how to earn from blogging Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

If you’re wondering how to earn from blog writing, this one’s for you! There’s a couple of main ways to earn from a blog. You can monetise a blog with your own business, if you have one, a product you own, or with affiliate marketing or advertising. So if you have nothing of your own to sell, you can sell other people’s products (affiliate marketing) or use ads on your blog and earn a percentage of advertising revenue.

The main problem for bloggers though isn’t necessarily the monetisation. It’s the traffic. With over 600 million blogs on the internet there’s a huge amount of competition. So getting your blog found among the noise is not easy. Most bloggers will start out with zero traffic unless they have some kind of following already from somewhere else. If you’re starting from scratch, as most new bloggers will be, you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting traction.

Depending on your blog niche, it can take months or even years to build up your traffic and start getting followers. That’s even before we talk about monetising your blog. So in the first instance, choosing your topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – Your Niche

“Choose a profitable niche” is often the advice you’ll hear when it comes to blogging. But that could be many niches and profit only comes after you’ve built up your blog and started generating traffic and sales/ad clicks. So it’s worth looking at what is meant by “a profitable niche”.

What is a profitable niche? A profitable niche is one in which you can generate sales and make a profit. With blogging, your traffic is going to come from multiple sources and mostly for free. Ideally it will come from the search engines (Google, etc.) but also you’ll want to find other methods of finding visitors such as social media, email marketing and perhaps even some paid marketing.

Your niche needs to be something you align with and have at least an interest in, if not a passion for. That’s because it’s going to take some time generating content on a regular basis over the course of months and even years. If you can’t imaging doing this in your chosen topic, then it’s probably not the niche for you.

The other advice which is often handed out is “choose a topic you love”. If you love your topic you’ll work much harder on it and for longer. But you also need to align your topic with some kind of monetisation strategy. See also choosing your blog niche.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – Monetising A Blog

Let’s say you’ve spent the last 6 months creating some awesome content in your niche and have built up a fair few daily visitors from the search engines. How are you going to make money from these people?

Without anything of your own to sell the two main options are affiliate marketing and advertising. With advertising you place code on your site which converts to adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn a share of ad revenue. Adsense is one program you can use for this but there are others. With this method of monetisation, you’ll usually only earn tiny amounts for each click on your ad space. This means you need a huge volume of traffic (and free traffic) to make this profitable.

With affiliate marketing you can earn more, but only with the right products and if you make the sales. So you might even test different strategies out to see which works best. But to see any meaningful results you’re going to need traffic first. So it’s best to start out with your monetisation methods in mind before you start out. Otherwise you could waste a lot of time blogging only to realise you’re not going to make any money from it.

To monetise a blog with affiliate marketing, you need to find a product which aligns with your topic which you can sell on your site.

Turning Visitors Into Sales

To turn blog visitors into customers you need to:

Get them to your site through content creation – blogging, blog promotion, etc.
Get them to sign up to your email list – offer some free giveaway on your site
Offer them value through your email messages – built trust
Promote your product – sell an affiliate product

Most visitors don’t buy from a new website they have just landed on. Purchases online are often made after a number of touch points with a product or service. Amazon might be the exception here because they have built up trust with so many people over the years. But a new website is different, the visitor doesn’t know you. How many touch points does it take to make a sale? This depends on a number of factors but you can gain your visitors trust by offering them something for free in exchange for their email address.

Then make sure you continue to build trust by sending out useful and informative emails which help them somehow with a particular problem. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy. But also an email marketing campaign gives you the opportunity of putting your products in front of your visitors more regularly and giving them continuity. More “touch points” and trust equals more sales.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – SEO

SEO is an important part of blog writing and it means Search Engine Optimisation. To get more traffic to your blog means writing with the search engines in mind so that Google ( and other search engines) can appropriately index your content and rank your articles/site appropriately on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages. Get an article to the top of Google for one of your search terms and your traffic can make a sudden leap upwards.

But since there’s so much competition online for blogging, you’ll likely not achieve this immediately. You’ll need to build some trust with Google first by creating some quality content on a regular basis and over a long period of time. This can be a frustrating period and you shouldn’t rely on the search engines entirely for your results. Make sure you promote your articles and give them the respect they deserve with your own promotion methods.

You can do this in a number of ways such as through setting up automated blog post sharing on social media and placing social media share buttons on your site. You can also use SEO tools to help you rank content on the SERPS. See best blog plugins for WordPress for a list of useful plugins for bloggers.

Choosing Long Tail Keywords In Your Niche

As a new blogger, you probably won’t get your articles ranked for the best keywords in your niche. After all, with over 600 million blogs on the internet, you’ll have some stiff competition and many of them have been around for years. But still, it’s a good idea to look at Google’s keyword planner for ideas for blog post titles. This will show you other keywords which are already being searched for on Google.

The best keywords have a huge amount of monthly searches and of course it would be nice to see all that traffic on your site! But unfortunately those keywords are well catered for with older domains which have huge authority with Google (and thousands of backlinks).

But the “low hanging fruit” of long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty are your chance to get your content ranking more easily. While there’s no guarantees with ranking your content, you have a much better chance if you aim at the keywords which are less competitive. To find them you can scroll through Google’s keyword planner and look for long tail keywords with less traffic.

Write quality articles for these terms and of course use a good SEO plugin (such as Yoast SEO) to help you.

Summary

Blog writing can be a great way to earn a living. But there’s a lot of other blogs out there to compete against. To give yourself the best chance of success with blogging, choose a topic you can write about for an unlimited amount of time! Many bloggers will quit when they don’t make any money. So your best opportunity is to find a niche which you would love to write about, whether or not it makes you any money!

“The person who loves walking will walk further than the person who wants the destination”.

The same applies to blogging. If you love what you do, you’ll go the extra mile. If not, you’ll likely give up before you get the traction you desire. You also need to align your passion with a suitable affiliate product in order to make money from blogging. See also what are the best affiliate products to promote.