How Can You Earn Money From a Blog?

Welcome to How Can You Earn Money From a Blog?
Can you make money writing a blog? Yes, you can. How would you like to make $30,000 a day with your blog?

That might sound impossible, but it’s actually what the Huffington Post earns for its owners. Or how about Engadget, which makes almost $10,000 a day.

And in case you think multi-writer blogs are not the only ones that bring in the big bucks, think again.

Blogger, Chris Brogan takes in over $300,000 a year with his self-titled blog, and Yaro Starak makes an estimated $280,000 annually with Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Those types of income figures might seem out of reach, but remember that every successful blog starts with a single post and the determination to make it big.

To get you started in the right direction, here is a how-to guide on how to make serious money with your blog.

Table of Contents:

• What is a Blog in Online Marketing
• Choosing Your Niche
• Setting Up Your Blog
• Creating Content For Your Blog
• Setting up a Content Schedule
• Monetization
• Scaling Up
• Conclusion

What is a Blog in Online Marketing?

A blog is a website that is designed to discuss informal topics and featuring content on posts that are mostly text-based.

It can be monetized in various ways, and it is an effective medium to contain product reviews and other promotional methods to earn money.

Here are the steps on how can you earn money from a blog

Choosing Your Niche

Success with a blog begins before you write a single word or add your first post. It starts with choosing the right niche.

A niche is the subject area that your blog will cover. A tightly focused blog targeting an audience that is willing to spend money is going to make it easier to make money with your blog.

When selecting the niche for your website, there are three primary considerations:

1. Is it something you have a keen interest in?
2. Is there an audience for that content?
3. Is that audience willing to spend money?

Now let’s have a quick look at each of these in a little more detail to explain why they are essential.

Is the niche something that you have a particular interest in?

You are going to spend a lot of time developing your blog, and so it helps if it is an area that you are passionate about.

If you find the topic boring, it is going to be difficult to produce high-quality content for that site consistently. Your inadequate passion for the subject will almost certainly come across to your audience.

Is there an audience for that content?

You might be interested in a particular topic, but is anyone else? If an audience for a particular niche is too limited, then it will make it challenging to attract enough readers to earn money from the website.

The problem that you are addressing may also be too narrow for you to produce content on that topic consistently. Remember that you are creating this blog not just for yourself but for other people.

Here are three different ways you can find out if there is an audience for a particular topic:

You want to enter the main keyword that describes your niche. I would recommend that unless you are targeting a specific area, for example, German Tennis Enthusiasts, that you look at the total global searches.

Your primary keyword, known as your “seed” keyword, is the most common search term people would use if they were looking for information on that niche in Google. Examples might include:

• Tennis training
• Speed Reading
• Sleepwalking
• Photoshop tutorials

Make a count of the number of people searching for each of the keywords that you chose earlier. Also, look at how many related keywords there are too your main keyword and the search volume for these.

• Amazon method – The Amazon approach is looking at how many books are published on your topic. I do recommend that you look at the physical book category rather than the Kindle section.

The reason for this is that for a physical book to be published by a traditional publisher, there needs to be a proven audience.

Publishers don’t want to take chances on books where there isn’t a pre-existing audience. Use your main keyword to see how many books are published on a particular topic.

If there are five or more books from traditional publishers on a subject, you can be sure that there is an audience for that niche.

• Using Jaaxy– This keyword research tool is essential for every online business.

Checking out the competition – Lastly, a Google search for other blogs in your niche is a good indication of its viability.

• You might think that completion is a bad sign, but it is an excellent way to determine if there is a  possibility to make money or not.
• Search on Google for your “Niche” + blog. See how many blogs already exist and how long they have been in operation.

Are people willing to spend money on the topic?

A niche might have an audience, but if people are not prepared to spend money on that subject, then you are not going to be able to monetize your blog.

So how do you identify a niche that people are willing to spend their money? First, look to see if people are spending money or products and services in that industry.

For example, if we look at golf as a niche, we can quickly identify that people are willing to spend hundreds, or maybe thousands of dollars, on their interest in golfing from buying clubs to joining particular courses to paying for one-to-one training.

One of the fastest ways to check if products are being sold in your niche (if you are unsure) is to visit Amazon.com.

A quick search using the name of your niche will reveal what types of products are being sold and for how much.

