Is blogging lucrative? Can anyone create a profitable blog and what do you need to do to make money blogging? It’s true that plenty of people have profitable blogs. But starting a blog and making money from it are two very different things. Imagine having 1000 visits to your blog every day. You sell digital products from it and also make a few pence for every visitor who clicks on your adverts. You basically have an autopilot money making system here, a passive income too. But how difficult is it to get from opening your first blog page to the ideal scenario of making a tonne of money from it?
Is Blogging Lucrative?
So is blogging lucrative? Yes blogging can be lucrative. But it can also be a lot of hard work. And even if you get visitors to your blog, you need to monetise it in the right way for it to start working for you. There are a few things which you need to get right in order to do this. Having a blog and having a lucrative blog are two different things and there are many people who have blogs which make zero money.
Your first obstacle is to get traffic to your blog. Before that you need to decide what your blog is going to be about. Ideally you would blog about your passion, that way you can continue writing for a good, long time. You will never grow a blog into the thousands of visitors a day bracket unless you offer something of value which people want to read. You can also start with products first, rather than starting with a topic. Ideally your passion should connect you with a digital product of some kind which you can sell to monetise your blog.
Getting Traffic To Your Blog
Blogging is a great way to get people to your website from which you can then sell products. Selling digital products is a good idea because they are ‘hands off’. You can sell them passively without having to be there personally. Your website can do the selling for you, take the payments and send the products automatically. Getting people to your site is done in several different ways:
- Writing great content which ranks on the search engines.
- Paid Advertising
- Writing guest blogs for other bloggers in exchange for links to your website.
- Forum and blog commenting to build back links to your blog
Obviously paid advertising costs money but it is also the best way to turn on traffic to your website immediately. You can also be very specific about your target audience with paid advertising. See why is target market important. Paid advertising can also be scaled up once you have found a profitable model. If you don’t want to go straight into paid advertising you can simply write blogs to build up your site over time.
Blogging – The Cheapest Way To Build Your Online Presence
So is blogging lucrative? You can waste a lot of time blogging to try and get found in the search results. Simply writing a blog and publishing it is not enough. You also need to share it around as many places as possible to generate links and shares.
Quality Content
First make sure you write great content. No one will share or link to your content unless it’s good. Google won’t rank your content higher than someone else’s who does a better job. So the most important factor in blogging is to create quality content which is hard to beat. You want your content to be shared around the internet, rank highly on Google’s search engine and stay around for potentially years to come, bringing in traffic to your site.
Make It Specific To Your Target Audience
When you write your content make sure you have your perfect targeted audience in mind. What is the intent of your visitors question? What are your keywords for your article? Make sure your keywords are congruent with your products on your website. Writing content which has nothing to do with you products or targeted audience will mean you get the wrong visitors to your website. They won’t buy your products if they are not searching for something related to them. Let’s say you sell sausages on your website. You blogging should reflect the visitor’s intent to know more and potentially buy sausages from you. Don’t blog about cabbages. The closer you can get your blogging topic to the products you are selling on your website, the more likely you are to get the right kind of visitors.
Target Specific Keywords
Use the Google Keyword Planner to find keywords within your topic of choice. Ideally you would write an article for a keyword which gets thousands of monthly visits. Then they would all go to your website. Sadly, the most searched for terms are also the most competitive. With a new website you have zero chance of ranking your site at the top of page one for these keywords. Instead you should look for less competitive and longer tail keyword combinations which don’t have as many monthly searches. Even though there may only be a few monthly searches for these keywords, you have more chance of ranking on Google for them. It’s far better to rank on the first page of Google for a long tail keyword, than to rank on page 10 for a shorter one. No one looks through 10 pages of results on Google to find your result. Most people only look at the first few results.
More on this in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.
Other Tactics
Of course this is only one tactic and there are many others. Some bloggers focus on catchy titles and social media to get more shares and build a following. Making your blog title exciting and interesting is a good way to get more shares. They key is getting well qualified traffic to your website to make your blogging lucrative. Is blogging lucrative? It can be but you must get things right and traffic is a major factor.
