Is blogging still profitable in 2021? Having learned several online marketing strategies over the years, I’ve jumped from blogging, to video marketing to paid marketing, social media and back to blogging. But blogging is still one of my favourite strategies.
When I first started blogging not much happened. I would write a few posts and then look for the money to roll in! This was years ago before I realised how much work is needed to make blogging profitable. Saying that, one of my first online sales came from a free blog platform (Hubpages.com), where I wrote a product review and promptly made a sale! It was a short lived success though, and most of my blog posts simply disappeared into the vast void of the internet super highway!
Is Blogging Still Profitable?
Since lockdown 2020 I’ve worked harder on my blog posts. My martial arts school was shut down and I switched to running online classes. This gave me more time (and need), to focus on the online business. So I blogged a lot and things started happening!
I’ve been a blogger for several years now though and over that time I’ve definitely improved. I understand SEO (search engine optimisation) better now and definitely write longer articles than I used to. In the early days of blogging though, nothing much happened. As a result of this I lost the faith in it as a legitimate marketing strategy. So my blogging was sporadic and I would quit for several weeks or months and then jump back on it again.
But since things started happening from my blog posts (leads and sales), I’ve upped the ante. There’s nothing quite like proof that something works to motivate you to work harder than before.
Is Blogging Still Profitable – Your Niche
Your niche is pretty important if you’re blogging, or thinking of starting a blog. With a good niche you can write a lot of information quite quickly. Since I’ve been studying affiliate marketing for several years now, and online marketing strategies, that is the subject of many of my blog posts. But this is a very competitive topic and hence why it’s taken me years to make a consistent income from it.
Less competitive topics are easier to gain traction from because the number of competing websites is far less. But with a less competitive topic, you have the problem of monetising. Less competitive niches tend to be more difficult to monetise and although you can monetise any niche, using Google Adsense, it doesn’t always equate to a reliable income source.
But beware of building a blog just for the money. It’s well worth aligning with a passion or interest because you should expect to keep at it for several months at least before you’ll see much in the way of traffic, let alone income.
Choosing The Wrong Niche – Case Study
A few years ago I was desperate to make money online. I was building niche website after niche website and none of them seemed to get me anywhere. A friend had built a site around the topic of potato growing and I decided to look for a similar topic. My strategy was to find a long tail keyword which already had traffic, and build a domain name targeted website around the keyword. My domain name was whentoharvestgarlic.com.
I knew nothing of harvesting garlic and this was on a bit of a whim! Researching information for my blog posts, I spent several months and wrote a tonne of content for the site. It started to rank and I got some traffic. Whoopee, I thought, and promptly realised it was very difficult to monetise my site. I joined an affiliate program which offered some vegetable products of some kind.
After placing some affiliate banners on my site and some Adsense adverts, I sat back to watch the money roll in!
I had no interest, zero, in garlic harvesting! I decided I had reached the end of the road as far as creating content was concerned, and my site started falling off the top spot. Eventually it was replaced by a garlic harvesting fanatic. They created posts regularly and videos on the topic. How could I compete given my lackluster approach?!
Lesson Learned
I realised that I was out matched and I had no interest in writing any more about garlic harvesting. After all, how much could I possibly write?! You just harvest the little buggers don’t you! Then you eat them!
After joining an online business community I later learned about Ikigai – a Japanese term roughly translated as “reason for being”. Garlic was most definitely not my ikigai.
Is blogging still profitable? I believe it can be yes, but in order to make blogging profitable, you need to find your ikigai. Blogging about something simply for the outcome, is no fun. It can be profitable, but it’s much more difficult than blogging about something you’re interested in, or passionate about.
Monetising A Blog
Monetising a blog can be the tricky part depending on your topic. With my garlic harvesting site, it was difficult to effectively monetise. I used some Adsense adverts and a banner from an affiliate website which was tentatively related to my subject. But I wasn’t getting nearly enough traffic to make any money. The site was largely a failure and I eventually let it go.
However you monetise a blog, you need traffic and buyer traffic ideally. Any old traffic can convert to advertising clicks, but it doesn’t convert when it comes to selling affiliate products. To sell affiliate products from a blog you need a very targeted kind of visitor and to show them products which they really want or really need.
Ideally use an affiliate program which offers recurring commissions if you can. This isn’t always possible and will depend on your blog topic. Monetising with Amazon products for example won’t pay as well as if you use recurring income products such as digital products, memberships and software products.
List Building & Lead “Magnets”
Every blog should have an email opt in form somewhere on the site. This is one of the best ways to monetise a blog. Offer a giveaway on your site, such as a free ebook which relates to your blog topic and your products in some way. Once on your list, you can email your subscribers for years to come; promoting your affiliate products and earning money.
On a blog post, visitors only have a few minutes before they leave, potentially forever. But if you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can keep in touch with them for years.
For bloggers it’s vitally important to build an email list to help monetise your blog. Whatever other monetisation you have, build a list of subscribers and build relationships with them through email marketing. Over time, as your email list grows you should start to sell more and more affiliate products by doing the same things – emailing your list.
Is Blogging Still Profitable?
I began blogging several years ago and found it pretty frustrating despite some short lived early successes.
If you are consistent with your blogging, you can start generating results within a few months or years. Initially, if you choose a topic you’re well suited to you should see some traffic growth after a few months. With a good lead magnet, some of this traffic will turn into leads. If you have chosen a good affiliate product and learn how to market it through email marketing, you should start seeing some sales coming in too.
The speed with which this happens will depend on a number of variables including:
- Your consistency – and how much content you create
- The quality of your content
- How well you share and distribute your content – see create free website and make money
- Your blog topic and relative competition
- The backlinks you and others post to your content
- How Google and other search engines view your content
- How people interact on your content (as a social signal to Google)
To keep going for long enough to make blogging profitable, you need to love your topic or have a huge passion for what you’re doing. I’ve been at blogging for several years and have only really started making a consistent income in the last year from it, (albeit a small one). But I’ve been inconsistent with my blogging and taken weeks and months off at a time. Because I’m now using recurring commission affiliate products in my affiliate inventory, I’m earning consistently from my blogging.
If I was to use only products which paid me only once, it would be a different story.