How to Make Money with a Blog for Beginners

Are you wondering if you can make money with a blog? As a long time blogger making a full time income, I can help answer that question for you.

I’m just a regular gal who wanted more freedom in life and figured out how to make money off blogging. I do this on my own, without a team of people helping me.

There are other successful blogs that make money with large teams that help make the entire operation work, but it’s not necessary for success.

In this post, I will help you understand the foundational steps to turn your knowledge and desire into a money making blog business.

How Do Bloggers Make Money From Blogging?

You are probably wondering exactly how bloggers make money. Pay attention to this part. Many new bloggers don’t think about how money actually gets made and get off to a bad start.

We all have information inside us. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What are you passionate about and what do you know really well?
• How can you provide value to others?
• Can your knowledge be turned into a profit? IMPORTANT!
• Will people be interested in and pay for they learn from your blog? More on that in the next section.

The content you publish on your blog will be based on just that!

Once you figure that out and build a following of people, you need to monetize your value and authority.

You do this through various offers on your blog that are congruent with your content and help your audience in some way.

I’ve broken down the monetization methods into these three categories:

• Affiliate marketing – You find a company with a product or service that is congruent with your blog content and partner with them through their affiliate program. When you refer your audience the merchant’s products via link on your blog, you earn a commission. The commission varies from merchant to merchant. Keep in mind it takes the same effort to earn a 4% commission as it does to earn a 40% commission. Be choosy about which products you promote.
• Advertising – You show ads on your blog and get paid when your visitors click on the ads. Google Adsense is a popular program to show targeted advertisements on your website.
• Products & Services – You can create and sell your own products and service to your visitors. For example you can create a training product or offer consulting services.

Here’s a breakdown by percentage of income sources from top bloggers.

Source: Authority Hacker

How to Choose a Profitable Blog Niche to Make Money

All too often bloggers just make a decision to start a blog about a topic, put a lot of time into blogging and make no money.

It’s because they missed this all important foundation step. DO YOUR RESEARCH!

Here’s a fact: every half a second a new blog is created somewhere in the world.

What does that mean for you? The Internet is crowded and there’s a lot of competition. Don’t let that stop you. Once you understand what you are dealing with, the easier it will be for you to understand this step.

Many new bloggers make the mistake of writing about whatever they feel like writing about. You can’t build a successful blog business on the hope that others will be drawn to your idea too.

Do your keyword research to find out if people are interested in your topic.

• Are enough people searching for your topic each month?
• How much competition is there for your topic?

Once you understand that, you can move on to researching if other bloggers are making money in the same or similar niche.

If the answer is YES, your next step is determine who your target audience is and if they are willing to spend money on the things you plan to sell on your blog.

This step right here is the most crucial one to make money blogging. Without this, you won’t have a blog business.

How to Get People to Your Blog

If you want to make money blogging, you must get people to your blog! If you have no visitors, you won’t make any money. It’s that simple.

When I started my first blog, I was the only one who read those first couple of months of posts. I was not attracting attention!  I set out to learn how to get people to my blog.

I solved the problem and it’s the foundation of everything I do these days. These two foundation steps go hand in hand and need each other for real success with blogging.

Write High-Quality Content

Everyone has their own idea of what high-quality content is. Make your content unique and specific. If you are writing the same old stuff that other bloggers are writing, yours won’t stand out as high quality. People are tired of mediocrity.

Take a topic and present it in a new way or write about it from a different angle. Most of all, make sure your content is useful and informative.

All too often I hear bloggers complain that they aren’t getting any traffic to their website. Before you publish a post, ask yourself if you would stop and read it as a new visitor. Be honest with yourself.

Promote and Market your Content

It’s not enough to create great content. The next step is marketing your blog content. Successful blogs that make money spend 20% of their time writing content and 80% marketing that content.

There are many ways to promote content:

• Use search engine optimization to get found in Google organic search (my favorite.)
• Use Facebook ads or post on Pages and in Groups.
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• Instagram

The list goes on. Without marketing, the chances of your blog content attracting people is slim to none. Are you willing to put the time in?

Video: Where to Promote your Blog Posts

Final Thoughts

Successful blogs that make money know exactly who their audience is and which blog topics are profitable in their niche.

I gave you the foundation steps you need to make money blogging. I didn’t supply you with the technical aspects of setting up a blog or optimizing your posts because without your foundation, none of that matters much.

Spend your time in the beginning figuring this stuff out before starting your blog!

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