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Blogging: Passion First, Money Will Follow!

If you fancy yourself as a blogger, focus on your passion, the money will follow. Blogging is a very cheap way to make money online by attracting an audience and then monetising it somehow.

You can monetise a blog in a few different ways such as by selling affiliate products, sponsorship or selling advertising space. But you’ll make nothing unless you grow your readership and this takes time. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, you’ve got some competition, no matter what niche you choose.

But choosing a niche you’re not much interested in is a big mistake. You’ll never keep up with a topic you don’t have a passion for. To be successful, you’ll need to be in the game for months or even years. That’s very difficult if you don’t absolutely love writing and you don’t absolutely love your topic.

Blogging: Passion First, Money Will Follow, A Tale Of Caution

A little while ago, well actually a few years ago really, I built a website around the topic of mushrooms! I had taken a course which taught me how to rank a website on Google. The key was to build a website around a specific keyword, by purchasing a keyword domain name, and then building a lot of content.

I chose a keyword “when to harvest mushrooms” because it was an uncompetitive one. My researched showed that I could potentially rank on Google for it, and get a lot of free traffic. You can read more about this topic here.

There were three mistakes I made here and although my website did rank, and I got free traffic, I soon lost interest. Mistake number one was I chose a topic I knew nothing about. So for each piece of content I wrote, I had to heavily research my niche. This took time, and since blogging takes time anyway, it considerably added to the timeframe of my generating website traffic.

The second mistake I made was to choose a topic I had zero interest in (beyond ranking my site). With a topic you’re not interested in, writing is much more difficult. Plus, it’s much harder to keep going months down the line, which is what is necessary if you want to become a successful blogger.

The third mistake was not figuring out my monetisation method first, before I got going. Mushroom harvesting turned out to be a difficult niche to monetise.

Blogging: Passion First, Money Will Follow

However you monetise your blog, the priority, I would say, is to choose the right niche for you. There’s a million online searches for “best niche for affiliate marketing” and other such queries. But the reality is that it’s going to be different for everyone. Although certain niches will be easier to monetise, with blogging at least, you’re going to need to be writing for a very long time.

So unless you pick a topic you’re totally passionate about, you’re likely to drop out with the thousands of other bloggers who fall by the wayside.

Unless you continue with your blogging for at least several months, if not years, you’re not going to attract enough visitors to make it pay. That’s fine if you’re just a hobby blogger. But if you want to make it your living, you’re going to need to go the extra mile.

With a topic you’re uninterested in, that’s a tall order. Like my mushroom blog, you’ll likely find that life is too short after a few months, like I did. I dropped that blog and it soon fell off the top spot on Google, only to be replaced by a passion blogger who was hugely into the topic.

Blogging: Passion First; Hobby Blogging

You know the difference between a hobby and a profession? Often it’s that the hobby is a passion interest which someone would do regardless of whether they get paid or not.

So a good measure of your blog topic, is to ask yourself whether you would enjoy writing about your particular topic for the next few years. If not, you probably haven’t found the best topic yet.

Many bloggers write on their websites as a past time, for fun, and not for the money. Often this is how many of the top bloggers started out. They didn’t start with the money in mind, they started with their passion in mind!

Think about what you would enjoy writing about every day, and then go and do that! That’s the key to finding your niche.

Monetising Your Blog

While passion is probably the best indicator as to whether your blog is going to last, you will also need to monetise it if you want to make money at some stage.

With my mushroom site, I found it difficult to monetise when I eventually came to do so. So it’s a good idea to figure out how you will monetise your website before you start out.

While the advice of following your passion is sound, you also need to align with a product or service in order to attract the right audience to make money. This can take some time and thought because your passion might be one which has few affiliate products to sell – like with my mushroom site.

Other ways to monetise can be to sell advertising space, or place ads (Google Adsense for example). But these methods lead your visitors away from your site to other people’s sites, which can be a slight conflict. Plus they pay very little.

Ideally, find an affiliate product which you can fully endorse and get behind.

Build An Email List

Most bloggers will have an email list and that’s for a very good reason. Since most of your organic traffic will disappear very quickly, never to return, a few will sign up to your offer/newsletter if you have one.

A newsletter, ebook or some other giveaway offer lets you collect email subscribers from your blog. As you collect subscribers your email list grows and grows. A list gives you more control over your traffic and you can send them your latest blog posts.