How easy is it to start blogging to earn money online? Blogging can be one of the simplest ways to earn online. But it can also be a huge challenge. With over 600 million bloggers in the world in 2022, there’s huge competition. If you’re choosing a very popular topic too, it can be very difficult to get heard through all the noise.
But if you can make blogging pay, it has some huge benefits. You can generate a passive income, you can escape the 9 to 5 and you can work from anywhere globally. So the question is do you want that badly enough?!
Many bloggers blog because they enjoy their topic too, not for an income. But if you can find a topic you love and you can generate an income from it too, it’s a win win! In fact this is the best way to approach a blog.
Without being in it for a good amount of time, it’s much more difficult to break through and get the necessary engagement and exposure to succeed financially. But if you choose a topic you aren’t passionate about, how long do you think you’ll keep it up for?!
So, one of the best decisions you can make when contemplating building a blog is what topic/niche it will be about.
Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Choosing Your Niche
Your niche is your topic and this choice will affect how much you enjoy blogging and how engaged your readers are. Choose a topic you’re less than thrilled. about and before long, blogging will become a drag, draining your enthusiasm and bringing you down! You can’t sustain a blog for long if you don’t choose your topic well.
I chose a topic I wasn’t at all interested in! Within a few months I was completely burned out. The site soon dropped off the search engine results pages (SERPS) and I let it go! Don’t make the same mistake. Choose a topic you are genuinely interested in and you’ll be able to out-perform other bloggers in the same niche because you’ll be more passionate about it!
It’s a little trite to just say “do something you love”! This needs to be balanced with a viable niche which can be easily monetised. I chose a niche in mushroom harvesting. This niche was both of little interest to me and difficult to monetise! In a popular niche, such as money making online, there’s a huge amount of competition. So you’ll need to blog over months or even years before you gain traction. So even though this niche is easily monetised with affiliate products and ads, you’ll have your work cut out making it work.
Conversely if you choose a niche which nobody cares about or which can’t be monetised with affiliate products, you’ll struggle to make it pay.
The answer is to find something you’re genuinely interested in, and find affiliate products you believe in, which align with your topic.
Start Blogging To Earn Money: Micro Niche
Sorry to say but blogging is a slow process. Even if you work really hard it will take a long time to make it pay! That’s because there’s so much competition. Ultimately bloggers want free traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.). Once they get free traffic, things can change quite dramatically. But getting this traffic is tough because there’s so many others doing exactly the same as you. The key to speed up this process is dig into your niche and find a niche within your niche which is more specific.
An example of a niche within a niche is “chair yoga for seniors”! Yoga is a hugely popular niche in which there’s many blogs. So if you started a blog on Yoga, it will likely take a huge amount of time and effort to get any traction. But if you dig deeper, and find a more specific topic, which has a smaller more niche audience, you’ll find far fewer competing websites.
Your site will stand out because you’re a specialist. This makes the journey a whole lot quicker. In a popular niche it can take years of blogging before you get the traffic you want. In a less competitive niche (a sub-niche) you might do it in a few months. See also best micro niche for blogging.
Start Blogging To Earn Money: Monetisation
Of course you can blog in any topic you choose but the longer you can sustain your blogging habit, the better your chances are to outperform the competition. That’s why choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy writing about is paramount. If you hate every minute of blogging, you’re not going to sustain it for years are you!?
To earn from blogging you can monetise in a couple of main ways. You can make your own products to sell, or sell your own service/business if you have one. But if not don’t worry because you can join an affiliate program and promote other people’s products from your blog.
There’s affiliate products in almost any area you can think of. Just have a look on Amazon, or Clickbank.com for ideas of products you can sell from a blog. You can also monetise a blog with advertising too. Adsense is the most popular platform where content creators can go to place ads on their content. You get paid when your visitors click on your ads and only in tiny amounts. So you’ll need a lot of free traffic if you’re going to monetise with adverts. That’s why affiliate marketing is a good choice because you can make more money from blogging with less traffic.
With high ticket affiliate products and subscription products on your blog you can dramatically increase your income from a smaller amount of traffic, once you start attracting visitors.
Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Free Blog Platforms
There’s several free blogging platforms where you can get your start as a blogger and I started with Hubpages.com and Blogger.com. However, it’s far better to own the website you are blogging on for a few reasons:
- Your site has more authority with your visitors – they perceive you as more of an authority that they would on a free blog platform.
- Search engines see you as a greater authority and therefore ranks you better with your own website
- There’s more control with your own site – you choose what to put up there and you’re less restricted by rules, terms and conditions – which can limit your choice of affiliate products and links etc.
Here’s a few other free blog platforms where you can get your start if you don’t have the cash to start your own site:
- Joomla (www.joomla.org)
- Tumblr (www.tumblr.com)
- Blogger (www.blogger.com)
- Ghost (www.ghost.org)
- Medium (www.medium.com)
- Weebly (www.weebly.com)
Buying A Domain Name & Website Setup
You can buy a domain name of your own from many places but I use namecheap.com. A domain name gives your own website character and credibility. You can also target specific keywords within your domain name which can give you a head start in terms of traffic generation. See my article on this topic “how to build a niche website“.
Once you’ve bought a domain name you’ll need to host it with a hosting provider. I use Hostgator which provides cheap hosting and lets you install your site through their user interface.
Once you’ve bought your domain name, I recommed to use WordPress which you can install through the Hostgator interface. WordPress is one of the easiest interfaces you can use and gives you complete control over your site. You can also install a number of plugins to WordPress very easily and for free. Checkout my blog post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Writing Your First Blog
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and blogging is exactly the same! I recommend a plugin called Yoast SEO which allows you to optimise your blog posts for the search engines. This means you’ll get more ranking status with Google and other search engines should your post come up against similar blog posts, which it surely will!
Most blog posts won’t rank however, particularly in the early stages of being a blogger. This makes it hard to get regular traffic to your site. To get around this problem, you can target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Finding the keywords which have the least competition on Google can give you a chance at free traffic with a new site. Over time, as you create more and more content, your site authority will grow and you should start getting more traffic.
But this can be a long and arduous task which is why if you don’t enjoy the journey it’s all the more difficult to sustain over the longer term. To get more traffic more quickly, share all your posts on social media frequently, write often and use social share plugins. See the best free blog plugin for WordPress for some other recommended plugins which will make your blogging journey smoother!
Summary
Can you really start blogging to earn money online? Starting blogging is very different to earning money from blogging. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’re competing with a huge number of others for attention. So if you’re going to become a blogger, it’s wise to do your homework before you start. The best thing you can do is to spend some time deciding on your blog topic. In a very competitive topic, you’ll struggle to get your content seen. But, choose a topic which people are uninterested in and you’ll struggle to get visitors for the opposite reasons.
It can take months or even years for bloggers to get enough traffic to their blogs to make any money. Here’s a few tips to get ahead of the rest:
- Find a topic/niche you are passionate about and could continue writing about for months or years
- Make sure you check how you’re going to monetise your topic before you start. Some niches are harder to monetise than others
- Ideally use subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products to monetise your niche. This can give you greater traction with less traffic.
- Build an email list from your blog – use an enticing call to action and promote your affiliate products to your list automatically. Access a free autoresponder software here.
- Join an online business community for help and support: learn more here.
