If you’re wondering how to earn from blog writing, this one’s for you! There’s a couple of main ways to earn from a blog. You can monetise a blog with your own business, if you have one, a product you own, or with affiliate marketing or advertising. So if you have nothing of your own to sell, you can sell other people’s products (affiliate marketing) or use ads on your blog and earn a percentage of advertising revenue.
The main problem for bloggers though isn’t necessarily the monetisation. It’s the traffic. With over 600 million blogs on the internet there’s a huge amount of competition. So getting your blog found among the noise is not easy. Most bloggers will start out with zero traffic unless they have some kind of following already from somewhere else. If you’re starting from scratch, as most new bloggers will be, you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting traction.
Depending on your blog niche, it can take months or even years to build up your traffic and start getting followers. That’s even before we talk about monetising your blog. So in the first instance, choosing your topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – Your Niche
“Choose a profitable niche” is often the advice you’ll hear when it comes to blogging. But that could be many niches and profit only comes after you’ve built up your blog and started generating traffic and sales/ad clicks. So it’s worth looking at what is meant by “a profitable niche”.
What is a profitable niche? A profitable niche is one in which you can generate sales and make a profit. With blogging, your traffic is going to come from multiple sources and mostly for free. Ideally it will come from the search engines (Google, etc.) but also you’ll want to find other methods of finding visitors such as social media, email marketing and perhaps even some paid marketing.
Your niche needs to be something you align with and have at least an interest in, if not a passion for. That’s because it’s going to take some time generating content on a regular basis over the course of months and even years. If you can’t imaging doing this in your chosen topic, then it’s probably not the niche for you.
The other advice which is often handed out is “choose a topic you love”. If you love your topic you’ll work much harder on it and for longer. But you also need to align your topic with some kind of monetisation strategy. See also choosing your blog niche.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – Monetising A Blog
Let’s say you’ve spent the last 6 months creating some awesome content in your niche and have built up a fair few daily visitors from the search engines. How are you going to make money from these people?
Without anything of your own to sell the two main options are affiliate marketing and advertising. With advertising you place code on your site which converts to adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn a share of ad revenue. Adsense is one program you can use for this but there are others. With this method of monetisation, you’ll usually only earn tiny amounts for each click on your ad space. This means you need a huge volume of traffic (and free traffic) to make this profitable.
With affiliate marketing you can earn more, but only with the right products and if you make the sales. So you might even test different strategies out to see which works best. But to see any meaningful results you’re going to need traffic first. So it’s best to start out with your monetisation methods in mind before you start out. Otherwise you could waste a lot of time blogging only to realise you’re not going to make any money from it.
To monetise a blog with affiliate marketing, you need to find a product which aligns with your topic which you can sell on your site.
Turning Visitors Into Sales
To turn blog visitors into customers you need to:
- Get them to your site through content creation – blogging, blog promotion, etc.
- Get them to sign up to your email list – offer some free giveaway on your site
- Offer them value through your email messages – built trust
- Promote your product – sell an affiliate product
Most visitors don’t buy from a new website they have just landed on. Purchases online are often made after a number of touch points with a product or service. Amazon might be the exception here because they have built up trust with so many people over the years. But a new website is different, the visitor doesn’t know you. How many touch points does it take to make a sale? This depends on a number of factors but you can gain your visitors trust by offering them something for free in exchange for their email address.
Then make sure you continue to build trust by sending out useful and informative emails which help them somehow with a particular problem. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy. But also an email marketing campaign gives you the opportunity of putting your products in front of your visitors more regularly and giving them continuity. More “touch points” and trust equals more sales.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – SEO
SEO is an important part of blog writing and it means Search Engine Optimisation. To get more traffic to your blog means writing with the search engines in mind so that Google ( and other search engines) can appropriately index your content and rank your articles/site appropriately on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages. Get an article to the top of Google for one of your search terms and your traffic can make a sudden leap upwards.
But since there’s so much competition online for blogging, you’ll likely not achieve this immediately. You’ll need to build some trust with Google first by creating some quality content on a regular basis and over a long period of time. This can be a frustrating period and you shouldn’t rely on the search engines entirely for your results. Make sure you promote your articles and give them the respect they deserve with your own promotion methods.
You can do this in a number of ways such as through setting up automated blog post sharing on social media and placing social media share buttons on your site. You can also use SEO tools to help you rank content on the SERPS. See best blog plugins for WordPress for a list of useful plugins for bloggers.
Choosing Long Tail Keywords In Your Niche
As a new blogger, you probably won’t get your articles ranked for the best keywords in your niche. After all, with over 600 million blogs on the internet, you’ll have some stiff competition and many of them have been around for years. But still, it’s a good idea to look at Google’s keyword planner for ideas for blog post titles. This will show you other keywords which are already being searched for on Google.
The best keywords have a huge amount of monthly searches and of course it would be nice to see all that traffic on your site! But unfortunately those keywords are well catered for with older domains which have huge authority with Google (and thousands of backlinks).
But the “low hanging fruit” of long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty are your chance to get your content ranking more easily. While there’s no guarantees with ranking your content, you have a much better chance if you aim at the keywords which are less competitive. To find them you can scroll through Google’s keyword planner and look for long tail keywords with less traffic.
Write quality articles for these terms and of course use a good SEO plugin (such as Yoast SEO) to help you.
Summary
Blog writing can be a great way to earn a living. But there’s a lot of other blogs out there to compete against. To give yourself the best chance of success with blogging, choose a topic you can write about for an unlimited amount of time! Many bloggers will quit when they don’t make any money. So your best opportunity is to find a niche which you would love to write about, whether or not it makes you any money!
“The person who loves walking will walk further than the person who wants the destination”.
The same applies to blogging. If you love what you do, you’ll go the extra mile. If not, you’ll likely give up before you get the traction you desire. You also need to align your passion with a suitable affiliate product in order to make money from blogging. See also what are the best affiliate products to promote.