If you love writing and sharing interesting content with other people, you may be wondering how to start your own blogging business.
Blogging is still a popular way to create written content, with over 600 million blogs all over the world. But can you really turn this passion of yours into profit?
Yes, of course, you can. Blogging has become so popular because it is one of the most efficient ways how to earn money online.
You don’t need a big budget to start and even better, you don’t need any employees to launch your blog. All you need is the right strategy, tools, and patience.
As a beginner, you can make money blogging by implementing various techniques within your strategy. These could include ads, affiliate marketing, on-page, and off-page SEO, marketing techniques, content scaling, authority building, sponsored content, and many others.
Combining more tactics is key to a profitable blog.
If you are really passionate about blogging, and you implement the right techniques, your blog can start to make profits within the first 9 months.
This post will break down the different ways you can earn income through blogging.
Can You Make Money Blogging?
Let’s get straight to the subject – can you make money blogging?
This might be the question you have on your mind as you’re staring at your beautifully designed blog, ready to post your first article. The good news is that yes, you can make serious money with blogging.
To start making money, you need a lot of people to click on your content, read it, and check your website regularly.
More often than not, you cannot build such a successful blog overnight. Unless you’re a celebrity or a pretty popular public figure, it takes time and effort to raise your blog to a satisfying level of fame – one that is high enough to allow you to generate nice sums.
Sometimes, you could spend years until you’re able to make thousands of dollars from the content you offer. Other times, the simplest blogging side hustles can turn into massive money-making machines.
Therefore, how much you can make from this activity is variable.
When you are just getting started, you might earn small amounts, such as $100 or a few hundred dollars. As time passes by, if you post regularly and implement good marketing strategies while attracting a huge, loyal fan base, you’ll be increasing your earnings.
How to Blog and Make Money
So, let me show you the most important steps to implement if you want to make money with your blog.
All these are proven steps you need to implement if you want to launch a successful and profitable blogging business.
Niche and Audience Research
A niche refers to a particular topic that is part of a larger subject.
Take cars, for instance. You might be thinking of starting an auto-centered blog, but the topic is too vast. You could technically talk about anything, whether that’s how to fix common engine issues, what certain car noises might mean, or reviews of various Mercedes-Benz models.
If someone visits your platform and sees so many different types of content, they will not know what association to make with the blog. Therefore, they will be less likely to stick around.
For this reason, finding a good and profitable niche is crucial.
It should be a topic with enough demand – audience potential, but also something that doesn’t have excessive competition.
The best way to find your niche is by choosing a subject you are passionate about.
What are you most interested in? Do you want to talk about lifestyle, art, or food?
Knowing what you want to share with your readers the most will make it easier for you to pick a niche that suits you.
When you think you’ve found something, research the market to see whether it’s profitable enough for a blog.
If you’re into ice skating as a hobby and want to talk about it, look it up on Google Trends. It will show you how many people are searching for this topic.
The same applies to any other small niche.
Another thing you can do is look up the most popular niches at the moment and create a blog inspired by one of those topics.
The highest-earning blog niches are food and personal finance, followed by lifestyle and “mommy” blogs. In general, these blogs make around $5,174 every month.
You’ll find that people are earning nice amounts of cash in various niches, such as hair accessories, pet accessories, specific food recipes, and so on.
But not every niche is profitable – therefore, spending time on research becomes essential.
Strategize Content
In order to make your blog content take off, you need to come up with a good strategy. This means that you must figure out what you want to achieve with your content and when the best times to post are. You should also establish how often you are going to post.
If you want to learn how to make money from a blog, one of the most important things to remember is that you must get people to visit your site.
Otherwise, monetizing it becomes impossible.
Readers come to you when they have questions that need answers or problems that need solutions.
In other words, you must be able to offer them something valuable.
First things first, you should find your target audience.
It could be new parents, aspiring hairstylists, or anyone who would be interested in the type of content you offer.
Then, you should think about what problem you will be solving for your reader.
Will you educate them about certain topics or address problems they might be experiencing and how to deal with them?
Moreover, it’s crucial to structure your texts accordingly. Some bloggers may post large blocks of text, some add a lot of pictures with descriptions for each, while others rely on list-based content.
But you should also consider what people want. According to statistics, 36% of blog readers go for list-based headlines.
You also have to think about what makes you unique, and why visitors should take your advice and not the competition’s.
Perhaps you are an expert in a particular domain, which makes you more qualified to speak on the topic and thus more trustworthy.
Another thing that needs to be established is when you’ll be posting your content.
Will you post daily, bi-weekly, weekly, or a few times per month?
Creating a content schedule will tell readers when they can expect new blog posts from you. If you don’t have a schedule in place, it will all be too chaotic, and people will not be happy to follow your blog in the long run.
It’s fundamental to brainstorm content ideas and find the best titles that spark the interest of your fan base.
