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.
See also how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.
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.
