Is it really possible for a beginner to make money from a blog? Can you make a living from blogging or is it just another myth? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’.
Blogging for money is not a theoretical concept, but it is a reality. Anyone with a basic knowledge of blogging, SEO, and a general idea of how the internet works can start a blogging business and make money.
How Bloggers Make Money: An Introduction for Beginners
The blog you are reading now is a real life example of a blog to make money.
The purpose of this guide is to help you understand how to make money blogging avoiding mistakes or wasting valuable time on tasks that will not contribute to your main goal.
It is aimed at beginners because I remember when I started (in 2002), I found it very difficult to understand how blogging can help you make money.
It took me several years to figure out the whole picture and figure out what I was doing wrong and how to change things.
Hopefully, this comprehensive step-by-step guide will put you on the right track. in the right direction from the start and give you a solid plan to follow that will generate results. two in the quickest way possible.
Before Going into details, let me clarify something from now on.
It is not an easy job, it is a complicated and time-consuming process that requires A LOT effort and hard work, but it is also one of the best and most rewarding jobs in the world.
The reward of building a successful blogging business is not just money but more importantly, the sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction of building a business without depending on anyone but yourself. talent and strengths.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many articles on “how to make money blogging”?
If some people know the magic formula, why do they share it with the World and not keep it and make more money?
The answer is simple. It’s every blogger’s dream to reach a point where they make money online and then share how to start a blogging business with the rest of the world.
Of course, as we’ll see below, it’s another way. of making money through affiliate marketing or selling your own products and capitalizing on your success.
Let’s rewind and start from the beginning. How do most bloggers make money online and how can you do the same?
How to make money with a blog
Here are the 7 steps to follow to make money with a blog.
- Set up your own self-hosted blog
- Start publishing great content
- Generate organic traffic to your website
- Build a community around your brand
- Start earning money selling ads
- Earn money selling your own products or services
- Earn money through marketing of affiliation
1. Set up your own self-hosted blog
This is perhaps the easiest step. It is very easy these days to register a domain name and set up a blog. All you need is a little help and pointing in the right direction.
In summary, to start a blog you need to follow these steps:
- Register a domain name
- Sign up for web hosting
- Set up WordPress
- Publish your first blog post!
If you don’t You already have a blog, start with Hostinger. You will be presented with a wizard that will guide you through the process step by step. In 30 minutes or less, you’ll have your own self-hosted blog with WordPress installed, and then you can move on to step 2.
Mistakes to avoid when setting up your own blog
As a blog beginner blogs, it is normal to make mistakes. That’s perfectly fine as long as you learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat them.
When it comes to starting a blog, keep these tips in mind.
Keep your focus on your main goal is to make money online.
Your goal is to reach a point where you will start making money from your blog, you must not forget about it.
I mention this again because I know from experience that a common mistake beginners make is to spend too much time and effort designing the ‘perfect blog’, forgetting that in the early stages (when there is no traffic), no one cares. about your website design, and that includes Google.
I’m not saying website design isn’t important, it is, but not in the early stages. Your main goal in this step is to get your blog up and running and start creating content that will drive traffic for you.
There’s a lot of work involved in getting traffic (and leads), and you should devote your energy to those tasks. from the beginning.
You need to have your own domain and self-hosted blog
As you will read in the guide on how to start a website , there is a big difference between hosting your website on a free platform like medium.com and have your own domain and your own hosted website. Starting a blog requires choosing the right hosting solution. Hosting ensures that your content is safe and trustworthy when it reaches your ideal readers.
Make the right decision from the start and choose the right platform. By far, a self-hosted WordPress website is your best option.
Keep it simple
If you’re starting now, try to keep everything as simple as possible. possible. Don’t overcomplicate things because you’ll lose yourself in the process.
You have a lot to learn, and as you progress you’ll change your mind about a lot, so save your time and energy for the more complicated tasks.
2. Start Publishing Great Content
So, you’ve got a website up and running, that’s great!
Now it’s time to get to one of the most difficult and challenging tasks of blogging, which is nothing more than creating the actual content for your blog.
Keep this in mind
A blog without content is nothing, a blog with mediocre content is Just another blog in the millions of blogs already published, a blog with great content is a profitable business.
That said, it’s important to understand early on the importance of content to the success of your blog. Blog. .
