Wondering how to become a successful blogger and make money? Blogging is great cheap strategy to make money online but it does require a huge commitment to make it work. There’s millions of blogs in a variety of topics so you need to stick at it for some time to generate traction in your area/niche. Many bloggers will quit because they simply don’t get enough traffic to their blogs to make money from. Or, they get the wrong kind of traffic, which is more difficult to monetise.
A good place to start if you want to become a blogger, and make money from your blogging is with your topic. By choosing a topic you align with, it can be much easier to maintain your enthusiasm over the longer term. That’s what’s required from blogging – long term enthusiasm. Many bloggers don’t earn from their blogging until they are months or even years into their project. So expect to be blogging regularly for some time before you can make it your living.
How To Become A Successful Blogger And Make Money – Income From Your Blog
Income from blogging isn’t straight forward either. You can monetise a blog in a few ways but the main two are advertising, with a program such as Google Adsense, and affiliate marketing. With advertising, you place code on your website and Google Adsense converts that code into relevant adverts for your audience. When your visitors click on your adverts, you receive a percentage of advertising revenue. Although this amount is typically very small, depending on your topic, over thousands of clicks this can add up. With a huge volume of traffic to your blog, this can be very lucrative and also passive!
Getting a huge volume of traffic to your blog is the hard part and this is what takes the most amount of time.
The other way to monetise a blog (used by most bloggers) is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you recommend and refer visitors to products from your blog. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. Again, you need a lot of traffic to sell affiliate products from your site. Plus, only a small percentage will actually buy. Your traffic needs to align with your product too, so choose your products wisely and offer something on your blog which your visitors will want or need.
How To Become A Successful Blogger And Make Money – Your Blog Topic (Warning*)
Your blog topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make about your blog. Once you choose a topic, you’ll need to create a lot of content in that particular area. Ideally, choose a topic you either have an interest and passion for, or at least know something about. This will make your journey towards becoming a paid blogger more pleasant and potentially much quicker too! That being said, monetisation is also a key factor if you want to make money from your blog. Without an effective monetisation strategy, you won’t make money. But equally without enough traffic to your blog you won’t make money either!
Tying these two things together is vital if you want to become profitable in your blogging. You choice of topic should join a passion or interest of yours with the products you are selling.
A word of warning! I choose a topic which wasn’t easy to monetise nor easy to write about! It was “when to harvest mushrooms“! A strange topic I know but as a beginner I found a relatively uncompetitive niche and thought I could make some money by getting my website to rank on the top of Google, (See how to rank an affiliate website for this strategy).
My site did actually rank but there were very few affiliate products within this niche which were profitable. I also ran out of enthusiasm for my topic relatively quickly. Despite writing about this dull topic for several months (apologies to mushroom fans!), I couldn’t bring myself to continue! Each blog post had to be researched thoroughly too, since I knew nothing of this topic! So ultimately the blog was doomed! I let it go but it taught me an important lesson: choose a topic you love, or are inspired by. Writing will be more enjoyable and you’ll keep going for longer!
A Topic Your Love Or A Topic Which Is Profitable?
Choosing a topic you love is often the advice you are given when building a blog. For bloggers, you’ll need to create a lot of content over a long period of time to be successful. Otherwise you’re likely join the ranks of the many failed bloggers who’s blogs are sitting dormant or have dropped off completely. Ultimately this means you’ll need o enjoy your work. As with the story above, if you are starting to hate blogging after only a few months, it’s probably going to fall short of what you need to do. But if you choose a topic which inspires you, you’re more likely to keep going long enough to start breaking through and generating traffic.
However, that being said, you also need to think about how you will monetise your blog. Using only Adsense to monetise your blog can leave you very vulnerable. Suppose you get your account shut down? Or you don’t get enough traffic to make a realistic income from Adsense. Using affiliate products for blog monetisation gives you more scope for earning. With the right products and services you can even make recurring commissions and high commissions over $500. See recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing.
Ideally find an affiliate product you love too and that you align with. This might take some time and digging but a good product can help you choose your blog topic and make it more profitable too.
Watch this free video series to learn about the different affiliate products available.
How To Become A Successful Blogger and Make Money – Email Marketing
Successful bloggers use email marketing. They build a list of email subscribers from their blog by offering something to give away to their visitors. I use a couple of ebooks on my blog posts to give to visitors in exchange for their email address. Then, I follow up with a series of useful emails and a video series explaining the best affiliate marketing business models to use. Here’s one of my ebooks which I use to build an email list:
Email marketing gives bloggers a massive advantage so it’s well worth getting an autoresponder so you can build an email list from your blog.
Access a free autoresponder here.
On a website, or blog, a visitor only has a small time to make a buying decision and purchase one of your affiliate products. But once you get them on your email list, this time period is drastically extended. I’ve had people buy products from my email list even years after they have signed up to it! This simply wouldn’t be possible without an email list, just from a blog.
To get people on your list, offer some ebook download, or a product which is provided from an affiliate program you join. See ebook lead magnet for more on this.
See also on this topic: Create free website and make money, how to rank your blog post on Google, Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Real Success Is enjoying What You Do
Hopefully you should have some idea now about how to become a successful blogger and make money? Please comment below if there’s anything you think should be added to this article. Real success means more than just money of course! Enjoying the process is key to becoming a successful blogger. If you simply don’t enjoy the process of blogging, you might want to choose another direction. Working on things you are enthusiastic about is a key to success in many ways, not just financially.
One way of determining whether this journey is right for you is to see yourself having already arrived at having built a successful blog. Do you enjoy what you’re doing, or want to quit? Having built a large amount of traffic from a blog you can always sell it too at some point in the future if it’s profitable. Access a free video series and learn more about the various ways you can earn online by clicking the image below:
