Making money from your blog can be a pipe dream for many people. The mere thought of being able to write about something you’re passionate about and have that result in actual money in your pocket is enough to make anyone smile.
However, with all of the blogs in existence only 14% make any money at all. In fact, it’s actually quite difficult to make money from your blog if you don’t start with the end goal in mind. For instance, having a blog about underwater basket weaving might not be a topic that can actually turn into profit. We’re not saying it’s impossible, but it’s going to take a lot of dedication and perseverance to build a profitable blog.
Below we dive into a process that will help you monetize your blog and turn your passion into a real-life business.
1. Choose a Niche That Can Be Profitable
The overall profitability of your niche will determine how much money you can make from your blog. If your niche is too small, then you may not have enough interested people to actually monetize your blog.
One great way to choose the right niche is to select an evergreen niche. These are proven topics that people have spent money on, and will continue to invest in over the long-term.
Some of the most common evergreen niches include:
- Business and finance
- Relationships
- Health and wellness
When choosing a niche it’s important to also select a topic that you enjoy writing about, have experience in, and have some innate ability. Without these traits it’s going to be difficult to stick with your blog over the long run. Making money from your blog isn’t a short-term endeavor, as building an audience and cultivating authority takes a long time.
2. Create Share-Worthy Content
You need to create stellar content if you want to create a blog that’s actually worth reading. The content you’re creating will be the backbone of your blog. By failing to invest the time and energy it takes to create amazing content, it’s going to be very difficult to actually build an audience around your work.
Content that stands above the rest must be educational, entertaining, offer a unique perspective, and be thoroughly researched. Go above and beyond and your audience will thank you for it.
3. Have a Website That Promotes Your Goals
Your website must be professional and assist your monetization efforts. It’s going to be difficult to profit off your blog if your design is overly amateur. Luckily, there are a variety of ways you can easily build a professional looking blog.
To start we recommend using a CMS like WordPress. WordPress is a great blogging platform for beginners and will allow you to choose from a variety of free and paid themes that will take your site to the next level.
WordPress is great for bloggers as there are also a variety of plugins that will enhance the functionality of your website.
- Part of having a professional site is having your own domain name.
4. Grow Your Audience
Posting blogs on your own site is great. But, what if no one is reading your blog? How will they find out that you even exist? It’s important to have a variety of outreach methods that’ll send traffic back to your blog and make other people aware of your work.
We outline a few of the most common traffic generation methods below:
Choose a Social Media Platform and Stick to It
Social media can be a great way to grow your audience and sends swarms of traffic back to your blog. Building a social media presence takes a lot of work, so it’s important you choose a single platform and stick to it. Once you’ve grown your audience on one platform, then you can branch out to other platforms.
Grow your social media presence by sharing your own articles, sharing other relevant and valuable information in your niche, and creating specific content focused on that platform.
Guest Post in Front of Larger Audiences
Guest posting is a very effective way to get your message in front of large and overlapping audiences. Sure, you’ll have to work to find the right guest posting opportunities and create brand new content. But, you’ll receive the benefits of gaining exposure to new segments of your audience and obtaining relevant backlinks to your site.
Most sites you guest blog on will give you an author bio where you can link back to your website. If you guest post on sites with large enough traffic numbers you can expect your posts to send a flood of new traffic to your site as well.
Consider Syndicating Your Published Content
Content syndication is a great way to gain additional exposure from blog posts that you’ve already written. Essentially, you’ll be posting the same blog you published on your site on a bunch of other blogs in your niche.
A few popular sites that enable you to post things that have already been written include Medium and LinkedIn.
Network With Other Bloggers in Your Niche
The relationships you build with other bloggers in your space are incredibly valuable. They’ll not only be able to share and promote your content, thus growing your blog, but you may be able to partner by selling each other’s products to your audience as well (we go into this a bit more below).
You can get started building relationships by leaving thoughtful comments on their blog posts, responding to and sharing their social media posts, and even sending gratitude emails about how one of their posts helped your life in a certain way. Relationship building is a long-term game, make sure you build up rapport before you go in for an ask.
5. Choose the Right Monetization Method
How you choose to monetize your blog will depend upon how much traffic you’re getting, the type of niche you’re in, and what feels best for your business. We recommend experimenting with a few different monetization methods until you find the one that aligns with your own business goals.
The most popular monetization methods are outlined below:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is essentially selling other peoples’ products to your readers in exchange for a commission per unit sold. Digital products usually have a very high commission, which makes this a great way to monetize your blog.
If you’ve been thinking about spending time creating a certain product for your readers it could already exist. By promoting this product you’ll save yourself the time and energy it takes to create a new product from scratch, and you’ll be able to recommend something valuable to your readers.
Some common ways to promote affiliate products are by creating a review post on your blog with a link to the product, or promoting the product to your email list.
Setting Up Advertising
The two main methods of advertising on your site are either selling individual ad slots, or by using Google Adsense or a similar platform. Essentially, you’ll post ads on your site, within your content, and on the sidebar of your website. Then you’ll receive income either based upon clicks or ad impressions.
Usually, advertising only makes sense if your blog receives a lot of traffic, otherwise this method won’t be very lucrative.
Selling eBooks and Courses
Ebooks and courses are a great way to package up your knowledge and sell it to your readers. One of the best ways to ensure the profitability of this method is to create a blog post that tests out the idea, or by running a survey to find out the deep needs of your audience.
This will allow you to see if your readers are actually interested in the course or eBook you want to create.
Monetizing your blog will take additional work, but it’s time well spent if you truly want to be able to get paid to write about something you care about. As you can see from the process above monetization is actually one of the last steps in the blog creation process.