Is Blogging Lucrative – Monetising Your Blog
So is blogging lucrative? As we have seen, creating a lucrative blog is not as straight forward as it may sound. It’s not just a matter of throwing up some content and laughing all the way to the bank. Your content needs to be shared and so it needs to be good. You can’t just publish your content and expect Google to show it to everyone. You need to target your content specifically to those people who may have an interest in your products. This means your interest or topic should be intricately linked to your products and services which you offer on your blog.
Monetising With Affilaite Products
You will need to monetise your blog with some affiliate products in order to make money from it. Affiliate products are simply other people’s products and services which you can earn from. Sell their product/s from your site and they do all the delivering and customer service, if there is any. Digital products can give you up to 50% commission on a sale. They can also be downloaded instantly without you being there. Choose affiliate products wisely. They are another important step in making blogging lucrative. Get it wrong and you don’t make any sales. Get it right and you can make regular sales on autopilot straight from your blog.
Monetising With Adsense Advertising
Google offers bloggers an advertising program. By creating some code and placing it on your blog, it creates clickable adverts which relate to your content. When a visitor clicks on your advert, you earn a small commission. This is usually only a few pence for each click. However, if you have thousands of visitors clicking on your adverts this soon adds up, and it’s passive income. You just need to build your traffic. The good thing about Google’s Adsense program is that you can use it on any blog, no matter what your content is about. Even if you struggle to find affiliate products within your niche, you can still benefit from Google’s program. The bad news is that you only earn tiny amounts from it, unless you have a massive amount of traffic. Some bloggers use just Google Adsense adverts alone. Others use a combination of affiliate marketing and Adsense, or just affiliate products.
Is Blogging Lucrative?
So is blogging lucrative? Talk to the top bloggers who make a living passively from their blog and the answer will be a resounding yes. Ask anyone who has attempted to create a profitable blog and failed and they will give you a different story. For many bloggers they are somewhere in between. The idea of having a blog and making an income which equals that of your current job is enough for most people to at least try. Once your blog has established itself over time you can rely on it more for an income and build more traffic to it.
Beware of the ‘Black Hat’ Techniques
White hat techniques involve the ones mentioned in this article. They are Google friendly ways of blogging. ‘Black hat’ techniques are those offered by various people on the internet with the promise that they will boost your rankings quickly.
Things like linking farms and directories offer to link to your content and boost your rankings. ‘Spammy’ keyword filled articles were once something which could ‘trick’ the Google search engines into ranking a site high, even when it didn’t offer much value.
Article spinners offer to use a single article and ‘spin’ it multiple times to build more links and content. Beware of these techniques and offerings and attempt them at your own risk! Many a blogger has been penalized by Google for using these techniques. They start to see their content ranking on Google. When a Google algorithm change takes place, their blog falls from the rankings and can completely disappear. If your income is dependent on your blog and this happens to you this can be devastating. Avoid this by sticking to white hat methods and build up slowly using quality content and building back links slowly over time.
Access A Digital Business System
The key to making a blog profitable is not in cheap pay per click adverts, it’s in building a list and selling products. If you don’t have your own products you can sell someone else’s. The owner handles all the promotional material, delivery and product development. You simply refer the sale. The four basic steps to making your blogging lucrative are:
- Write content which gets lots of traffic
- Turn your visitors into subscribers
- Offer value and education with your emails
- Follow up with useful products your audience wants
Ideally too you should use products with a back end of increasingly higher valued items. Even though most of your subscribers won’t buy a $20,000 product, for example, 1-2% might do. It’s this 1-2% of your list which will make your blogging very lucrative. And you should also have a range of products which are more affordable too.
Access a free video series which will explain how to use a digital business system to generate an income from blogging, online advertising and other lead generation methods. You can also access a range of high ticket products, with back end sales, ready for you to sell on your blog. Access here.
s what make a lot of blogs fail. Focus on content first and get the traffic. Without traffic to your blog you will never make any money however good your products are. Just having good content is not enough either sadly, you also need to market your content either through social media, paid advertising, Google or a blend of them all.
