If you’re frustrated with blogging here’s a post on how to make blogging pay. Blogging can be a slow burn and if you’re just getting started with a blog, don’t worry if the results aren’t forth coming just yet. It can take some time before your traffic starts growing. So don’t be put off if you don’t see much traction.
In the beginning it’s far better to make daily habits out of your blog posting and focus on that. When you look for results too quickly, the result is disappointment. This leads to inaction, and inaction leads to, well, nothing much happening. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy that a blog will fail when you don’t work on it continually.
So first, light up your enthusiasm with a passion project you want to work on. Choose your topic carefully and ask yourself whether you’re going to enjoy the process of coming up with new blog ideas for several months at a minimum.
A blog you love working on is going to last much longer than one where you’re only interested in the outcome. So choose a niche you love, and get blogging!
That all said, to make blogging pay you also need to do two things really well:
- Find a great affiliate product you can offer to your visitors
- Find visitors who will benefit/want that product
How To Make Blogging Pay – Choosing A Great Product
You might think that’s obvious! But attracting an audience with your content is going to be more lucrative if you find a product which is of high quality and of huge benefit to your audience. Consider what you’ll be writing about and the kinds of people that will attract. If you choose a product which is misaligned with your topic, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time!
The easiest way to align a good product with your topic is to choose one which you personally endorse and have benefitted from. For example, I promote Aweber’s email marketing software from my blog. I use it myself and haven’t used anything else for my email marketing. It’s a great product and absolutely essential for building a profitable online business. You can also use it for free through this link.
So why wouldn’t I promote such a beneficial product?:
- It aligns with my content
- I personally use it and recommend it
- It’s helpful and necessary for online success (through building an online business)
It’s therefore a total no-brainer that I would promote this product from my blog. Bloggers can use the product to collect emails from their blogs, and promote their affiliate products through it to an ever-growing audience. My audience includes bloggers who are often trying to build an income online on a shoestring budget. Hence again, the free version of this software is a total no brainer to get – you get up to 500 subscribers without having to pay!
Still, if your blog is about something else, such as cabinet making, for example, you’ll want a different product which aligns with your topic and the interests of your audience.
How To Make Blogging Pay – Aligning Your Content With Your Product
If you’re writing content on one particular subject, but promoting a product in another niche, you’re going to get a mix-match. Your audience won’t be interested in what you have to sell.
So no matter how many blog posts you write, your audience is only interested in that particular topic. For example, if your blog attracts people who have no money, it’s going to be difficult encouraging them to buy a particular product, especially if it’s well out of their budget.
So it’s worth asking yourself a few questions so you can get clearer on who you are attracting:
- Are my visitors likely to be able to afford my product?
- Is my product a good match for my audience?
- Does my product help my audience?
- Do I relay the value of my product through my content?
Answering these questions (and more like them) will enlighten you as to whether your content is attracting the right audience for your products.
Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet too and go through it. You should learn something about the “who” you’re trying to attract, or are attracting by default by not thinking about it properly.
How To Make Blogging Pay – Lead Visitors To Your Email List/Product
Most people come to a blog post to read the content you have put up – if they have found it (more on this later). So, for this particular piece of content, “How To Make Blogging Pay”, I can expect people who read the content are already bloggers, or are considering becoming bloggers.
Bloggers are often trying to build an income online on a shoestring budget. Which means they aren’t likely to come to your content looking to buy something! However, people from all walks of life are also looking to learn how to make money blogging.
But unless you lead them to your products, they are mostly going to leave your blog post without having taken the action you want – (signing up to your email list or buying a product through one of your links).
You can lead visitors to your list/product through popups (annoying I know), embedded links and forms on your website. So make sure you test them out if you haven’t already done so. A popup on this website also showcases my ebook (Affiliate Marketing For Beginners) – Access it here.
How To Make Blogging Pay – Getting Eyes On Your Content
Without traffic to your content, you won’t make any affiliate sales and you won’t get any leads (email opt-ins). So content promotion is a large part of making blogging pay. There’s several ways you can get more traffic to your blog posts:
- Write more content
- Share your content more widely
- Write for SEO – get ranked on Google/search engines
- Build an email list and send subscribers to your newly posted content
Think about how you currently promote your content, if at all. When I started blogging, I would write a post and sit back, waiting for Google to rank it – and the traffic to come flooding in! Sadly that mostly didn’t happen and although some of posts did rank on the first page of Google, most of them didn’t get a look in. So, in fact, most of my hard work at blogging was completely wasted because nobody saw my posts!
When I started to understand that I needed to promote my posts too, I started seeing more hits on my website. But it’s an easy mistake to make. So just make sure you promote your content, otherwise you’re pretty much guaranteed to get zero visitors unless you’re already a high ranking/popular blogger.
Methods Of Blog Promotion
There’s many ways to promote your blog posts once you have created them. Or, you can write content in such a way as to garner the respect of the ranking algorithms too – (i.e. get ranked on Google). This can be a challenge, but if you’re in a relatively uncompetitive niche it’s much easier to do. Checkout my post on how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Here’s a few ways you can promote them too:
- Post them on your social media accounts manually
- Get an automated software to post them (such as Revive Old Posts)
- Use share buttons on your website to give visitors the option of sharing on their social media
- Send them to your email list
- Link back from other websites to them (blog commenting or guest posting)
- Use some paid advertising to drive traffic to them
You don’t have to do all of these, but I’d recommending as many automated methods as possible to reduce your workload.
Summary
So there’s a few aspects of blogging you need to get right in order to make it pay. Here’s a quick recap:
- Choose your topic carefully – find a subject you personally align with and can write about for several months at a minimum, ideally forever!
- Find a high value product (or products) you can align with your topic. Unless you attract an audience who want that product, even with a lot of content you won’t sell.
- Make sure you are promoting your content – don’t rely on your content being ranked on Google or getting found through the search engines alone! Some will of course but most won’t.
- Lead visitors to your product and/or your email list – ask for the sale. With a high value and good product which you audience needs, you should find selling through your content much easier.
- If your topic is misaligned with your product, selling will be more difficult or even impossible. Can your audience afford your product? Is it vital for their success? Checkout the customer avatar worksheet for more on this.