To get paid blogging you need to generate a lot of website traffic through content creation. Over some time, you should have created enough content to attract some free traffic from the search engines.
With highly targeted visitors on your website you can either make money from advertising clicks or through selling affiliate products. Some bloggers charge to write for website owners. You can get paid through brand sponsorships too if you can find a company to sponsor you. Many bloggers sell affiliate products from their blog. On this site for example, I sell training and education for people wanting to earn a living online.
Placing adverts on your blog posts is another popular method of earning from a blog. Adsense, for example lets you do this by joining their program and you can place code on your site which shows up as targeted ads according to your content. When your visitors click, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue.
Get Paid Blogging – Getting Traffic
But the way you get paid blogging is only a tiny part of the story. In order to make blogging profitable, you’ll need to attract traffic and this can take more effort than most are prepared for. Certainly I never knew how long it would take to generate a steady income through blogging. Why should someone come and visit your blog anyway? You have to ask! There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and these add to an over crowded marketplace.
Depending on the topic of your blog, you could be up against tens of thousands of blogs on a similar subject. For each blog post you write, there’s thousands of others with similar titles all competing to rank on Google for the top place. It is the top listing place on Google which gets the most traffic. But in most topics this place is vastly over subscribed. Particularly in a competitive field, you can expect a tough ride to start generating traffic for free.
So what’s the answer?
Get Paid Blogging – Choose Your Passion
A lot of bloggers recommend choosing a topic you love. While this is true, you also need to pick a topic you can monetise. With advertising, you only make a tiny amount of advertising revenue. So in an uncompetitive topic in which it is easier to get traffic, you’ll only earn peanuts from your ad clicks. Such a topic can be difficult to monetise with affiliate products too, if there’s limited things you can sell.
Conversely in a competitive topic you can find it very difficult to get traffic, even though you will find more choice of affiliate products to choose from to sell. The answer I believe lies somewhere in between your passion and what the market wants. Without a long term focus on your blogging, it’s going to be difficult to get traffic. And without a good product to sell from your blog, you won’t easily make money from it.
Tapping into a product you can offer and which you completely align with, and a topic you’re going to be happy blogging about (potentially for years) is the answer. This gives you a massive advantage over the many bloggers who will quit because they chose a topic they didn’t really care about, and/or which they can’t monetise.
Get Paid Blogging
Blogging can be an awesome way to generate an income. But it can also be incredibly tiresome; especially after months of hard work and nothing much to show for it. So if you’re going to take on blogging and potentially earn from it, it’s well worth setting yourself up for success and the crux of this is to choose a topic you love writing about.
Imagine being six months in to your blogging and still you’re struggling to make sales. How do you feel? If you feel ok about it, you’re going to last a whole lot longer and eventually make it work. But if you’re frustrated and disillusioned how long do you think it’ll be before you quit?! I chose a topic to blog about in an area in which I had no interest.
Each blog post took longer to write because I had to research every single one of them! After 6 months my blog did rank on Google. But I was utterly burned out and had zero interest in keeping going. So eventually my blog fell off Google and I gave up on it. It taught me a hell of a lesson. If you’re going to be a blogger, choose a topic you love. You can’t lose if you love what you do!
Finding Affiliate Products Which You Align With
The best way to get paid blogging is not only to choose a topic you love, but to also align yourself with an affiliate product/program which you completely believe in. This was a mistake I made when I started out as an affiliate marketer. I picked several products I didn’t care a jot about and threw up multiple websites in a vain attempt to sell them. I think I sold maybe one product after all the work I put in; shed plans as I recall from a site called TedsSheds.net – long since passed!
To make sales consistently online you’ll need a lot of traffic to your blog. This will definitely require a lot of content if you want your traffic for free. But getting traffic and making sales are not the same thing. You can get traffic to your blog without making any sales.
So to give yourself the best chance of success, your products need to make sense. They need to be aligned with your content. Otherwise your visitors won’t want them.
Turning Visitors Into Subscribers
Selling products from a website can be tough. You need to give your visitors more opportunity to get to know you, like you and trust you before they will buy from you. This is where email marketing comes in. If you sign up on this website for my newsletter, you will receive regular updates from me to your inbox. This is a massively important thing for bloggers. It gives them more opportunity to sell to their visitors because they can hold a longer term conversation with them through email.
Most website visitors don’t buy on their first time on a site. They typically will need several touch points before they buy something. So to give yourself a better chance of turning your blog visitors into customers, get yourself an email marketing service and learn how to collect email subscribers from your blog. You can access one for free here.
See also how to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing.