2021 Guide to Make Money Blogging
If you have a passion for writing, blogging is one of the finest career choices you can make. It gives you the freedom to work on your own hours and write about whatever you’re comfortable with. However, it takes a little time to get everything going. That’s why we’ve created a guide on how to make money with blogging. We are going to cover everything from what you know to what you don’t.
How Do You Make Money from Blogging?
There is a misconception that bloggers make money through writing. Well, that’s somewhat true. Writing is what opens the doors but the money doesn’t come from the words directly. Rather, various marketing agendas make a blogger successful.
So, let’s take a look at some of the ways you can make money with blogging.
Website Monetization
This is one of the most popular ways a blogger makes money. If you’re not familiar with monetizing, it means that your website runs ads. With ready-to-go programs like Google AdSense, you don’t have to spend your time scratching your head with the ads.
When you connect your AdSense account with your website, Google will place the relevant ads. From there, you can agree to make money in two different ways. You can either get paid on a per click basis or you can go with per 1000 impressions.
The first approach is known as PPC ads. It stands for Pay Per Click and it means that every time a website visitor clicks on the ad, you get paid. The rates will vary from ad to ad and niche to niche. This is a great way to earn money with blogging when you have a high-traffic website.
The second approach is known as CPM. For every 1,000 visitors who see the ad on your website, the advertiser will pay you a fixed amount. The rate will also vary from ad to ad and niche to niche in this case.
To make money with website monetization, Google AdSense is every blogger’s first choice. The platform is smart enough to place relevant ads on your content. As a result, it increases the likelihood of generating more clicks and impressions.
Whichever path you decide to go on, you’re going to need a Google AdSense account. If you don’t have it on yet, search for Google AdSense on Google and open the account by following the instructions. Keep in mind that you can only have one AdSense account under your name.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has been popularized in the 21st century like never before. Although the concept is very old, the inclusion of the internet has added a new dimension to it. The idea is that you promote a third-party product (from the merchant) on your platform (the affiliate) and earn a commission for the sales you make.
Affiliate marketing and blogging have been going hand in hand since affiliate marketing become a major profession. Blogs bring in huge revenue streams for bloggers all over the world. The simplicity of the process has made it a prime choice among both parties, the merchant and the affiliate.
To start affiliate marketing, you need to sign up as an affiliate first. There are various networks on the internet that allows affiliate marketing. The most prominent example of such a network would be Amazon Associates. You can choose from a variety of categories and select products that you’re comfortable with.
A similar platform would be ClickBank. Think of it as Amazon for digital products. The best thing about ClickBank is that you get 75% of the product’s price as a commission! Apart from these two, there are Target, Walmart, and many other affiliate networks.
When you have your affiliate account ready to go, you can generate affiliate links for any product you want and promote it on your website. Although going with products that resonate with your blog topics is one of the key things for success.
You cannot expect people to buy computer hardware from a blog revolving around clothing and lifestyle. If you absolutely can’t connect the product you want to market with your content, opening a new blog section on your website might be a good idea.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a practice that can come in handy for all kinds of marketing needs. Whether you want to promote your affiliate link or bring in more traffic to your website, email marketing is the way to go.
Email marketing is one of the oldest marketing strategies yet boasts the highest ROI. If you have a small subscriber list, the process won’t even cost anything because you can handle the emails manually. And when you do decide to go with the professional route for email marketing, it will cost you no more than $50 to $100 for up to 1,000 subscribers!
The marketing strategy relies on you making a connection with your audience. By reaching out directly to them, you open a new dynamic of communication where you can pursue the lead on a personal note. If you manage to gather some personal insight on the leads, you can crank the possibility to make a sale even higher.
To begin with, you can combine email marketing and affiliate marketing to generate never seen before revenues. With affiliate marketing, you usually get a 24-hour window from when the click happened to the purchase.
You can convert a prospective lead by sending a personalized message to the client through email marketing in that 24 hours. Also, as you gradually build up your email list, you can automate it to send out occasional emails with new product releases, discount offers, and so on.
The bottom line is, making money with blogging is so much more than just blogging. The writing only acts as the vessel to connect the audience with where the money is.
Selling Courses Online
There is an old saying, ‘If you’re good at something, never do it for free.’ You can use this saying in your blogging career every effectively. As you’re a writer, it means you’re good at writing. So, why not create a course of it?
You’ll be amazed to know how many people are trying to make ends meet as a blogger. As an expert in the field, you can easily turn your skills and knowledge into a sustainable source of income.
Various online education portals on the internet will be happy to display and sell your course. Or, if you want to cut the middle man, you can start selling the courses right on your website.
An easy way to attract students would be to offer a section of your course for free. You can end the post with a call-to-action to buy the course. Even better, you can offer discounts for those who sign up for your email list. You can build up your list for future prospects and sell your knowledge at the same time. It’s a win-win situation.
Selling eBooks
As sad as it may sound, the hard-cover books have seen better days. The world currently lives on the internet and so do the books. Utilizing this phenomenon, you can create an eBook and sell it to your audience.
Writing an eBook is not much different than blogging. Instead of writing individual posts, you’ll be compiling a lot of relevant posts together. The best thing about eBooks is that you create them once and reek the benefits for as long as they’re listed on the internet.
However, don’t forget to market your book properly. Use channels like your blogs, your social media, and guest posting to get your book in front of the eyes of the public. You can easily list your book on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon.
Once you get the hang of it, you can make so much money from selling as many eBooks as you want.
Advertising Directly
If you want to up your game from Google AdSense and make more money from advertising, placing ads directly from advertisers is the way to go. Many networks on the internet deal with bloggers and advertisement banners on their websites. You need to get in touch with them to see if your website qualifies for their program.
Another good way to go about it is making a separate page on your website for advertisement. You can name it ‘Hire for Advertisement’ or ‘Ads with Me’, or whatever you want. Basically, it will work as a landing page for people who want to run ads on your blog website.
Paid Reviews
This is similar to affiliate marketing, but not entirely. You contact service providers or sellers of high-quality products and offer to write a paid review on your website. It will go under their marketing budget if they decide to go forward with it. Just so you know, the biggest fund for any business is reserved for marketing!
The process can start from the other end as well. If you manage to create enough buzz on the internet with your high-quality blogs, businesses might start reaching out to you and ask you to do sponsored reviews for them. Depending on the length of the review and the popularity of your platform, you can make anywhere between a few hundred to thousands of dollars.
Offer Services
We know you love independence to write on your favorite topics. But if making money through blogging is your primary target, you should definitely offer services to people who need good content for marketing.
Any good writer on the internet is generally good at SEO, research, and proofreading. So, make a list of things that you are good at and selling those.
To start with, you can create a separate page on your blogging website named ‘Hire Me’ or ‘Get Professional Help’. The page will display a list of your services and how much you will charge them. The entire website will work as your portfolio in this case. So, if you have a website with decent traffic, you can make a lot of money.
How to Bring Traffic to Your Blog Website?
We don’t know if you noticed or not, all of the methods we mentioned about making money with blogging require a decent audience. And you can only build a consistent audience by bringing traffic to your website.
In this section, we’re going to look at ways you can increase the number of interested people on your website.
Use Keywords Sensibly
It doesn’t matter what topic you write about or what niche you cover, there is a keyword that can go viral through your content. And you can increase the chances even more by covering trending topics.
Keywords might not be the number 1 tool for SEO anymore, but they still hold their ground pretty firmly. So, if you want to improve the traffic to your blog website, there’s no alternative to using better keywords.
There are many keyword research tools out there that can give you a precise idea about a keyword’s search volume and competition. Google Keywords Planner is an amazing place to start. If you are willing to take things a notch higher and invest in keyword research. SEMrush can be an amazing paid tool.
You not only need to find better keywords but you also need to implement them correctly. Instead of stuffing your blogs with keywords, use them naturally. If the context doesn’t add up, don’t be afraid to tweak it a little to make it natural.
If the keyword alone isn’t working well, you can expand your ventures into LSI keywords. Also known as long-tail keywords, these are extended phrases containing the primary keyword to narrow down search results.
Moreover, you must connect your content and the keywords based on user intent. One keyword can be applied to various scenarios. But you must always go with the scenario where the reader is the winner.
Always Generate Unique Content
If there is one mistake you can make while blogging, that would be using plagiarized content. Plagiarism is your worst enemy when you’re trying to use blogging to make money. Google or any other reputed search engines will instantly penalize your content if the match percentage goes over the threshold.
If you don’t think you can create plagiarism-free content, maybe blogging is not for you. We mind come off as very harsh right now, but it’s the truth.
Take the Time to Craft Good Quality Content
If you feel the urge to produce as many contents as you can in the shortest possible time, you won’t be alone. More content means more money, right? Well, it’s not that simple. In the world of blogging, you must provide value to the reader. Without value, your blogs mean nothing to the audience.
So, don’t be shy to take the time to create high-quality content. If you’re writing about something you’re not familiar with, take extra time to research the topic very well. You don’t want to come off as a novice on your own blog.
Also, focus on your word choices and tonality. When you have a specific niche to satisfy, you need to adopt the tone they like. And keep it consistent across all of your content. If you’re into adding humor to your content, do it on all of them. Because once a reader finds your creations interesting, he/she might want to check out the other ones as well.
Cover Something Viral
If your target is getting as much traffic as soon as possible, there are no alternatives to covering viral topics. As we live in the era of the internet, news travels faster than anything else. So, if you find a viral topic that resonates with your niche, make sure that you cover it.
The clever use of the viral keywords and your input on the matter will bring in a lot of attention. And that’s your chance to keep the new influx of traffic as possible leads.