Great content (good, great, or great, your choice), will bring you traffic (we’ll see how below), credibility, and make you money (in different ways).
So what is great content?
Great blog content isn’t necessarily text, it can be images, videos, infographics, or even audio. BUT, in order to rank high on Google (and other search engines), your content should be mostly text.
As I mentioned earlier, keep it simple at first. Later, for best results, you can combine text with other shapes to make your content more interesting.
Great content has the following characteristics:
- It is unique for your website (not an exact copy of an already published post)
- It is free of spelling and grammatical errors
- It is meaningful
- It is insightful
- It’s fair
- It’s something that helps people do/understand/learn something
- It’s easy to read
Don’t worry if the list above doesn’t make much sense for now, as you get more experienced you’ll understand it better.
Let’s see how you can practically create a good content for your website.
Choose a theme that enjoy reading/researching/writing
When n start writing content for your blog, you should be able to provide content that meets the criteria for good content (as explained above).
If you are not passionate about the subject, this process will be very difficult and you will give up before you even start.
A blog to make money needs a lot of content and you should propose many ideas and topics to cover weekly (if not daily), so keep this in mind when choosing your niche.
Pick a topic with a decent audience
It’s not enough to be passionate about one topic, others should be too.
Remember that to make money from your blog, you’ll need people to buy your products or advertisers to pay money for your advertising space. .
If your selected topic doesn’t have a decent audience, none of the above will happen.
The easiest way to do a preliminary search as to the potential of your niche is to open Google and search for phrases (keywords), which come to mind.
Look up the number of results and types of websites that appear on the first pages of Google.
Don’t Go Too Broad, Make It Specific
While you need a decent audience for your chosen topic, don’t go too broad because there are probably thousands of websites already on the same topic.
Popular topics have a larger audience but are also very competitive. If you are starting now as a freelance blogger, it would be easier to compete with other bloggers rather than online companies that have teams of writers and SEO behind them.
Let me give you an example. to make this easier to understand.
Let’s say you’re passionate about ‘fitness’ and ‘healthy living.’ If you do a Google search for ‘weight loss’ or ‘diets’, you’ll get thousands of results, many from online magazines or long-established websites loaded with thousands of pages of content.
It is impossible for a new website to compete with these and get traffic from Google for such broad terms.
What you can do instead is narrow down your topic and go after a specific niche that is still related to your passion but with less competition. An example would be “healthy lifestyle tips for children”.
It is a topic of great interest, mainly from parents who want to learn how to provide a healthy lifestyle for their children, and also have the money to buy a product (perhaps an ebook) to help them do it.
This process of figuring out what to blog about is called keyword research.
It’s a process that requires master early on and I suggest you take some time and read the following articles:
3. Drive organic traffic to your blog
Let’s recap the process so far.
Your first step is to register your own domain and set up your blog.
Your second step is to decide the topics to cover on your blog and master the keyword research process.
The next step is to start generating organic traffic to your blog, and this is what which I will talk about in this section.
What is organic traffic?
To make money from your blog, you need organic traffic and not General traffic only. Organic traffic is generated from search engines (primarily Google).
What makes organic traffic more valuable than any other traffic source is ‘intent’ user’.
A user typing a query into the Google search box has a clear intent. He or she is looking for an answer to a question, wants to learn something, find information or buy a product.
Their intention is expressed through the search terms used in the search query.
For example, a user searching for “how to do an SEO audit of my website”, is clearly looking for a step-by-step guide on how to do an SEO audit.
You are very specific and to be eligible to rank for that (or related) term, you must provide Google with comprehensive guidance on how to perform a manual audit.
When If you do this correctly, your blog posts will eventually rank high on Google and you will start getting targeted organic traffic to your blog.
How to get organic traffic to your blog?
The Targeted organic traffic is the most valuable traffic source to your blog because it’s the traffic that converts.
For ‘convert’, n We mean a number of things:
- Users are more like staying on your page longer, reading your post
- They are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter
- They are more likely to ask about your services
- They are more likely to buy your products
We will cover each of these in more detail in the last section of the post, but for now, let’s see how you can get more search engine traffic for your blog. .
You need great content
Although I covered this in step 2 above, I’m mentioning it again because it’s extremely important. If your content isn’t up to Google’s standards, what you read next won’t work.
You need to fix your technical SEO
Technical SEO it has to do with how your blog is set up and how well it is optimized for search engines.
