How to Start a Blog – Complete Guide on How to Make Money Blogging

Introduction

making a living as a blogger should be one of the cutest gigs out there. As a blogger, you can generate a passive financial gain, which suggests your money can pour in while you sleep, travel, or hang out with friends.

You don’t have to trade a lot of time for financial gain, and this may be the point you want to reach if you want to be independent (being independent of clients yourself is pretty much like having a job).

Making money with blogging is all about writing about a topic that you find simply fascinating and you even become a minor celebrity in your chosen niche. You can make tons of money here too if a blog takes off and becomes extremely successful you can theoretically make thousands daily, it scales and there is no “ceiling” to what you can achieve.

What’s the downside? It’s challenging to blogging.

This is about working hard and being sensible so you can reap the benefits later. Too many people approach blogging the wrong way, thinking they’ll just write a few semi-annual posts that will be enough to validate their success.

In reality, if you ever need blogging as your primary source of financial gain, you want to pursue blogging as a full-time job. In other words, if you want this to be your full-time job, you’d better treat it that way. This means working tediously (hard), and initially, you want to upload as much content as possible, after initially investing a lot of time and/or money into creating a great design.

At the same time, however, it also means being good at how you want to grow your blog, and it means using growth hacks to capitalize on the work you put in.

If you get this right, you can apply power multipliers that can shave years off the time it takes you to reach number one. Do you think it’s not possible? 

Do you suppose that making money from a blog is a one-time fluke that only happens once in a very blue moon? Accept again!

The statistics paint a unique picture and show that blogging is an extremely profitable use of your time.

Blogging Statistics and Why You Should Care

• Marketers who rely on their blogs make 13x more money than people who don’t

• Businesses with blogs get 97 more links landing on their site

• Blogs are the 5th most trusted source of accurate information on the web!

• 81% of customers trust the data they get from blogs

• Well over a hundred and fifty million people in the United States alone frequently surf blogs

• 23% of web time is spent on blogs

•  61% of customers have made purchases through blogs

It’s usually believed that promoting content – AKA blogging – is much more powerful than pure SEO right now

As you will then see, blogging is an extremely fertile force to be reckoned with and there is enough here to travel around. Time to get a piece of the pie!

If you’re still reading, then you’re most likely pretty excited about the prospect of becoming a “career blogger,” and you’re almost certainly dying to get started and start making money from e-book sales.

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place, and this guide can act as a blueprint to ensure each of your work is focused on the right things.

What is a blog?

A blog is an entertainment or informational website published on the web consisting of various, usually informal, text entries (articles) in a magazine format. 

What do you need to do to make your blog successful?

1. CHOOSING YOUR NICHE

A “niche” essentially means a topic or object. 

Ultimately, picking a niche just because a “guru” says it’s profitable can leave you bored and disillusioned and eventually give in.

Tip 3: Popularity

When choosing your niche, you want to believe in the competition out there and how easy it will be to stand out.

Of course, you want a topic that has a large potential audience, so why not go for something big like “finance” or “auto loans”? Well, that’s a decent plan on the face of it, until you think about how many bloggers write in these niches.

GetRichSlowly is one of the largest sites on the web and generates massive revenue – most of it is invested in the site to ensure a smooth flow of topical issues. The question is: can you keep up with that? Will you be able to fight any of these pages to get to page one?

On the other hand, if you choose to blog about texts, you might find that there’s a much smaller audience — but also a lot less competition. The best scenario, then, is to find a topic that is common but not so common that it attracts a lot of big companies and big-name bloggers.

Things like foraging, knitting, writing, and parkour are all huge but don’t draw undue attention.

Tip 4; Broad vs. specific topics

Another strategy is to start with a broadly appealing topic and then narrow it down to something more specific. For example, if you prefer personal finance, how about choosing a specific area of ​​personal finance such as saving, investing, estate planning, or income? Or how about targeting a specific group instead? For example, “Estate Planning for Students.”  You’ll also try to combine 2 different topics.

Another strategy is to go abroad with your chosen niche, which has the benefit of allowing you to find many new angles for content. However, if you do this you risk a lack of focus, so you’ll want to make sure you’re holding everything together with just one common thread.

A great example of this can be the Art of Manliness blog. This blog writes about what could be called “manly” – this includes editorials on the role of the trendy man, but also posts on the journey to smoking a roll of tobacco or enjoying alcohol, and posts on the journey to becoming raise children. This gives the author a tremendous variety of topics while still having a really strong brand identity and focus.

Tip 5: Choosing a profitable market

Another thought when choosing your niche is whether it is profitable or not. That’s right, some niches are a lot more profitable than others, and you’ll find that it’s easier to legitimize depending on which one you choose.

Examples of extremely profitable niches are finance and business. These are profitable. They offer an ROI: someone will be more willing to pay cash for a money-making e-book because, in theory, they will recoup that initial cost. Likewise, money can be made in any niche that encompasses a massive and obvious “value proposition.”

A value proposition is viewed as an emotional hook it is the factor that people may need to buy your product or read your blog, and therefore the “way” they hope their lives can benefit.

Fitness might be a nice example because people desperately need a six-pack and are willing to pay for it. The same goes for dating. Monetizing this stick insect-raising blog on the other hand is getting harder. There simply isn’t a similar demand or “need” for the product.

However, the relative lack of competition within the field, combined with the relative inadequacy of knowledge, means there are ways to legitimize oneself. Ultimately, the price of thinking carefully about whether your niche is going to be profitable or not, and whether or not you want to write about it, is the price.

Look at your competition to see if they seem to be making a lot of money, believe in your business model, and maybe even try to validate your intended business model. Verifying means trying to sell to your target audience first to see if they are there and if they are curious to buy your product.

2. CHOOSING THE RIGHT BLOG PLATFORM

Do you have your niche?

If yes, Great;

The next factor is then to consider what really suits your new website and get started with your content together. To do this you may need to choose a “blogging platform” which effectively dictates how your site’s code will be structured and what you will see as you work on it and add content.

Now, of course, you don’t need a “blogging platform” as such. You can create your website from scratch, which may involve creating pages in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and CSS, probably using a builder like ‘Dreamweaver’, but if you do this it will take a lot longer and a lot harder to create something that looks and performs like a professional website.

You then want to use a blogging platform/CMS instead. CMS stands for “Content Management System” and it is a tool that makes it easy to create and build your website and add and write content as needed. Use a CMS and you don’t have to understand a line of code to create the website, add new posts, and edit your existing content. Of course, this saves tons of time, streamlines the method, and ensures that your website is at least functional.

Choosing your CMS

So how do you choose a CMS? The first issue to try is acknowledging the difference between hosted and self-hosted options.

A hosted option could be a blog platform that you use almost like a social network. In other words, you create your account and “login” to another site, and from there you can then add new posts for different users to view. In other words, the platform and your website are already hosted online somewhere, which means you don’t need to get a hosting account to get started.

Good examples of hosted blogging platforms are:

bloggers

Middle

Place

WordPress hosted 

Wix

Weebly

Tumblr

Each of them has strengths and weaknesses, although all essentially do the same thing.

Tumblr 

It is the weird thing here because it straddles the road between a blogging platform and a social media platform and because it mostly focuses on images that you just upload as opposed to written content. The big problem with this is that it is a free method and requires no setup at all.

You simply visit the blogging platform, be it BlogSpot or WordPress, login, and then start posting! You can make changes to your blog in terms of how it looks, but you will be fairly limited in terms of what you can do.

Likewise, you’ll even be restricted in terms of your URL – meaning you simply won’t be able to access your website

Usdngn.com- instead, your blog can be “usdngn.wordpress.com” or usdngn.blogger.com 

This ends up looking a lot less slick, and it also suggests that your URL is a lot less catchy and brandable.

People can’t remember your Uniform Resource Locator and type it back in the address bar – they have to search Google. And that means even looking at Google will be harder to spot since it’s not that easy to get hosted websites to “rank.” For these reasons, you are far better off with a self-hosted CMS.

This means you can also buy a hosting space  (www.BlueHost.com might be a good provider) as the website name (any you bought) as well separately or together with the hosting space). Overall, this can cost you $100-$500 a year, but if you monetize well, you should be able to make that profit even in a few months. If you intend to become an experienced blogger, this can be a very mandatory expense.

When it comes to hosted blogging platforms, you have a few general choices. These include:

WordPress self-hosted

Joomla

Drupal

WordPress is available as both hosted and self-hosted CMS options.

