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How To Earn Money Through Blogging

If you’re wondering how to earn money through blogging, listen up! In this article I’ll talk about the best strategies to earn money through blogging and how to pick a suitable topic. Not all bloggers make money, but if you’re in it for the long term, you can earn money through blogging. You just need to keep growing your blog, and be persistent.

Getting started with a blog is the toughest part. Even though you’re probably massively enthusiastic to get going, you need to set out the groundwork if you’re going to make your blogging profitable. Don’t just rush in because you can quite easily hit a roadblock, get stuck; or worse still quit.

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Monetisation Methods

Most blogs are monetised through a couple of main strategies: affiliate marketing or advertising. An advertising platform any blogger can use is Google’s Adsense program. Adsense lets you place advertising on your site and earn from the clicks of your visitors. You’ll only earn tiny amounts from this strategy, so you need a lot of traffic.

Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets you earn by selling other people’s products and services. Although you can earn a lot more through selling other people’s products, your content will need to align with your products in order to sell anything. So with affiliate marketing, you need to create content which brings in the right kind of traffic, not just any old traffic.

On most blogs you’ll find a “giveaway product” which bloggers use to encourage visitors to opt in to their email list. From their lists, bloggers sell affiliate products. On a blog, visitors only spend about 10 minutes or less looking at a piece of content. So they only have this amount of time to make a purchase if you’re selling affiliate products. But once you get your visitors on your email list, you’ve got potentially years to encourage them to buy something, if they stay on your list for that long!).

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Traffic

Without visitors to your blog content you won’t make any money. This is something most newbie bloggers struggle with. I struggled for years getting people to my content too. Before I started getting regular consistent traffic to my blogs, I was full of doubt. I doubted whether I was going in the right direction, I doubted my content was good enough, and I doubted whether I would make any money blogging.

I would spend several months creating content and then look at my results. Nothing. I wondered what I was doing wrong, got frustrated and quit for several more months. What a waste of time! If I had only have continued writing a single blog post a day, I would have monetised my blog far faster.

Once results did start coming it gave me belief in what I was doing. Belief is a game changer for a blogger. When you start seeing leads and sales coming in, it motivates you to create more content and be more consistent. But if you were only consistent at the beginning, and had belief in what you were doing, it would be a far smoother journey!

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Belief, Consistency & Knowledge

So in order to motivate yourself to blog day after day, with nothing to show in the way of results, you need belief in what you’re doing and consistency. This comes more easily when you get the right knowledge. If you understand SEO (search engine optimisation) better, then it will massively help you. I use an SEO plugin which helps me optimise my content for the search engines. Even so, much of my content doesn’t rank on Google. But I give it a better chance by optimising it.

I’ll also use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords to write articles around. This article “How To Earn Money Through Blogging” is a bit of a long shot whether I actually rank it. But I found the keyword using Google’s free keyword planner tool. This tells me how many people are (on average) searching for this particular keyword. Then I look on Google for the number of competing websites for the term.

Over time, the more content I write, the more content gets picked up by the search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, etc.

Content Is King

Writing good content is your best weapon as a blogger. If you write poor content, it doesn’t get found because the ranking signals shows search engines that people click away, no-one links to it, nobody shares it and it’s basically rubbish content.

But if you write good content, or great content, it gets shares. People link to it, and search engines find it and rank it. When it gets ranked, more people see and share and on the cycle goes. So it all starts with creating content which is good. That comes down to picking a subject you love, have a passion for or have a keen interest in.

Ikigai

Ikigai is a Japanese term roughly translated as “reason for being”. It’s worth a mention here because if you can align your blogging with your passion, or interests, it’s that much easier to make it earn money for you. However you monetise a blog, it’s nothing without constant streams of traffic. So before you even think about your monetisation methods, you should consider how you’re going to write content for months and months without losing the will to live!

I’m no stranger to writing content I have no interest in. In my article on is blogging still profitable I talk about a blog I built around the subject of garlic harvesting – something I knew nothing about. I also spent 6 months working for an airport parking company writing about airports and parking! After that I was ready to throw myself under a bus!

There’s nothing quite as soul destroying as writing about something you don’t care about. So if you’re going to write a blog which will stand the test of time, you’ll need to be able to keep up your enthusiasm for month and even years.

Building A List

Blogging can be very profitable once you build up some momentum. At first it seems difficult because you have no results to build your strategy on. So picking a subject close to your heart is key to build up the momentum needed to create some regular traffic.

Once you start getting traffic, you’ll want to turn that traffic into leads. Turning traffic (website visitors) directly into sales is pretty difficult. If people don’t know you they will be more sceptical of you. Online retailers like eBay and Amazon have built up trust in their customers, but people are still sceptical about buying products they don’t know about from people they don’t know.

Of course you can monetise using Amazon’s affiliate program, but Amazon only pays from 3% to 11% commission to it’s partners. So you’ll be sending your well earned traffic off for peanuts. It’s far better to monetise with affiliate products which pay much more – such as high ticket affiliate products and recurring income affiliate products.