Your blogging platform (especially if it’s WordPress), is SEO friendly by default, but still, there are a number of things to check and change to make it even better.
Things like:
- Blog Structure
- URL Structure
- XML Sitemap Optimization
- Using Schema Markup
- Canonical URLs
- Optimizing Category and Tag Pages
- Website speed
- Mobile compatibility and accelerated mobile pages
- SEO webmaster tools
They are all very important in the process.
You need to get your On-Page SEO right
On-page SEO goes a step above technical SEO and is all about how you can make your content and web pages more visible to search engines.
When checking your On-Page SEO, you will look at things like:
- Optimized titles and description
- Post length
- Use of images and videos within your content
- Proper use of headlines and post formatting
- Internal best practices linking for maximum SEO
You need to work on your SEO Off-Page
All the actions described so far to increase your organic traffic have to do with elements that you can change /optimize on your website.
Another very important aspect to get more traffic from the mo search engines is off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO is the process of promoting your website on the web in order to increase awareness of your content, products or services.
In other words, you need to tell other website owners that you exist. The benefits of doing so are many:
- Websites that have references (links) from other websites are more likely to be ranked higher by search engines.
- You will get more traffic.
- You will establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
As I mentioned many times before:
Well done- The SEO SEO can get you to the first pages of Google, while good off-page SEO can get you to the top positions.
The most popular and effective off-page SEO method is link building. .
What is link building and why is it so important?
Search engine ranking algorithms are always looking for ways to understand the quality of a website.
The main intention of a search engine, and Google in particular, is to keep its users happy by presenting them with websites that have good content, are easy to navigate, and are generally considered high quality.
In addition to on-page SEO optimization, another way to convince them that your website falls into this category is to have external links from other websites pointing to the pages of your website.
All things being equal, the website with the most inbound links will rank higher in the SERPS.
Link building is a topic complicated and that blogging beginners find difficult to understand. I know this from experience and from the feedback I get from my blog readers and clients.
What you should know about link building at this stage is:
- It is not a question of quantity, but it is above all a question of quality. This means there is no magic number for how many links you need to get to rank high, but rather where these links are coming from.
- Links related to your topic from websites that are highly trusted by Google are more valuable than links from article directories or other low-quality websites.
- If you engage in black hat link building practices (i.e. buying links, exchanging links with others), you will have problems with Google.
- Google’s algorithms will penalize your website for trying to manipulate their algorithms and you will lose all your rankings as a result.
How to increase your blog traffic through link building?
The most popular link building methods are:
- Guest posting on larger, more well-known websites than yours
- Link to other websites from your content. or and contact them to let them know. If they find your website useful, they may decide to return the favor.
- Contact other webmasters and introduce your website and content
4. Build a community around your brand
Once you have a blog with great content and traffic starts flowing, your next step is to build a community around your brand.
A common mistake beginners make is to skip this step and go straight to the money making part, but this is not the most efficient way.
Before making any sales (conversions ), you first need to gain the trust of the user and this is achieved through the creation of a community.
Note that I used the term ‘brand’ and not just blog and this is done on purpose.
At this stage, you should stop thinking of your blog as a hobby, but you should change your mindset and approach it as you would a ‘real’ business.
We all know that branding is a very important aspect. success of any business and your blog is no exception to this rule.
There are many things you can do related to branding (like having a distinctive logo, a unique tagline, etc.), and co community building is one of them.
What is community building for a blog?
In simple terms, what you are trying to do is create a community of people who will follow you blog, interact with their content, and buy their products or services.
The most common ways to do this are through:
Email marketing
People who sign up for your email list (aka newsletter) are a valuable asset to your blog. You can use your email list to let your community know when new content is available on your blog, to solicit their feedback, and to sell them products or services.
This won’t happen on day one, you need to first. earn their trust by providing value through your emails, but at the end of the day, it’s one of the most efficient methods of building a community around your blog.
In my case, 20% of The monthly sales from my SEO courses are generated through my email list.
Social networks
Some people do not like receiving emails, they prefer to use social networks to read their news, communicate with their friends, and, in general, they spend a lot of time online.
You need to make sure you have a social presence on the same channels as your potential followers.
There are many social networks available that you can use, but as is When starting to set up and brand your blog, it’s best to focus on those channels that have proven to be more effective than others (when it comes to building a following), and these are Facebook and Twitter.
