Earning money online from your own website is perhaps the greatest of all home-based businesses. Unlike virtually all other home business ventures, blogging requires almost no startup capital at all. Registering a domain is cheap, and web hosting these days costs next to nothing. The only investment that a blog really requires is your own time. Running a successful blog requires a great deal of time, but you’ve got plenty of time on your hands these days if you’re stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
You’re feeling stir crazy. There are no sports to watch, and you’ve already gotten caught up on all of your favorite TV series. It’s time to do something productive, and the fact that blogging requires almost no investment means that there’s virtually no risk. If you get started now, you could find yourself with a burgeoning second career on your hands when the stay-at-home orders are over, and everyone gets back to normal life.
Don’t let anyone tell you that making money with a blog is easy — but the fact is that it isn’t really that hard if you’re willing to spend a lot of time typing.
It’s also a fact that most bloggers are doing it wrong and have little chance of ever earning anything substantial from their blogs. Don’t become another broke blogger!
If you want to start a blog because you’re interested in gaining social media followers and earning notoriety, that’s great. Many people find it greatly fulfilling to write about their lives online — but they aren’t earning money for their work.
If you want to write for money, you need an entirely different approach — and there are four absolutely crucial pointers that you must know before you begin. These are the four steps to running a profitable blog.
Choose a Product-Oriented Niche
The first thing you need to know about blogging for money is that many of the things that you enjoy most aren’t suitable as topics for a profit-generating blog.
Don’t start a food blog. Food is probably the most difficult blogging niche in which to earn money. Likewise, bloggers who write about sports, movies, music and video games earn almost nothing from their work because the people who read those blogs aren’t looking to buy anything. You can only earn money from your blog if your readers are buyers.
The easiest way to start a profitable blog is by choosing a topic that dovetails easily into product offers. If people are already in buying mode when they visit your blog, then you’ll have an excellent chance of generating revenue for yourself. If you start a vaping blog on which you review vape gear from companies like V2 Cigs UK, for example, it’s likely that many of your readers will be receptive to product offers relating to vaping.
Choose a Catchy, Memorable Domain Name
Every website needs a domain name. Before you register a domain name for your blog, spend plenty of time brainstorming. You want to register the catchiest and most memorable domain name possible, and you’ll need to be prepared for the possibility that some of your favorite ideas will already be taken. If the .com version of your preferred domain name is taken, move on to another idea. Only proceed with registering a domain name if you can get the .com or the top-level domain for your country.
If you’re certain that your domain name idea is a great idea, you should register the .net and .org variations at the same time to prevent someone else from registering those domains later. You do not want to compete against another website that has the same name as yours.
Write First and Worry About Revenue Later
One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers make is plastering their blogs with advertisements and affiliate links right from the beginning. That’s the wrong way to do things because your blog isn’t going to earn revenue until it receives substantial traffic. Focus on getting traffic first; monetize your blog later.
When you sit down to write content for your blog, the last things that you should write are aimless stories about your life. You want people to find your content on Google, and for that to happen, you need to optimize your articles around specific search phrases. Some of the article topics that typically do well on product-focused blogs include product reviews, product comparisons and information about how to solve problems with — or have a better experience with — various products.
If you write regularly — and you optimize your posts around specific keyword phrases that people use on Google — you will eventually start to attract consistent traffic each day.
Plan Your Strategy for Revenue Generation
Once you’ve gotten your blog to the point at which it’s receiving dozens of visitors per day, it’s time to start figuring out how you’re going to generate revenue from your content. Keep your expectations reasonable at this point. As a general rule, if a product-oriented blog generates:
- Dozens of daily viewers, it can pay for your daily coffee.
- Hundreds of daily viewers, it can cover your car payment.
- Thousands of daily viewers, it can potentially become your full-time job.
The amount of money that your blog can generate primarily depends on three things:
- The quality of your content. The more confident your readers are in your level of expertise, the more receptive they’ll be to your product offers.
- Where your readers are in the buying journey. People searching online for product reviews are probably ready to buy. People looking for information about how to solve problems with a product they already own are probably not planning to buy right now.
- How appealing your product offers are. If you have an offer that’s a perfect fit for your readers, the offer will have a high conversion rate, and you’ll earn more money.
Unless you have a natural knack for online marketing, you may need to experiment with different types of revenue streams before you’ll find the one that really works for your blog. These, however, are the three most common ways in which bloggers earn money.
- Display ads. When you sign up with an advertising network like Google AdSense, you’ll receive a block of code that you can add to your blog. Viewers will then begin seeing ads. You’ll earn a small amount of money — usually ranging from a few cents to a few dollars — when someone clicks an ad.
- Affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you’ll recommend specific products and link to those products on your blog. When someone clicks one of the links and buys a product, you’ll earn a commission. Affiliate commissions are often quite high, but you only earn money when people buy products through your links.
- Digital product sales. Many bloggers create e-books in which they reprint their best articles and often enhance those articles with new and exclusive content. When you create an e-book, you’re selling your own product rather than hawking a product produced by someone else. There’s tremendous satisfaction in that.
