Not everyone is cut out to do blogging but it’s an affordable way for anyone to get started making money online. The question is, how attainable is it to make money from a blog, and how much money can you make?
Making money from a blog takes time, patience and perseverance. There’s plenty of competition out there from many other bloggers. Not every blogger makes money from their blogs either. Some do it just for the heck of it! To monetise a blog, you’ll need traffic (visitors) as a minimum. Blogs can be monetised using a couple of main strategies:
- Affiliate marketing – selling carious products and services (which you don’t need to personally own).
- Advertising – Google’s Adsense program lets bloggers place adverts on their blogs which earn them revenue when they are clicked.
You don’t really even need a website of your own to start blogging either! You can get paid for advertising online even without a website. Do this with a free blogging platform. The problem with this is traffic though. Google doesn’t rank free blogging sites on their searches, so you’ll need to work very hard at getting traffic elsewhere.
Ideally, your blog content will get found on Google for some of your keywords in your articles. This will give you free visitors who will hopefully either click on your ads, or purchase your products! Whether they do or not is another matter! But how effective is blogging when it comes to making money online?
How Effective Is Blogging?
Blogging is a slow strategy for gaining traffic to your affiliate products or adverts. It takes a long time to build up enough traffic to see any realistic income. Even after a huge amount of work, results aren’t guaranteed from a blog. The facts speak for themselves, not how hard it has been. Whether your blog makes money or not is down to a few specific things:
- Traffic is the most important factor. Without it, you’ll never make any money from your blog. To get traffic you need to build content and promote it. It needs to be good enough for people to like too, for it to stand a chance of getting shares or ranked by Google.
- If you’re monetising your blog with ads, you’ll need a lot of traffic. The type of traffic isn’t as important as if you use only affiliate marketing, although some blog topics will earn you more in ad revenue than others.
- If you monetise your blog with affiliate products you’ll need the right kind of traffic. You want targeted buyers, not ‘tyre kickers’! This means crafting your content very specifically towards the kinds of people who would like (and need) your products.
Only a small percentage of your website visitors will actually buy from you. If you can get your visitors to opt-in to an email list, you have a chance to build a relationship with them over the longer term. This increases your chances of selling to them.
Blogging can be a very effective way of generating website traffic from social media and the search engines. However, it’s easy to get nowhere with blogging too! You need the right blueprint and determination to blog for a good 6 months solidly, without expecting anything in return! For this reason, it’s better to focus on a topic or interest which you’re passionate about. It’s very difficult to blog about topics which you have no interest in; especially over the long term.
What’s A Good Blogging Strategy?
There’s lots of blogging strategies you can use. You can:
- Target long tail keywords within your article titles and aim to rank on Google
- Use powerful and enticing titles to draw people in (think clickbait!)
- Checkout trending articles on Buzzsumo.com for ideas
- Write articles for leaders in your field/topic to get shares to their followers
Ultimately it’s your content which will determine whether your blog does well or not, and of course how well you promote it or it gets shared. Good content is the pre-requisite for a successful blogging strategy. Without it, you won’t get shares and likes and Google won’t rank your content on its search algorithm. It might not anyway, but at least with good content you stand a chance of getting shares for free on social media!
Tips & Tricks
Once you’ve written a blog, your job isn’t over. You need to share it, syndicate it, link to it and promote it as much as possible. Don’t expect it to rank immediately on Google. Getting a ranking is a bonus – but don’t expect it!
You can use a social media share buttons on your website to help encourage others to share and like your content. This can give it some extra views without incurring much work.
Use an SEO plugin (Yoast SEO) to help you optimise your content for the search algorithms.
Use a content syndication plugin – this lets you share your content automatically when you publish with a variety of social media platforms.
What’s The Ultimate Goal Of A Blog?
The purpose of a blog can be to enjoy creating it while also building a potential future income. You can blog without the intention of making any money. Many bloggers started out that way and became popular before they even thought about making money from it.
Ultimately though, a blog can become a source of passive income if you stick at it for long enough. This in itself is a very attractive proposition. However, you’ll need to work at your blog over the long term. You also need to learn which strategies work best for you, your products and you style of working.
Ideally, choose products which you would buy yourself to promote on your blog. You will want to choose products which also meet the needs of your visitors. However, if you can also pick subscription affiliate products, you can earn a lot more from far fewer sales.