Start with build your fan base on Facebook and also spend 10-15 minutes a day on Twitter.
Remember that your goal is to connect with people who can become potential followers and customers of your blog and not just with anyone who has a social presence. Create some profiles and choose your target audience wisely.
Web push notifications
This is another way to connect with your community. People who sign up for push notifications receive a notification each time a new post is published and each time you want to send them a new message.
Reply to comments
Last but not least, you should not forget to comment on the blog. I’m not talking about comments you can write on other blogs, but replying to comments other people post on your blog.
If someone writes a comment on one of your articles, expect a response. , and ignoring them is not good when it comes to building a community.
Look at some of my previous posts and you’ll notice that they have dozens of comments. What I do on a daily basis is try to respond to each comment and help my readers in any way I can.
I don’t approve of all comments; I only post comments that make sense (not spam or self-promotion) and this encourages more people to post their comments.
5. Start Making Money Selling Ads
Did you notice how many things you need to do to get to the making money part?
Although this blog post is about making money from your blog, almost ¾ of the content is related to previous activities and this is how blogging for money works in real life.
As a reminder, it is necessary to understand that you will not make money from your blog if :
- You don’t have enough organic traffic
- You don’t have a decent email list
- You don’t have a community of loyal followers.
- You don’t have content that converts
Assuming you have successfully completed the above tasks, let’s see how you can earn money online and reward yourself for hard work.
Selling Ad Space: Google AdSense
I’m a big fan of AdSense, I admit it! I have been an AdSense publisher for over 15 years and while there are alternatives, Google Adsense is still one of the best ways to make money online.
I use Adsense on my blogs etc. I’ve made a good 6 figure so far.
I’m not using Adsense on this blog because, as you’ll read below, there are cases where AdSense is not the best way to monetize your blog.
A few things to know about making money with AdSense:
Easy and reliable
Adsense it is very easy to use and reliable. All you need is a blog with great content and lots of traffic.
You add AdSense to your blog and when people click on one of your ads, you get 68% of the money paid by the advertiser (the the remaining 32% goes to Google for testing this service.)
You are trustworthy because you know that Google will pay you on time and will do everything possible to protect the system against fraud and spam.
You can choose what type of ads to show, how often to show them, how the ads will look, and many other things.
How much money can you make with AdSense?
The amount of money you can make with Adsense depends on three things:
- Your organic traffic levels
- Placement of your ads
- The number of advertisers available for your niche.
Let’s quickly examine these factors:
Obviously, the more traffic you have, the more money you can make with Adsense. It’s as simple as that.
To make money with Adsense, you need people to click on your ads and the position of your ads on the page is a very important factor.
While the best way is to test different ad placements and find out which placements work best for you when you place Adsense in your main content (as opposed to the sidebar and footer), you can expect higher click-through rates (CTRs) and this means more revenue.
Ads that are above the middle of the page also work better.
This is an example of Adsense ads within the content of a blog post .
Adsense is an auction type system based on keywords, when a user is searching on Google and then visits a website that has AdSense ads, it will try to show the user ads that are relevant to the search query.
If there is a lot of competition, that is, a lot of related ads, this increases the money the advertiser will pay and the money you will earn.
Can you advertise your blog or products through AdSense?
Yes, you can through Google Adwords.AdWords is the system used by advertisers to serve ads that show up on Google search and Adsense websites.
Note that you cannot use Adwords and drive PPC traffic to a landing page that has Adsense. In the past, this was a method that made some people a lot of money, but not anymore.
When is it? best to use ad sense?
- Use AdSense on websites that cover a wide range of topics (news portals, magazines, newspapers, forums, etc.).
- Use Adsense on websites in the healthy living niche (fitness blogs, weight loss, etc.).
- Use AdSense on websites that have a lot of page views.
When is it better NOT to use Adsense?
- Do not use Adsense when you can create and sell your own products or services.
- Don’t use Adsense when you can make money through affiliate marketing.
6. Make Money Selling Your Own Products or Services
I mentioned earlier that I don’t use AdSense on this blog. The reason is simple. The purpose of this blog is not to earn money from advertising, but it is the channel I use to promote my SEO Courses and Digital Marketing Services .
Think Talk about it this way: When you sell ad space on your blog, what happens? You only get a portion of the money as 30% goes to the intermediary (advertising company) and the advertiser profits from your content and hard work.