Work on Your Headings
Before anyone reads the entire content, they will go through the headings. The more creative headings you can come up with, the more engaging your content will be. You need to represent the body of the content through the headings alone.
When you’re creating content, don’t put too much stress on the headings right away. Complete the first draft and then start to work on the headings. It will give you a unique perspective on your own content because you have more information about your blog than when you’re writing the first draft. It will help you come up with better headings to really capture the attention of the readers.
Use Photos
Do you know what gets more attention than text? Photos! Include relevant images where they’re appropriate. Images help to capture the attention and make the reader want to read what you’re talking about.
Especially if you’re writing to promote your affiliate products, pictures are a must. Pictures are the only way the readers will get a good look at the products. And when they are convinced, you can expect them to click on your affiliate link.
Use Your Social Media
The power of social media is often disregarded by many bloggers. And as a result, they don’t generate enough traffic to monetize their website. We don’t want you to make the same mistake. So, why not use your social media?
According to statistics, over 3 billion people use social media regularly. So, if you’re not promoting your blog website on your social media handles, you are missing out on a huge crowd.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are all good examples of social media platforms that you can use to generate more traffic. Facebook and Instagram have dedicated business programs to help you target your audience even more accurately.
Create Evergreen Content
The sustainability of your blog website depends heavily on what type of content you write. Topic or trendy content might be good to generate traffic in a short time but it won’t be sustainable. Once the hype on the topic blows over, you will lose the audience with it.
Creating evergreen content, on the other hand, ensures that you have solid traffic all the time. Sports, lifestyle, health, etc. areas are best to create such content because they are relevant at all times.
When you provide your audience with sustainability, they become your source of sustainable income. You can apply the same principle for affiliate marketing as well. Promoting products or services that people always need will make you more money in the long run than covering viral products for a short period.
Know Your Audience by Heart
We know this should’ve been mentioned earlier, but the position of this section doesn’t mean it’s less important. In fact, this is one of the things you need to ensure when you start out with your blog website.
The audience is the most important part of the entire ‘making money with blogging’ equation. If you can’t get a hold of your audience first, all of your efforts will go in vain.
First of all, you need to find out your strengths. What areas are you good at? How can you provide the most value through your content? What’s the general tone of your writing?
The answers to these questions are your tickets to identifying your audience. For example, if you have an overall happy tone, you can target a large demographic because most people love to read positive energy.
On the other hand, if you tend to use a lot of pop culture references and humorous bits in your content, you will be narrowing your audience down to a younger demographic. But that’s not a bad thing at all. 10 sells out of 100 leads is always better than 1000 leads.
Moreover, if you find a niche that gets your content, it’s more likely that they will stick to your website. Hence, you get a consistent traffic report every single month!
Optimize Your Website if You Haven’t Already
Did you know that people’s attention span is less than 8 seconds on the internet? If you can’t get someone’s attention in the first 8 seconds they land on your website, you lose the lead forever. Even worse, if your website doesn’t load within the first 3 seconds, you may lose more than one lead because he or she will tell their friends to stay away from your website.
Do you want that for the blogs you work so hard on? Of course not. So, it’s time to optimize your website for faster load times. Also, look at your competitors and figure out what they do with their sites. Organize your content in a way that feels soothing to the eyes.
Also, don’t forget the mobile users. It’s not uncommon for many website developers to launch a website and completely forgetting about the mobile users. In fact, mobile users have defeated the laptop and desktop users combined in terms of usage volume.
So, make sure that you optimize your website for mobile users. We can surely say that many of your readers will read your post while lying down on their bed after a long day at work. Do you want them to see your broken and unoptimized website? We know you don’t.
Focus on Readability
You may have everything right. Your website loads fast. It loads properly on mobile. You’re marketing on your social media and through other channels. You are creating unique content with proper keywords. The sad reality is, all of this won’t do you any good if you can’t make your content readable.
Readability is a huge deal when it comes to blogs. No one likes to read a huge chunk of text that covers the entire screen. You need to break your blogs down into smaller paragraphs and use relevant headings throughout.
To ensure that you’re creating readable content, you can take the popular Flesch Reading Ease score. Multiple tools on the internet will let you test your content for readability. For absolutely free!
Keep the Content Updated
If you think writing content is the end of your duty, you’re wrong. Google and other search engines keep tabs on every website to make sure only the relevant pages stay. If your website has a lot of dead web pages, it will harm your rankings.
To get more traffic, removing old irrelevant content is a very important step. And from now on, make a schedule to update every content periodically. You can decide on the duration by yourself. 6 months to 1 year is usually the sweet spot.
Final Words
Making money is not easy. If it was, everyone would be a millionaire, right? The same goes for making money with blogging. You need to put in a decent amount of work to see a significant change in your traffic behavior.
You need to update your website and tailor your content to the specific needs of your audience. It can take a little time to get everything settled. However, you can use our guide to accelerate the process and see an increase in your paycheck from next month!