This can most easily be done through building a list of subscribers. Selling directly from your blog is tough. Your visitors will only be on there for a few minutes before clicking away. So they only have a tiny window of opportunity to buy. Get them on your email list and you can extend this window to months, years and even decades.

Lead Magnets – Profiting From A Blog

Lead magnets are what gets people to opt in to your email list. I’ve already showed you a few lead magnets on this article with my ebooks. Ebooks are a great way to get people to opt into your list. Have a look at some affiliate marketing book pdf’s I’ve created to help build my email list.

With an ebook, you create a small pdf and an ebook cover. You can use an outsourcing website like Fiverr.com to help you get this done. A good ebook is a good match for your visitors and for your affiliate products too. Ideally an ebook will encourage someone who is a website visitor to become a subscriber to your email list.

You can also just give away ebooks which contain your affiliate links within them. People who downloaded your ebooks years ago can still click on a link and make a purchase once they’ve got it! I like to use ebooks to get people on my email list because once on my list they are much more likely to purchase something as I email them regularly and keep in touch.

Money From A Blog – Emailing Your List

With an autoresponder, you can place email capture forms on your website and get your visitors to opt in to your email list. Once on your list, you can automate an email series to go out to your subscribers – often bloggers automate emails to go out one email a day, for several days in a row. After that’s finished, you can follow up with your subscribers every week or several times a week, depending on your particular style and business niche.

You’ve probably signed up to someone’s list already? Most businesses now try and get your email so they can bombard your inbox with spam about their products and services right?!

In order to keep your open rates high, you really don’t want to do this yourself! Ideally, give huge value to your list and fulfil on your promise when they signed up. If someone signs up to your list for an ebook, and you talk about something completely different in your emails, they won’t stay tuned in for long! But if you offer value and help them in some way, they are much more likely to open your emails when you send them.

Then, when you recommend a (relevant) affiliate product to them which can also help them, they are much more likely to trust them because you’ve given value and built a relationship with them; rather than just trying to sell them something and spam them!

Types Of Affiliate Products

Not all affiliate products are equal and although I’ve mentioned how Amazon have a huge amount of trust with customers, it’s not a great answer for bloggers. You might very well be able to sell Amazon products from your blog quite easily too, if your content is a good match for the product. But you won’t earn much from a 3-11% commission.

There’s better ways to monetise your blog and ideally choose products which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer the most value to bloggers. It’s also worth considering high ticket programs and two tier programs which offer commissions based on sales made by your referrals.

Digital products are a good idea because they offer 40%+ commissions compared to physical products which offer between 3-11%. Clickbank is one of the biggest market places for digital affiliate products. You can use a site called CBEngine.com which can help you identify the recurring commission products you’ll find on Clickbank.

How Long Does It Take To Earn Money Through Blogging

Depending on your blog topic, work ethic and consistency, you can make blogging start making an income in months or years. It really depends on so many factors that it’s impossible to say how long it will take for you.

I started blogging several years ago and struggled for a long time. I only started making consistent income from my blogging fairly recently after a lot of inconsistent blogging. But if I had been more consistent and focused, it would have happened much faster.

You can of course build an online business much more quickly without blogging or even needing a website. See fastest legit way to make money online.

Access a free video series to learn more about building an income online. Click on the image below to get access.

Get Started With Your Own Blog

You can get started blogging for free using a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com or WordPress.com. However, if you’re serious about making a living from blogging, I would recommend to get your own hosting and domain name set up. You can read about how that’s done in this article “Create Free Website and Earn Money”.

It takes a little more work to do this but once it’s set up it’s done. A website hosting will cost less than $10 a month and you can purchase a domain name for less than $10.

With free blog hostings like Hubpages and WordPress it can be more difficult to get traffic from the search engines. Plus, with your own website you can decide what you put on it. Free blogging platforms often limit your use of affiliate links and have more strict rules as to what you can post.

You can also set up a website quite quickly through using an online website platform. Have a look at the video below (click image) to see how quickly you can set one up. If you’re not very tech savvy, this is definitely an option you might want to consider.

Is Blogging Still Profitable?

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.

Is Blogging Profitable?

So, is blogging profitable? And if so, how do you make it profitable? How long does it take to become profitable as a blogger? All these questions are hard to answer since almost anyone can build a blog from anywhere in the world. Will they all become profitable? Most definitely the answer is a resounding no. But what’s the difference between those who create profitable blogs and those who don’t?

A profitable blog makes money; more money than is spent, too. To make a blog profitable you need to monetise it some how. Many bloggers monetise with advertising such as the Google Adsense program. Others use affiliate marketing. However you monetise your blog, you’ll need traffic to make your monetisation method pay. So the two main “musts” with a blog are monetisation and traffic. But that’s not the full story either.

Is Blogging Profitable?

