloggers is getting their content in front of more and more people over a long period of time. This can be accomplished through first creating a lot of content in your particular niche or topic. Over time, if you’re successful, your content with gain momentum and your traffic will increase. This is accomplished by building good quality content in the first instance. Bloggers should also share and promote their content as much as possible.

If you stick at it for long enough Google, and the other search engines, will reward you with free traffic from the SERPS – the Search Engine Results Page’s. When this happens your traffic can explode and you can suddenly have a large uptick in visitors. But typically this won’t happen without a lot of content and content promotion first.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Why Bloggers Quit

If you’re intending to start a blog and earn money from it, expect to work at it for several months before you see consistent visitors coming to your website. This can be tough, especially if you are unsure of your topic. So it’s well worth taking some time and finding a blog topic you can stick with for quite some time. It’s very easy to rush in and choose a blog topic and give up on a blog when nothing happens.

Your choice should be something you can continue generating content in for a really long time. That way, your blog will continue to grow because you’ll never run out of enthusiasm for it!

This is an image from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. It’s a good book to read if you’re considering becoming a blogger. It clearly shows what he calls the “valley of disappointment” where your expectations don’t meet the reality! I think this is also a great illustration of what a blogger goes through!

Blogging for income seldom goes the way you expect. There’s so much competition on Google that it’s hard to get traffic. When it does come, it comes very slowly from blogging. But over time your work can compound and previous blogs posts will get found as you create more and more. This shows in the picture too as the “what actually happens” line gains momentum and moves up exponentially.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Write About Your Passions & Interests

A simple blogging strategy is to write about things which you have an interest in. Make your blog specific to a single topic, rather than a range of things which aren’t connected. That way, you can direct your visitors to products which will be suitable for them. With a generic topic, you are less tangible for visitors, so it can be harder to monetise with affiliate marketing.

With Google’s Adsense program you can still make money regardless of your subject area, since you are placing clickable adverts on your content with this strategy. However, this can be tough because you only make tiny amounts per click. So you’ll need a huge amount of traffic to make Adsense profitable with a blog.

With affiliate marketing, you can promote high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions. This can make a blog more profitable more quickly.

Targeting Your Content To A Specific Audience

Since affiliate marketing requires you to refer customers to products online, you’ll need to match your product with your subject in order to make money from it. For example, if your blog is about car exhausts, you will need to sell something related to that on your site. People don’t buy flowers from a car exhaust website!

To find an affiliate program which is suitable for your topic, you can do a simple online search for “{your subject} affiliate program”, where {your subject} is your chosen blogging topic. You can find affiliate programs for all kinds of products, so choose a product wisely which will work well in your subject area.

Join the affiliate program and use the banners and/or links given to you to sell the products/service.

An SEO Strategy

Bloggers use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help search engines find their content and rank it in the search results. They often use plugins to help them with this so they can write more SEO friendly content. (See best free blog plugins for WordPress).

Typically the main keywords you may want to be found for as a blogger are hugely over-competitive. A two word keyword will likely have hundreds of thousands of competing websites, so it can be very difficult to rank your blog post for it. A key strategy therefore for many bloggers is to find the long tail keywords which offer less SEO competition.

This can be done using Google’s keyword planner. Type in your main keyword and look for longer phrases which come up. Compare them on Google with a simple search and a “phrase match” search (in quotation marks). Google will give you a number if using a laptop or desktop computer and this correlates to the number of competing websites for that particular keyword.

Summary

So, how does blogging work to make money? Bloggers create content on a website to attract an audience. They promote it as much as possible to get more and more visitors over time. This is done through sharing content on social media, linking to their content from other websites and platforms, paid promotion, SEO and various other methods.

Over the longer term, if they have done the right things, bloggers will see more and more traffic coming to their site for free from the search engines: Google, Bing Duckduckgo.com etc. They can monetise their blog either with their own business, or through using affiliate marketing products or an advertising platform, such as Google Adsense.

Bloggers also build email lists from their website too. This can help them build more authority with their subscribers and let them know about their affiliate products over a longer time span. From a website/blog, a visitor only has a small time to make a purchase. But on an email list this time period is extended to weeks, months and even years! See also the power of email marketing.