For the best results, you may also consider hiring editors or having someone else review your content before posting it.
Statistics show that 46% of bloggers prefer to edit their work themselves, while the remaining 54% either ask someone to look over their work or have editors.
Build Topical Authority
Earning topical authority may not be the first thing on your mind when you’re learning how to make money online blogging.
Still, it’s fundamental if you want to increase your profits.
Building authority is relevant for SEO purposes – and this could influence how high you rank on Google search, which could ultimately regulate how many visitors your blog gets. Authority is a credibility or trustworthiness measure, and it describes how important a site or webpage is.
Topical authority refers to how much authority you obtain by providing high-quality content.
When you put effort into your posts and provide valuable content, your blog will get the trust of the visitors, turning into an authoritative and reliable source of information on a particular subject.
The more you focus on topical authority and building it, the more clicks your blog will get from individuals who are searching for the type of information you offer.
Outreach
Search engine optimization is something many bloggers used to increase their Google rank.
Although SEO can be implemented within your content, there is also an SEO type known as “off-page SEO”, allowing your blog to gain more traction through outreach.
To put it simply, while on-page SEO is implemented within your site, off-page SEO occurs outside the website.
Off-page SEO can build the blog’s authority through link building, social media, forums, events, and other activities.
It pretty much involves things that you and other people do away from the blog to boost its ranking on the big search engines.
Outreaching can be done by obtaining backlinks from high-authority sites that can grow the authority of your own blog.
Content marketing can also be useful, as you’d be writing guest posts or even infographics that can then be linked to big newspapers.
Social media can also be used for outreach.
Around 4.70 billion people in the world use social media today. So, using this to your advantage can be a great way to grow your blog and start making money from it.
Through social media, you can speak to your fan base and even answer people’s questions.
You should look at your social media as a brand channel and a customer service platform.
Marketing Techniques
How else can bloggers make money if not by implementing various marketing techniques into their strategy?
There are more than 10 useful marketing techniques you can take advantage of – you just need to find the ones that work well for your blog.
One of the most advantageous marketing techniques is email marketing.
When it comes to blogs, it works by creating an email list for the blog when a reader consents to get updates by email.
As such, you will establish a group of readers who wish to receive blog-related updates in their inbox.
Once someone opts to hear from you by email, you’ll be able to grow the relationship you have with them by guaranteeing access to high-quality content and even products you may be selling.
Email marketing for your blog can be useful as 99% of people who own an email address check their inbox on a daily basis. What’s more, 58% of them check their email as soon as they wake up in the morning.
So, there are high chances of subscribers seeing your content and engaging with it thanks to this marketing tactic, boosting your profits.
Affiliate marketing is another great tactic that bloggers use to generate more money.
What you have to do when using this technique is recommend certain products to your readers.
Obviously, these products have to be related to the type of content you’re writing regularly.
You don’t even need to bother creating your own products – you’ll simply be a salesperson for existing firms.
Thus, you get the possibility to make money without worrying about packaging, shipping, and similar aspects.
Commissions you earn through affiliate marketing are generally between 15% and 70% of the price of the product.
If you’re lucky enough, you may earn dozens from one sale, and go as far as to get up to $1,000 or more per month.
The Amazon Associates program is a great place to get started with this, as Amazon is an established e-commerce business that people trust.
Of course, there are more marketing techniques you can consider, such as guest blogging, social media marketing, and others. Take your time implementing the best ones.
Monetization
What better way to make money from your blog than monetizing your website? Here are some ways to implement monetization:
1. Display Ads
Ads may not be people’s favorite, but if you know how to display adverts without going over the top, you can bring in some money.
Display ads work fast, and they are a great monetization technique to use as a beginner. It is not the most profitable feature ever, but it’ll add to the rest of the cash you get if you implement other techniques.
Car Expert’s Alborz Fallah added display ads from Google Adsense to his blog after a friend kept telling him about it. By doing so, Alborz started making a daily $200, which is a pretty nice amount of money.
2. Affiliate Marketing
One of the most common ways bloggers make money online is by becoming affiliate marketers.
This technique involves promoting companies’ products, and whenever there is a sale made through the links you provide on your blog, you earn a commission.
3. Hybrid Model (Affiliate + Ads)
If you want to bring in more money, combining affiliate marketing with ads to create a hybrid model of monetization is a wise decision.
You’ll get the cash from ads, but you can also get something extra from the sales you help businesses make.
4. Get Paid for Sponsored Content
Did you know you can make sponsored content and make money from it?
You can publish sponsored articles and send newsletter sponsorships, and you can earn certain sums of money for it.
As a beginner, it might be hard to receive sponsorship inquiries, but it’s an aspect to consider in the long run.
Whenever you make a sponsored newsletter placement or post a sponsored article, you get a one-time fee as payment.
