Of course you can – yes! The end! That’s why the world and his dog are forever writing blogs about this, that and everything. They’re not just there for their health! (Got all three ‘there’s’ in there!!).
People blog because they like to but also because they can earn a living from it. Firstly it’s not a job for everyone and to blog successfully you need to enjoy it and to enjoy it you need to write about something which interests you. If you’re the kind of person who is interested in everything then so much the better. I have built several websites and have written about pretty much everything from recipes to growing garlic!
Why write a blog on garlic you might ask! The garlic website came about from a huge amount of keyword research. One of the ‘money online’ systems I followed involved building ‘niche’ sites which targeted certain keywords that had a good amount of traffic already, plus a limited number of competing websites. I built the site from scratch with no prior knowledge of ‘when to harvest garlic’. I just studied the topic and built several articles giving information about garlic.
The site doesn’t make much money and I haven’t done anything to it for a while but I still make a tiny trickle from Google Adsense from it so it’s just about worth keeping. Originally it did quite well and ranked near the top for its keywords. However I haven’t kept up with it and it has been pushed to the bottom of the pile now.
Adsense is one way to monetize your blog but if you have relevant products which you can promote and sell it is miles better. Adsense works if you have a tonne of traffic, but selling affiliate products seems to work better in my experience. If someone clicks on an advert on your blog you make a few pence, but if someone buys a product from your site you can make 100’s or even 1000’s of pounds/dollars for each sale. Even if you only sell occasionally it makes far more sense to do this than to send away your visitors through an adsense advert for only $0.50. Adsense is useful though if your niche is particularly difficult to monitise. It means you can still make money and you’re not selling anything.
The biggest issue with blogging isn’t the monetisation however – it is the traffic generation. It’s quite easy to put a few products on your website but it’ll still earn sweet F.A if you haven’t got any visitors! And you don’t just want random traffic landing on your blog either, you want to target your visitors with precision so that you bring in relevant customers for your products. For example if you’re selling weight loss products you don’t want to blog about financial security and vice versa. You need to write relevant content to bring in interested customers to your niche.
Of course you can create your own products to sell but this is much harder and you don’t have any proof that they will sell. Then you have to gather interest for them by which time you have doubled your workload and you still have no customers. Instead you can use other people’s products which are already proven and promote them instead. Make sure you find the best quality products to promote and that they offer real value. ‘High ticket’ sales are better than low value products since you earn a greater commission on each one sold. Therefore you are generating more income for the same or similar amount of work done.
Take a browse down this sales funnel and you can see how it all works: I was lucky enough to find this company who offer high ticket affiliate commissions and superb training, allowing anyone to build an internet business from scratch with no prior knowledge. You can unsubscribe at any time and there is no obligation to buy. This seven day video series will talk you through how you too can build a career from your laptop.