If you decide to go with the hosted option, all you might need to do is visit WordPress.com and open an account. If you decide to go with a self-hosted choice, you’ll need to transfer the installation files from WordPress.org instead and then upload them to your server. You then navigate to one of the files in your browser and the setup method also begins.

Which self-hosted platform do you need to use? The result is WordPress through a long queue.

Part of the reason for this is that WordPress is just the most widely used blogging platform. This, in turn, suggests that it also has the broadest support. 

That suggests you can find plenty of developers who know the platform, and it means you can easily create additional plugins and themes to throw in to take your site to the next level.

The fact that WordPress started as a blogging platform offers another major advantage. That said, it’s extremely simple, and compared to Joomla or Drupal, the board is much more accessible and easy to use.

But most of all, you should use WordPress because everyone else is doing it.

This might sound like a bit of a lame reason but consider it: most of the best-known bloggers on the web use WordPress. Countless people before you have shown that a WordPress website is often incredibly successful… so why use the rest that is far less well known? Why take your chances with an extra difficult platform?

We know WordPress is often searched engine optimized, and we all know it can be very well optimized… if you are serious about making money then it’s the logical choice. And the websites made with letters from words look great.

Choosing A Name And URL

As you’re going with a self-hosted choice for your blog, you’ll now need to select an URL. This is the address that people can sort in their search bar to search for your website and as such, it’ll most likely also act because of the title of your website and therefore the brand you’re going with.

Choosing your name is another vital step here and there are 2 huge factors to contemplate once creating this decision:

a. SEO Branding

SEO is search engine optimization – in different words, tweaking your website to confirm that it’ll possibly rank extremely on Google and to indicate up in searches. Your uniform resource locator (URL) affects your SEO as a result of some URLs being far more ‘searchable’ than others and this may offer you a foothold over the competition.

In different words, if you wished to rank highly for our earlier example – Hotforexnews – then having an address like hotforexnews.com or hotforex-news.com would be a good advantage. 

This won’t guarantee you’ll rank high mind and those who have done additional work on their SEO might still beat you in different ways which – it’s simply a good head-start and advantage.

In terms of branding, you would like to decide on a uniform resource locator that’s the same as, or kind of like, the name of your website. So a business known as ‘Buggyman’ would do very well to get ‘Buggyman.com’. Again, this isn’t a demand however it’ll build many things easier – not to mention promoting your website and creating it more unforgettable. If you don’t have a website name yet, then this can be a good time to consider it.

Aim for one thing that’s unique and attention-grabbing, catchy, and at identical time descriptive.

In a good scenario, your URL can tell individuals what your website is about without simply being a boring description. So essentially, ‘hotforexnews.com’ could be an m URL that’s not nice for branding. This is easier for making logos, creating an impression, and more however it still can offer you some SEO profit and won’t be too obtuse.

As for your ‘TLD’ or ‘Top Level Domain’ (the ‘com’ or ‘co. uk’ part), it’s still perpetually preferred to aim for the ‘.com’ if you’ll be able to. An exception to this is if you’re running an area blog during which case a regional TLD is best. In most cases tho’, ‘.com’ is the best to recollect and therefore the best to promote.

2. WRITING KILLER BLOG ARTICLES

If you would like to begin growing your guests and building momentum for your new business then you’re attending content.

• Why Content is King?

Content typically refers to ‘writing’ when used online and in the case of a blog, this implies blog posts. This type of content is what most people are trying to find after we look for things on Google: we would like information, recreation, or opinion. Thus, by adding additional content to your site, you provide people an incentive to visit, and you let yourself get to understand them.

• Content is vital for more reasons than thought.

For instance, it also happens to be your site’s content that may make sure you win or lose at SEO. Search engines work by attempting to match search terms to the content on an internet site. The more writing you’ve got, the more likelihood there is of you obtaining a ‘hit’ and therefore the more people can begin finding your website with relevant sensible queries.

Content is also crucial for ‘content marketing. Content selling is essentially a kind of marketing that revolves around your blog posts. The idea here is that you’re aiming to update your website frequently with attention-grabbing articles and posts and this could then assist you to seek out real fans of your work.

These people may subscribe to your website, be part of your mailing list (more on that later) or simply bookmark your page. They’ll then return frequently to check what fascinating new content you’ve added recently and every time they do, you’ll have a new chance to market to them.

Content is also crucial for your social media promotion (as you’ll be able to share it to your channels to urge more followers) and it is often used to sell things directly. In short, the success of your blog revolves nearly entirely around the content that you’ll be uploading there.

How Much Content Do You Have To Be Adding?

 So here’s the golden question: how much content should one add to make your site a massive hit? However, there is no single answer here, and in fact, the simplest tips can rely on what your blog is about, who your typical reader is, etc.

You should also keep in mind that quality always trumps quantity. But the simple guideline for how much content to show is just: the maximum amount you most likely can have while staying consistent.

Consistency is key.

We’ve seen all the ways content can simplify your website. We’ve seen that “content is king” and that SEO is first and foremost adding text to your website that can be found by Google, which can allow people to find you and the more you can create from your website.

Not only that, we touched on this briefly in the introduction, but this really can be the key point you need to take away from this guide. Essentially, to be successful with a blog, you want to invest in it yourself. That means you spend a lot of your time creating lots of quality content and then promoting it.

You can submit a blog post once a week and be quite successful. Your rewards can increase exponentially the more quality content you post.

How many words should each blog post have?

Now that you’ve only thought about the amount of content you need to add, the question might now be how many words or how long each blog post should be.

According to Neil Patel of QuickSprout.com and statistics from SerpIQ,

longer posts are sometimes higher.

Typically, longer posts attract additional search traffic. Take a look at this graph from SerpIQ:

Note that the maximum content length is around 2000 words.

Longer posts are sometimes more comprehensive than a short 500-word article—they contain more flesh and detail. Search traffic is higher because you include more h1, h2, and h3 headings and keywords in your posts. The more words you count, the more linkbacks you get.

Take these graphics from MOZ as proof:

More backlinks mean more search traffic.

SEO pro Neil Patel says, “My analysis of Fast Sprout confirms this. All my poof sts 1,500+ words get sixty-eight additional tweets and 22nd more Facebook views and likes than the under 1,500-word content.” Just one thing to think about once you’ve made your posts.

 choice of topics

The next question then is how do you plan to choose topics to write about?

How do you bring something fresh to your chosen niche that has never been seen before?

How do you make sure your content engages readers who want it?

#SEO

I shared some search traffic tips earlier, but let’s take a closer look. One strategy is to focus on the SEO side of your articles.

The ideal scenario here is that you simply write a post that people are looking for but doesn’t exist. Alternatively, you can try writing a topic that is currently common but not yet oversaturated.

You can do this by using keyword research tools. Keyword research tools allow you to effectively see what people are searching for and how the competition is performing. The well-known keyword tool is Google’s keyword planner. This is aimed at people who are considering using Google’s paid “AdWords” platform for advertising and therefore want to point out which search terms can be a good use of investment capital for a company looking for a presence in a selected audience in hopes

Alternative options to the Google Keyword Planner are:

    Moz Keyword Explorer

    Ahrefs

    KWfinder

To use these, simply search for the subject of relevant terms in addition to the search volume (how many people frequently search for it). From there, you can then try searching the term yourself on Google and then see what the competition is like.

Find a keyword, then ask yourself: Can you do more? And also: How? Then, for added SEO gain, you want to subtly insert your keywords into the content so that you repeat the phrase often without compulsion

way (as well as the use of associated terms). Don’t make it obvious (this is called “keyword stuffing” and you will be penalized for it), just take advantage of the opportunities that arise.

Keyword research could be an extremely handy tool to find topics to be successful on.

 Places to research

Another way to get nice content ideas is to keep an eye on what people are talking about and what’s new. Looking at forums in your niche might be a good way to try this as you can see what people are talking about, asking questions, etc.

You can even post there yourself and just address what people want to hear more! Of course, you can also consider what your competitors are writing about and you can consider news sites.

News sites usually have sections like health, technology, etc. and these provide helpful timely updates for your content. In other words, it has a limited shelf life as far as it’s relevant, meaning you can’t get any additional value from it in the future.

Another trick is to look at news from sites that aren’t in your niche and then shuffle that news. In other words, you might have a financial website, but maybe a new motion-controlled video game is relevant. Or maybe write something that supports technology?