In general, you will find it easier to make money in your niche if you are selling high-value products in that niche.

In other niches, people may not be purchasing a physical product or services, but they will spend money on information that will help them to solve their problems or to achieve their goals.

The copywriter Gary Halbert remarked once that if he wanted to make money, he would look for a starving crowd.

What he meant by this remark is that he was looking for people with a problem that they were desperate to solve.

The more urgent or significant the problem is, the more you are willing to get the solution.

For example, if you have bed bugs, then you are going to be pretty strongly motivated to find a way of removing them.

On the other hand, learning how to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie – while no doubt delicious – is a far less urgent problem to solve.

An excellent resource to find out if people are willing to spend money on information to address the problems in your niche is Clickbank.

This website is a marketplace for digital products. When you are searching for products in your niche, look at both the number of products that are listed and the number of those products being sold.

To find out how many copies of a product are being sold, look for the figure called “gravity.” The higher the gravity of a product on Clickbank, the more products that are being sold.

Setting Up Your Blog

It’s much easier to establish a blog than many people realize. Website builders such as Weebly, Moonfruits, and WIX include drop and drag builders, making it possible to very quickly set up a blog.

Free platforms like Blogger mean that you don’t even have to pay to get started with your website. However, if you are going to establish a blog to make money, it is recommended that you use WordPress on your hosting.

Here’s why.

• No restrictions – While free platforms like Blogger sound good in practice, they can be limiting when it comes to making money.

There are often restrictions in place which don’t allow you to make money with affiliate marketing (see below). This kind of platform can be a signing problem for a money-making blog.

• Branding – When you have your website, you can brand it exactly how you want it.

You have freedom on what you can put on your website, and this can make your website look more professional, which in turn can make it easier to turn readers into buying customers.

With your own hosting, you can label or your blog exactly how you want it.

• Expansion – You want your blog to be a success, and that will mean scaling up! With your own hosting, it is as easy to build a 100-page blog as it as a 5-page blog.

When setting up your website unless you have programming experience with HTML and CSS, it is a good idea to use WordPress as your platform.

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system powering more than half of the top 100 hundred blogs in the world.

It’s completely customizable, easy to update, and doesn’t require any programming skills. Best of all, it’s completely free to use.

While WordPress is free, you will still need to pay for hosting. Hosting is the service that provides the server space where your website is going to be housed.

Luckily hosting these days is extremely cost-effective, with a package available for as little as $5 a month. Some of the most popular hosting solutions include:

• GoDaddy
• Bluehost
• Namecheap
• HostGator
• WPEngine
• Dreamhost
• SiteRubix

These hosting services also include “one-click” install for WordPress websites, which makes it very easy to get quickly started with your site.

Creating Content For Your Website

To attract visitors to your website, you need to have great content. Content doesn’t just mean written content either.

Videos, photos, infographics, slideshows are all great types of content to add to your website.

No matter what kind of content you are producing, some general rules will help you to determine whether it is going to be successful.

Keyword research is essential.

• Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool – To get started with Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool, you enter your “Seed” keyword again, as detailed earlier.

You will  be presented with “related keywords.” These are other searches that people typically perform when looking for information on your website.

You will also be able to find how many times they are being searched.

• Ubersuggest – Ubersuggest is another excellent tool to get ideas for your blog.

While Ubersuggest doesn’t tell you the search volume for a particular keyword, it does draw its suggestions from across different search engines.

An Auber-suggest search will often produce more than a hundred possible topics to write about, making it an excellent source of quick ideas.

• Amazon – Earlier, we looked at how you can use Amazon to find out if there is an audience for your niche. You can also use Amazon to find potential blog topics, as well.

To do this, search for books on your topic, then use the “look inside” feature next to the image of the book’s cover.

Navigate to the contents page of that book.  Look at the chapter titles for the book. Each of these chapter titles is a potential post for your blog.

Setting Up A Content Schedule

Being successful in building an online audience requires consistency. You need to post new content to your website consistently and frequently.

The easiest way to accomplice this is by creating a content calendar. A free and easy tool to set up your content calendar is Google Calendar.

This calendar is where you list precisely which topics you are going to write about and on what dates you will publish them.

Monetization

Now that you have content for your website, you can now think about how you are going to make money from your website.