Blogging can be very profitable yes. Some bloggers make 6 figures through their blogging efforts. But that’s undoubtedly a minority. The vast majority will struggle, or do it just for fun! Unless you’re committed to your blog, you’ll probably make nothing or very little.

You’ll need traffic and some monetisation method to make money from a blog. Without either of these it’s dead in the water. Most bloggers will use affiliate products or advertising to monetise their blogs. Or, they’ll use a combination of both. To get traffic to a blog means creating content and getting eyes on it. Ultimately a blogger wants Google to recognise their content and show it on the free search engines at the top of the page. If this happens, traffic will come! But it’s a big “if” rather than a “when”.

Before Google starts ranking your content it needs to see you and it needs data! Google has thousands of ranking data “points” on which to judge your blog content. If there’s a better blog post for the same topic, it’ll favour that instead of yours. Or another, similar post might have thousands of back links or is from an older, more authority site. There might be thousands of blog posts just like yours too; so depending on your topic, you may have little chance of getting even a look-in with the search engines.

Is Blogging Profitable? Monetisation Methods – Adsense

With Google Adsense, a blogger can place a piece of code on their content. Google turns that code into a specific advert which is appropriate for your specific content. For example, say your blog is about handy crafts. Google will show your visitors adverts relating to that particular topic. When someone clicks on your advert, you’ll make a small commission.

This is usually only tiny amounts: less than a $1. But this will depend on your blog topic. More competitive topics will usually have more expensive advertisements. So if an advertiser pays $10 per click, you might earn $4. If they pay $1 per click, you’ll earn only a few cents.

Unfortunately the more expensive topics are usually well over prescribed already. This means you’ll have a tough time getting your content ranking or seen easily. Less competitive topics usually have lower advertising costs associated with them. A site about Forex marketing for example will be hard to rank for with a blog. But it will pay a larger amount for an advertising click than a site about mushroom harvesting, for example.

Whatever topic you choose, rest assured you’ll need a huge volume of traffic in order to make a good monthly revenue from your blog. More expensive advertising is much more competitive in terms of search traffic. Less expensive topics will give you more scope for getting free traffic but less revenue per click.

Blogging With Affiliate Marketing

Most bloggers will use affiliate marketing on their blogs to monetise. Affiliate marketing lets bloggers promote other people’s products for a share of the revenue. With an affiliate blog you can make a lot more than you could with Google Adsense. But it depends on how you go about it. Some blogs are intended for monetisation with Google Adsense. Others are made for affiliate marketing. Of course you can use both strategies side by side.

Affiliates will promote products and services which match their particular blog topic. For example if you owned a travel blog, you might advertise hotels, taxi services or travel related purchases. If your blog was about gadgets, you could link your blog to gadgets from Amazon, for example.

Affiliate marketing can be profitable when used in conjunction with a blog. However, it again will depend on the volume of traffic you can attract and the particular type of visitors you attract.

Is Blogging Profitable – Type Of Traffic & Email List

With a Google Adsense blog your topic isn’t that important (more on this later). Google will attempt to monetise your adverts for any given topic you choose to write about. But with an affiliate product, your topic is going to attract a certain type of visitor. Ideally you want every visitor to purchase an affiliate product from your site! But in reality that isn’t going to happen. Only something like 1% of your visitors will ever buy something from your site. But you can increase this percentage in a number of ways. The main two strategies are:

Write content which attracts your specific customer “avatar” – the perfect type of person who not only likes what you’re selling but desperately needs it.
Encourage your blog visitors to opt in to your email list – once on your email list you can follow up with subscribers and build a longer term relationship.

With the right kind of traffic and a hugely enticing sign-in offer, you can get more of your visitors to join your mailing list. From there you can build relationships and extend the time period with which someone might make a purchasing decision. On a blog, someone only has a few minute to buy something. Once you’ve got their email you can sell something even years later to this same blog visitor.

Blogging & You – Choice Of Topic

Although your blog topic isn’t that important as far as Google Adsense is concerned, it’s vitally important if you want to succeed (and be profitable). Having made the mistake of blogging in a topic I knew nothing of, I realised how difficult this can be. If you at least have an interest in a topic, it makes much more sense to choose that topic over one you think might be profitable.

Choosing a topic because you think it might be profitable is a big mistake when it comes to blogging for profit! I know that sounds ridiculous! The reason is because it takes a huge amount of time and commitment to make a blog profitable. Expect to be blogging for several months before you start to see any results at all! Imagine blogging every day for several months about something you absolutely hate – or have zero interest in!

Having worked for an airport parking company I was writing about airports and parking for 6 months straight! Despite looking for the most interesting bits about the subject, I was super miserable and had had enough! I also built a blog around the mushroom harvesting topic – which I knew nothing of. I had to research every post I wrote. Eventually I gave up having made next to nothing from it. Choose a topic you love (or have a passion for) and you can keep going long enough to make it profitable. Without the passion, it’s much harder.