Easy way to get content

Would you like to be satisfied without having to do all the legwork yourself? As is the case, there are a variety of ways you can get good content “for free” and without any work.

One way is to create curated content.

Curated content is exclusively tent that you have just collected from the web. None of this is original, but by putting it all together in one place, you can offer something new. A very simple example of curated content would be a listing of famous or sacred quotes.

You can do more than that and create useful paragraphs, links, or maybe entire short articles. As long as you add value to your audience by collecting all content in one place, it will be helpful to your readers. Note that curated content may be penalized by Google.

Google doesn’t want individuals to use duplicate content, i.e. H. Content that has already been printed elsewhere. Of course, your curated content runs the risk of falling into this trap. That’s fine, just make sure you’re directing most of your traffic to the latest social media article and watch to avoid using this strategy too often.

Another tip is to use smaller passages – this might also help you not to be guilty of plain copypasta.

Another way to get quality content for free is to post the work of guest bloggers.

Guest bloggers are bloggers who post content to your {site|website|website} in exchange for a free link back to their site. This will give them some advertising and you’ll get some free content in the process – it’s a real win/win scenario!

SOCIALIZE YOUR BLOG

Social media is the most effective way to promote your business or website. Sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to move with your audience.. 

The first step to using social media and driving more traffic to your website is to make yourself visible on the different platforms.

1. Use of Facebook

If you don’t have a business page on Facebook, this can be your first step in increasing your visibility on the site. Once you have set up your Facebook Business Page, confirm that you are only providing information on your website that can inform potential customers or guests about your Page.

In the future, use Facebook to announce new developments in your company that could be relevant to your customers. You can also use it to publish posts about offers or discounts accessible on your website. You can even provide updates on new content currently available for use through your Business Page.

Additionally, you can also use your Facebook page as an open forum to create more refined research requests and collect customer feedback that may generate more interest in your business and website, since most customers like professionals related to their customer base and are interested in hearing their opinions.

With thumbprint people accessing Facebook every day, it has quickly become one of the best avenues for brand new media advertising that you can efficiently achieve through its paid advertising programs that can showcase your business to a variety of people in your business-targeted demographics.

How to create effective posts on Facebook

To create a Facebook post of your own, you need to be able to create posts that are smart and easy to search through. The posts you create must contain detailed information that relates directly to your business. Part of creating helpful posts on Facebook is receiving messages that not only catch your guests’ attention but also lead them to share your words. 

Since your posts are shared with others, it becomes easier to promote your business.

a. Tell stories

Some of the most effective posts you can add to your Facebook Page are Stories. You can mention something you simply need as long as it’s exclusive and relevant to your business. Tell distinctive stories related to your business and let people understand what makes it distinctive.

The best stories can always be shared with others. These types of posts require you to be willing to talk about the background of your business. Find out how to share what you do and why you are compelled to help them. 

Show that what you do creates a difference in the lives of others. When people see that you are only doing something valuable and helpful, they will support you.

b. Work with trending topics

The algorithmic rule of Facebook search rewards those who mention trending issues. Favorite topics are highlighted more often because individuals are more likely to search or have greater demand. 

Working with trending topics that are specific and important is often helpful. Discussing trending topics makes it easier for your business to be discovered.

They show that your company understands the trends and interests of the day. This allows you to share knowledge with your audience in a very special way. However, you want to exercise caution in how you incorporate these trends into your posts.

You don’t have to talk about something unrelated to your business just because it’s a topic you love. Try to relate the trend to your business in some way.

c. Talk about business decisions

Today, individuals value transparency, and it has become a necessary side of running a business. Consumers choose to do business with companies that are open and direct about what they need to do or promote. Customers value companies that are willing to talk about what drives them and why they are starting a business.

You can mention each business call you create and how you use it. Talking about results and ideas makes you more open to your audience. You can even ask for feedback on something you’d like to follow up on. When you get a clearer plan of what your audience wants, gathering data from your guests will make a difference.

d. Use unique media

While everyone is posting historical images, news footage, or memes to their Facebook feeds, it’s better if you notice how to remain distinctive and private. Part of this may involve using media files and images that aren’t like the rest. Using distinctive media files shows your audience that you simply have a good setup in mind for your business.