To minimize money loss, you should consider creating and sell your own products or services.
Of course, this is not as easy as it seems. It takes a lot of effort and hard work to create products that other people are willing to pay money for BUT it is the best way to build a long lasting online business.
Having your own products will maximize your profits and you know that every effort whatever you do to get more traffic will lead to more sales.
The easiest type of products to create and sell online through your blog are eBooks and online courses.
Before you spend time and possibly money creating your own product, you should do some homework.
To be more specific, you should answer these 4 questions:
- What kind of of product to create?
- Who can potentially buy your product?
- How much to sell it for?
- How to test your product idea before actually making the product ?
To answer the first three questions, you need to do your research and find out what is available on the market, who is selling it, and how much is sold. end.
But even if you have this information available, it’s still the most important thing to know if your product idea will sell before you actually make the product, and this is what I’ll explain next.
When I thought about selling an online course through my blog, I wasn’t sure if this was something my readers (and the community) would be willing to do. buy. After all, there are hundreds of SEO resources available for free.
So what I did to test my idea was this:
- I created a sales page for my course (which is similar to the one you see now).
- I added banners (call-to-action boxes), in my articles and in the sidebar to redirect traffic to that page.
- When someone clicked the BUY NOW button, they were redirected to the checkout page, but when they tried to complete the purchase, they received a message that the product is not available yet.
I know this is not the best user experience, but it helped me answer a lot of questions and gave me the energy and power to create the course.
I ran the test above for 2 weeks and at In the end, did I know:
- How many people clicked on the CTA boxes (I tried different messages and found the one that led to the best conversions)
- How many people visited the sales page
- How many people clicked the Add to Cart buttons
- How many people showed their intention to complete the purchase by visiting the checkout page and clicking the buy now button
It also knew their country of origin, the device they were using, and many other details.
After reviewing all the information, I decided that an SEO ebook is something my readers want and are willing to buy.
So, I stopped the test and created the actual product. It was not an easy task; It took me about 6 months to create the first version of the course, but in the end I was very happy that I did it.
The actual sales figures were even better than the test ones, and since last year , course sales generate a good monthly income.
The bottom line is this: Do your research, find an idea, and try it out. If the test is successful, proceed to the deployment, if not, start the process again.
7. Make Money Through Affiliate Marketing
Last but not least, another way to make money from your blog is by selling other people’s products (digital or physical) for a commission.
This is generally known as affiliate marketing. Here’s an overview of the process.
- Find what products you want to promote
- Sign up for their affiliate marketing program and get a unique link and banners to use.
- You add the links/banners to your blog
- When someone clicks on the links, they are redirected to the provider’s website
- When they make a purchase , you get the agreed commission
Sounds good, right?
Well, it’s not as easy as it sounds. You still need to find the right products to promote, and you still need to test whether your readers and the community are willing to pay money to buy the products you will suggest.
A few things to know before you start affiliate marketing :
- Do not promote products or services that you do not personally use. You don’t want to lose your user’s trust. Only promote products that you know from personal experience and will help your readers.
- Google doesn’t like websites or web pages whose sole purpose is to make money from affiliate marketing. Your website should provide real value to the user, without being too promotional.
- Don’t overdo it. It’s okay to suggest products in your blog content, but not all the time. Good affiliate marketers don’t promote products all the time. They provide value to their readers first, and then suggest products.
- If you’re on WordPress, read this guide on how to manage your affiliate links (the white hat way).
If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, check out Pat Flynn’s blog, he is one of the most successful affiliate marketers on the internet today. p>
Conclusion
Blogging for money is not a theoretical concept. Thousands of bloggers make money through their blogs, whether it’s selling ad space, their own products/services, or through affiliate marketing.
All of these successful bloggers have a few things in common:
- They have blogs with excellent content.
- They have managed to create communities around their blogs.
- They use more than one way to earn money. They have their own products, but they also make money from affiliate marketing and selling ad space.
- They have been blogging for years and it took several years for them to get to the point of blogging for a living.
If you’ve gotten to this point, I’ll let you go with this:
Everyone can learn how to make money blogging. The amount of money you’ll earn depends on how much work you’re willing to put in to make it happen.
It’s not easy work, and it’s not something that will produce results in a few months or even years. , it will take time and need a LOT of patience. BUT, as I mentioned earlier, once it happens, it’s some of the best work in the world!
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