There are so many different ways of monetizing your website, and you just have to select the most productive and develop it.

The best approach is usually to test out different monetization channels. You will often find that depending on your niche some monetization methods will work better than others.

Having multiple monetization methods on your website can help to produce multiple income streams. These sources of revenue can contribute to making the earnings from your website more consistent.

Here are some of the most effective ways that people make money from their website:

• Advertising

One of the easiest ways to get started making money from your website is to add advertising. Adding banner ads or Google Adsense to your website will help you to help to monetize the traffic to your site quickly.

If you are uncertain of how to start monetizing your website, adding Adsense is usually the best approach.

• Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is where you make recommendations for a product or service, and if someone acts upon that recommendation, then you earn a commission.

Depending on the type of “offer,” the action needed to win a commission will differ.

With Cost per Lead (CPL), the person who acts on your recommendations needs to provide information, such as an email address or phone number, for you to receive your commission.

With Cost per Sale (CPS), you will receive your commission if someone buys the product or service.

In affiliate marketing, you are acting as a middle man. Consequently, you do need to hold product inventory, shipping, deal with refunds, or handle customer service.

Once you have made your recommendation, your task is complete. To track whether your recommendation resulted in a sale or a lead, you are provided with a unique tracking link.

This link is the tracking link that you will add to your website when you are directing your readers to the product or service.

Some of the most significant affiliate programs include:

• Clickbank
• Shareasale
• Amazon Associates
• Commission Junction
• eBay Partner Network
• Wealthy Affiliate

Click on the images to learn more.

Another good source of affiliate programs is OfferVault. This program is an affiliate search engine that allows you to quickly look through thousands of different affiliate offers in a vast range of categories.

• Product Sales

As you develop your blog, you might decide to shift to offering your own product.

Selling your own product tends to be more profitable than acting as an affiliate or adding advertising. It tends to be a little more complicated, and it is one of its drawbacks.

Once you have developed a product, you will need to facilitate the payment and delivery of your product.

It is an excellent idea to start with verifying that a niche is profitable using affiliate marketing before moving on to developing your own product.

A product can be a physical product, for example, yoga mats or a laptop case, or a digital product, like a software application or video training course.

Selling and delivering a digital product tends to be relatively easy compared to a physical product.

You can use a platform like the aforementioned digital marketplace Clickbank to process payments, delivery the product, and recruit affiliates to promote your product.

If you are looking to create a physical product, a good option can be to white label a product. This product is where you put your own branding on an existing product.

Sites like Alibaba.com list products that you can choose to white-label.

• Offering Services

Offering services are monetization method which often offers extremely attractive profit margins.

Unless you are targeting a particular geographic area, you will usually need to think of a service that can be provided over the internet.

Think about what type of services your target demographic might require.

For example, if your blog is targeting business owners, then services like web design, copywriting, or marketing will work well.

You can even offer your services to help them set up their own blog! Coaching or tutoring can also be a very lucrative service to offer.

Video communication tools like Skype and Google Chat, have made delivering these types of services incredibly easy. You can provide coaching or tutoring either one-to-one or in a class format.

Scaling Up

The “secret sauce” to making real good money with your blog is scaling up.

There are two primary ways of scaling your business. Either bringing more visitors to your blog or making more money from those visitors.

Of the two, making more money from your existing traffic tends to be easy.

For example, if you are currently running Google Adsense, could it be more profitable if you contacted the advertisers on your website directly and negotiated an affiliate deal?

Or would it make sense to develop your own digital product to sell to your audience?

Moving up the “value chain” and improving the monetization of your blog is an excellent way to transform your blog from a small sideline income to a game-changing financial asset.

Conclusion

There is a platform that can teach you how to start and monetize your blog, it is Wealthy Affiliate.

It provides training, to build a website, to Learn keyword research, learn Search Engine Optimization, and it has a community of online entrepreneurs willing to help each other.

On top of that, it also has the best affiliate program in the world. It offers free web hosting, and you will get two free websites as a free member.

Feel free to ask questions, post comments, or subscribe to my email list so you will be the first to get the updates and offers.

You can also visit me so I can answer your questions directly at Wealthy Affiliate (my profile page).

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Hello Everyone,
I am Den and I am the owner of this Website. I finally quit my job in Aviation to do my online business full-time.

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