They will understand that you are simply inventive and ingenious while keeping an open mind. Using identical images that everyone else is using isn’t always the best choice, as it only shows repetition.

2. Use of Twitter

The main advantage of using Twitter to increase your internet traffic is that it is widely used and the character limit caters to the stunted span of today’s youth. Twitter enables your business to engage with others in short and humorous, bite-sized text, while also tracking the more important social media trends and considerations in an extremely precise manner.

The first problem you need to do is manage Twitterer and get relevant discussions all over the world. If you notice open language wherever you provide relevant data, take the time to post your contribution along with links back to your website or other content you feel would be willing to enrich the discussion.

a. Get the most out of your tweets

The messages you simply post on Twitter are important to your success with the platform. It’s important that you simply produce thoughtful, unique, useful, and engaging messages. There are some useful methods you can use to make your tweets more likely to be read by more people. 

More importantly, once people trust your work and words, your tweets are more likely to result in additional followers and lots of traffic to your site.

b. Be creative

The most popular Twitter feeds are the most imaginative. They can include funny anecdotes, how-to guides, thoughtful quotes, or anything that would potentially grab an audience’s attention. Think about what you want to mention and move on as you develop your Twitter feed.

Let your audience understand that you simply have something unique to share with them and that you are someone they can trust.

• Continue with a style

Take the time to reflect on your progression to posting things on Twitter. Need a light-hearted approach? Would you be easy with the public? Whatever you choose, you want to work out the angle and elegance you want to follow and continue for as long as possible.

• Keep up to date with all your posts on Twitter.

Be careful not to change your style and perspective on a whim, as this would confuse your audience. Some might even assume that your Twitter profile has been hacked.

• Stay transparent

As with other social media platforms, it’s important to stay clear when speaking to your audience. Let individuals understand what you do and what makes your business so important. People appreciate it after hearing from you and can see how direct you are with them. They will retweet your message and increase your visibility.

3. Use of YouTube

Another extremely valuable option to increase your internet traffic is YouTube Positioning has become very common lately since it highlights videos of all kinds. YouTube can be an incredibly valuable tool for your business. Videos must be created that are exceptional and worth sharing.

To start working with YouTube, you need to create a profile so you can start posting videos on the site. Getting YouTube to the top is good for social media campaigns and brings a lot of traffic to the website. This will help in gaining many subscribers and increase visits to your site.

There are a few special techniques to make your YouTube videos easier to read and more dynamic.

• Be verified

To get the most out of your YouTube account, you want to be verified. A verified account can give you a lot of access to many features on the site. This includes the flexibility to add custom thumbnails to a video and make your videos longer.

Getting your channel verified ensures you are willing to put in a lot of effort as YouTube will know your channel is legitimate. People are more likely to trust your channel when they see it’s verified.

•Use custom thumbnails

When you start using YouTube, you may have the choice to work with random thumbnails on every video. After a while, you will be approved to work with custom thumbnails. These can add a unique image that allows people to see what you want to share before they click on the video. It may contain details about the video or other display features that are of great interest to the reader.

• Create a channel trailer

A channel trailer can be a video that you simply broadcast and that plays on your channel page once someone who hasn’t signed up on your page comes across it. The video is set up for mechanical playback. You can produce any type of video for your trailer, but it’s best to use one that illustrates what your business is about.

This is usually the main problem you should show someone unfamiliar with what you are doing.

• Creating playlists

You can create playlists that highlight all similar content on your channel. With a playlist, you share data in a series of organized spaces that allow people to understand specific things related to your business. You can also include points about your business and the way it works, or your information on matters related to your niche.

• Use subtitles

There are also cases when someone wants to watch your YouTube video but needs to keep the audio low so as not to disturb those around them. Other users may be deaf or hard of hearing. To avoid alienating your audience, use subtitles in your video.

If someone needs to use subtitles on your video for no reason, all they have to do is click on the correct subtitle icon on your video and a set of subtitles can appear at the right moment.

• Add calls to action

You need to integrate many calls to action around your YouTube page and videos. These contain calls to encourage individuals to visit your website or perhaps your place of business. More importantly, you want to offer calls to action for things specific to YouTube. Moving through your videos and different options with your viewers is essential if you want to drive traffic to your website.

