There are various ways how to earn money by blogging. Firstly you obviously need a blog. You can start a blog for nothing on various blogging sites such as hubpages.com or blogger.com. However, it is worth getting your own website domain name and hosting if you want to take it a bit more seriously. Blogs on the free blogging sites don’t get the same authority on Google as your own blog and they can always shut down at any time.
How To Earn Money By Blogging – Get Started With A Blog
Head over to wordpress.com to start your own blog and get a website set up with your own choice of domain name. WordPress is probably the most user friendly platform to use. Once you have set up a site, you need to start blogging. Your blog is one of tens of millions of blogs floating around the internet. No-one will visit your blog unless you give them a reason to. Getting your first blog is quite rewarding but you need to remember than no-one can see it! You need to advertise!
How To Earn Money From Blogging – Getting People To Your Blog
Getting people to your blog, and keeping them there, is the main and probably the hardest job for a blogger. You need to write content for people to come and read. Unless you are creating good content, no one will visit. Even if your content is the best content ever, people have to find it. They are not going to scroll through pages of Google results just to find your blog. You need to promote your content once you have published it. Don’t expect Google to rank it! Your job isn’t done after publishing your first post. You need to advertise and share your content as far and wide as possible.
Sharing Your Blog And Networking
Sharing your blog content on various social media platforms is a good start to get your work known. Once you have been blogging for a while you may build a small following. Find other bloggers in your niche and connect with them by either writing to them directly, commenting on their posts, or connecting with them on social media. Blogging takes time. Sharing, networking and keyword research are a few methods to spread word of your blog.
Earn Money Blogging – Keyword Research
Using the free Google Keyword planner is a good way to find untapped niche keywords for your blog titles. It’s not guaranteed to get you on the first page of Google, but by doing this in conjunction with writing great content and sharing on social media is a great way to get a steady stream of views for free over the long term. You can read more about this in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.
Earn Money Blogging – Monetisation
So far I have talked only about starting a blog and building traffic to it. Without traffic you can’t earn from a blog. But without a good way to monetize your blog you can’t earn either. There are several ways to monetise your blog but the main two methods are:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Google Adsense
Google adsense offers you the ability to place code on your website which is optimsed for your blog content. Adverts appear automatically in relation to what your content is about. You earn every time someone clicks on an advert on your site. However, you need a serious amount of traffic to your website to earn even a modest amount from Google Adsense. You will usually only earn a few pence for each click you get.
Affiliate Marketing
You can promote other people’s products and services on your website. For every sale you make, you earn a commission. Selling some digital products on your site can earn you as much as 50% of the sale price on some products. All you need to do is place an advert or banner on your website. Obviously the products you choose has a huge impact on your success. You need to choose products which relate to your blog in some way. Your visitors should be suitable for the products you choose to display on your blog.
Clickbank is one of the biggest global internet retailers. See their marketplace here.
Earn Money Blogging – High Ticket Products
Selling low value affiliate items from your website can make you some small commissions. However, by selling high ticket items, you can earn much more for each sale. Let’s say you sold an affiliate product for $100 and the commission rate is 40%. You would earn $40. By selling an item worth $1000 a the same rate of commission you would earn $400 for the sale. High ticket products make monetising a blog much more effective.
How To Earn Money By Blogging – Paid Advertising
Although the title of this blog is how to earn money by blogging it is also worth mentioning the power of paid advertising to help boost and monetize a blog.Blogging takes time and lot of effort. Paid advertising on the other hand is like turning on a tap of targeted traffic to your blog. Ideally when paying for advertising you should capture your visitors email when they visit your blog. Having a landing page for this specific action is definitely recommended. Rather than paying for someone to come and browse your site. Send the paid traffic to a landing page with one action in mind – to sign them up to your email list. More on paid traffic in this article: strategic marketing ebook.
How To Earn Money By Blogging – Email List
Many successful bloggers don’t make their money from their blog. They use their email list to make money. Not many first time visitors to your site will buy a product straight away. Only a tiny percentage will do this. You have only a few minutes to sell to a customer browsing on your website unless you capture their email address. Email marketing is one of the biggest and best marketing strategies on the internet. All the top earners online use an email list. Here’s the reason why:
A visitor to your site has only a few minutes to make a decision to buy. If someone opts into your email list, the window of opportunity to sell to that person opens up to days, weeks, months, years and even decades.Â
By providing value, entertaining and offering insight to your subscribers you can build a relationship with them. Over time they are more likely to purchase from you because of this relationship, if you have something of value to offer them.
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