How much you earn depends on various factors such as the blog’s click rate, average open rate, and active email subscribers.
5. Offer Consultations
Being an expert in a particular industry can be used to your advantage.
You can help others with information by offering consultations.
As a consultant, you’ll help identify the problems of your clients, then make the right changes for them, so they can solve these issues.
Not only that, but you can also teach your fan base various skills that will help them in their daily life or business.
The good news is that being a consultant allows you to earn cash.
One famous blogger who makes money through consultations is Neil Patel.
As an SEO consultant, he earns $20,000 per month.
You can offer consultations in different fields of expertise, and depending on each area, you can make up to $90,000 per year.
Scale Your Blog
Adam Enfroy is a blogger who doesn’t spend anything on advertising, yet he makes $80,000 monthly in revenue.
How is this possible? Well, he does it by scaling his blog. This technique can also be your money-maker if you want to earn more cash.
Scaling your blog can be done in different ways.
You can take advantage of rapid-ranking keywords, but also write more content.
Learn how to do the keyword research right! The goal is to find low competition keywords with high search volume.
To find such keywords, you need to use the right tools. One of the best tools available online is Ahrefs.
The next step to scale your blog is the content production. You can’t expect big results without producing enough content and posting new posts actively.
Consider starting a contract with cheap writers from Fiverr or Upwork for bulk writing. The key is to find good quality writers that understand your niche.
Don’t underestimate the selection of the right person. Bad content quality can hurt your rankings or even worse, you can get penalized by Google.
There are also AI-writing tools that can help you create more content much faster.
Finding the right keywords and scale the content production are 2 of the 3 main components of your scaling strategy.
The third is the outreach, so called link-building.
Backlinks to your blog are crucial for SEO. It is one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
There are different tactics how to build backlinks to your blog.
Guest posting, finding broken links, or build your own tool are some of the most used strategies to increase authority of your blog.
Yes, authority. This is what backlinks tell about your site.
If enough authoritative sites from (not only) your niche are linking to your site, then your site is considered as trustworthy and authoritative source of informations.
And so will Google rank your posts higher in the search results.
Important is to use only the “legal” link building practices.
Do not risk penalty from Google as their algorithm is getting smarter every day.
How to Start Blogging in 5 Steps
You’ve seen that you can make your living from blogging. Even better, you can build a real online business from one blog!
Here are the first single steps you have to follow to launch your first blog:
1. Choose a Niche Relevant Blog Name
First things first, you need to find a suitable blog name that is relevant to your niche.
There are two different ways you can choose the name for your blog:
- Based on your name – this gives you more freedom. You can simply change the topic you’re writing about once you evolve.
- Based on your niche – in this case, you can go for something specific. Let’s say, you want to start a travel blog. Ideally, your name should represent something related to travel niche that is easy to remember.
2. Get Hosting
Next, you may want to find a hosting provider.
This will ensure that all your website files are stored online, making the blog accessible on the Internet. You’ll have to pay for a hosting plan.
For example, Hostinger is a great service, and it offers three plans for $1.99-$3.99 per month.
3. Sign Up to WordPress
Register on WordPress.org – the platform that most blogs use. Click on “Create an Account” and offer the information requested.
The registration process is simple, and you’ll be ready to set up a blog in no time.
4. Pick a Simple Theme
People will want to read posts on a blog that also has a nice design.
So, choosing the right theme is essential.
Fortunately, WordPress has numerous themes you can pick from.
The theme must suit the purpose of the blog and have all the functions you need, but also load fast – because of SEO.
Also, make sure it’s mobile-friendly because most people read blogs on their smartphones now.
5. Start Publishing
Now you can start publishing unique and engaging content.
Make sure you implement the right money-making techniques to start generating profit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do most blogs fail?
Most blogs end up failing because they are unable to offer good and engaging content that helps their readers.
Others cannot keep a regular posting schedule, or they give up after a few months when they see that they’re not reaching the sums they were dreaming of.
Remember that you have to be patient and work hard on your blog to see results.
How much does it cost to start a blog?
It may cost between $50 and $200 to start a blog, but it all depends on the type of blog you opt for and the goals you want to reach with the website.
What type of blogs make the most money?
When you are thinking of starting your own blog as a side hustle, you may be wondering “What type of blogs make the most money?” Today, lifestyle blogs, pet blogs, “mommy” blogs, and DIY blogs are some of the most profitable ones.
Conclusion
Did you think that blogging is no more than just a simple hobby?
Well, now you know that this is not true – blogging can help you earn some extra cash and even become a full-time job.
You can use all the different steps and tips in this post to start making a profit from your blogging content. If you pick the right marketing techniques and strategize your content accordingly, you’ll slowly earn more and more.
So, what are you waiting for? Start applying these tips and your career as a blogger will flourish.