Blog monetizing.

With everything you’ve learned {so far|so far|up to this point}, you must now have what it takes to be a successful blogger in that you can figure out a way to create a blog and grow it to the point of becoming one let on which it’s gotten a lot of traffic. But while this can be extremely rewarding, it’s not meant to give you the freedom you’re looking for.

This will not be enough to make you quit your job and lie down in the mornings/spend more time with your family/travel. To do that, you also need to monetize your blog — in other words, make sure it’s bringing in money.

How do you do that? The solution may surprise you…

1. Place ads

Once your blog starts receiving many thousands of visitors a day. You can place ads on your website and earn money by showing ads to your guests.

To start getting ads, sign up with one of the most effective worldwide ad networks listed below:

• Google AdSense

• Media.net

• Ezoic

• Propeller ads

Disadvantage

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll receive an ad code from the network. You want to paste this code into your website to start showing your ads.

2. Creating and Selling Products

The best way to make money from a blog is to sell something. You can do this by buying inventory in bulk and then selling it for more than you got it. However, this is often a rather complicated and complex process with a multitude of challenges. Selling an information product is much easier than and particularly well suited to blogging.

That means an e-book, a book, a digital course, or something else. As a digital product, these options can have no overhead and no shipping costs for you. Additionally, your content marketing is extremely effective in demonstrating price and building trust in your product.

Put some ads for your product and a few promotions in the body of your content and you can make tons of money that way. 

Note that you always outsource the method to freelancers if you are not confident enough or don’t have time to write a full ebook.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Or if you’d rather not invest the time or money into making products, another option is to skip that half and sell someone else’s product instead. You can do this by switching to an affiliate marketer, which means you are currently selling a product for a commission. 

If that seems like a drop from marketing your product, remember that this gives you a much wider choice of things to sell, which means you’re choosing products that are already very successful.

When you discover an affiliate product through a site like ClickBank or JVZoo, you become an affiliate link to the marketplace and every time someone clicks on that link and buys the product, you earn around 40-60% commission. A great strategy then is to incorporate product reviews as blog posts or have an inventory of top resources for your readers to promote this stuff.

Another option is billing with Amazon’s affiliate program. This pays out a much lower percentage but on the other hand, gives you access to a wide range and allows you to sell through a dealer that individuals already use and trust. Look for widgets and plugins that allow you to add your ads to your site’s sidebars and under headers.

These key points bring more clicks and more money without distracting or disturbing your guests.

4. Email Marketing

Most visitors to your blog can read it, enjoy it, and then fall {again} through the little holes, never to be seen again. At this point, they are lost, which is why email marketing is often necessary.

With email marketing, the goal is to get guests to sign up for a list so you can keep them up to date with updates about your new posts, new products, and more. This way you can turn an event attendee into a loyal fan and someone you can reach out to regularly.

To build a successful mailing list, you should use an auto-responder like Aweber or GetResponse.

These can manage your contacts, allow you to send massive bulk emails, and also change the process of subscribing or unsubscribing. Once you have selected a platform and signed up, you will be allowed to create an “opt-in form”.

This is where your guests can enter their details when they want to sign up, and you need to work on it if you want to spark the greatest potential for guests.

Luckily, it’s comparatively easy to add opt-in forms to your sidebar and

at the bottom of your posts. That won’t be enough to encourage first-time viewers, though: if you want to go the extra mile to get subscribers (which you really should be doing), you’ll need to stimulate your list with an ebook, free report, or another sane freebee.

Likewise, you can place your opt-in form in a lightbox that will appear on top of the rest of your content. Sumo is an example of a helpful “pop-up” lightbox that you can use to convert your one-time guests into subscribers and long-term customers.

Now, confirm that your list stays active by letting your members know about the latest blog updates and mentioning your offers and promotions. Note that almost every great blogger cites their list as one of the critical aspects of their business model.

Don’t ignore this!

Conclusion

For now, with a well-designed blog, a consistent brand, and lots of distinctive content, you should be making a fairly steady financial return. You know a way to share it, a way to build fans, and a way to use a bunch of the simplest tools to not waste your time.

The rest depends on luck.

So just keep plugging in and eventually, you’ll get your break once your link lands on the right website or is suggested by the right person.

The secret is not to stop.