How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners in 2021
How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners in 2021
Is It Really Possible For A Beginner To Make Money With A Blog? Can you make a living from blogging or is it just another myth? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’.
Blogging for money is not a theoretical concept, but it is a reality. Anyone with some basic knowledge of blogging, SEO and a general idea of how the internet works can start a blogging business and make money.
How Bloggers Make Money – An Introduction for Beginners
The blog you are reading now is a realistic example of a blog making money.
The purpose of this guide is to help you understand how to make money blogging by avoiding mistakes or wasting valuable time on tasks that don’t contribute to your main goal.
It’s meant for beginners because I remember when I started (in 2002), I found it very difficult to understand how blogging can help you make money.
It took me several years to realize the whole picture and figure out what I was doing wrong and how I could change things.
Hopefully, this comprehensive step-by-step guide will guide you in the right direction from the very beginning and give you a solid plan to follow that will deliver results in the fastest possible way.
Before going into the details, I would like to clarify something now.
It’s not an easy job, it’s a tricky and time consuming process that requires LOTS of effort and hard work, but it’s also one of the best and most rewarding jobs in the world.
The reward of building a successful blogging business is not just the money, but most of all the sense of achievement and satisfaction of building a business without relying on anyone other than your own talent and strengths.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many articles on “how to make money with a blog”?
If some people know the magic formula, why are they sharing it with the world and not keeping it to themselves and generating more money?
The answer is simple. It is every blogger’s dream to get to a point where they make money online and then share how they can start a blogging business with the rest of the world.
Of course, as we’ll see below, it’s another way to make money through affiliate marketing or by selling your own products and capitalizing on your success.
How do you make money with a blog?
Let’s rewind and start from the beginning. How do most bloggers make money online and how does it sound like a simple process! Actually, some steps are quite simple, but others are tricky and you need to have the right knowledge, the right tools, and a lot of patience.
Step 1: Set up your own self-hosted blog
This may be the easiest step. Nowadays it is so easy to register a domain name and set up a blog. All you need is a little help and pointers in the right direction.
I won’t go into all the details on how to set up a blog, but the good news is that our How to start a website guide (opens in a new tab) has everything you need to know.
In summary, it covers the following topics:
- How To Register A Domain Name
- How To Sign Up For Hosting
- How To Set Up WordPress
- How To Publish Your First Blog Post!
It is a comprehensive guide written for beginners to blogging and it will certainly save you a lot of time searching for this information online and a lot of stress.
Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Up Your Own Blog
As a blogging beginner, it’s normal to make mistakes. That’s fine, provided you learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat them. When it comes to starting a blog, keep these tips in mind.
Stay focused on your main goal: to make money online.
Your goal is to get to a point where you are going to make money with your blog, don’t forget that.
I mention this again because I know from experience that a common mistake beginners make is spending too much time and effort designing the ‘perfect blog’, forgetting that in the early stages (when no traffic is coming in ) no one cares about the design of your website, and that includes Google.
I’m not saying website design isn’t important, just not in the early stages. Your primary goal in this step is to run a blog and start creating content that will increase your traffic.
There is so much work involved in getting traffic (and potential customers), and you should devote all your energy to those tasks from the start.
You need your own domain and a self-hosted blog.
As you can read in the ‘start a website’ guide, there is a big difference between hosting your website on a free platform like medium.com and having your own domain and your own domain. self-hosted website.
Make the right decision from the start and choose the right platform. A self-hosted WordPress website is by far your best bet.
Keep it simple
If you start now, try to keep everything as simple as possible. Don’t overcomplicate things as you will get lost in the process.
You have a lot to learn and as you progress you will change your mind about many things, so save your time and energy for the more complicated tasks.
Digital marketing bundle – an online training that teaches you how to make money from blogging using digital marketing.
Step 2: Start Publishing Great Content
So you have a website running, that’s great!
Now is the time to tackle one of the most difficult and challenging tasks of blogging, which is nothing more than creating the actual content for your blog.
Keep this in mind
A blog with no content is nothing, a blog with mediocre content is just another blog in the millions of blogs already published, a blog with great content is a money-making business.
That said, it’s important to understand the importance of content to the success of your blog from the start.
Great (good, great, or great – you choose) content will get you traffic (we’ll see how below), credibility, and make you money (in a variety of ways).
So what’s great content?
Great blog content isn’t necessarily text, it can be images, videos, infographics, or even audio. BUT, in order to get high rankings on Google (and other search engines), your content should be mostly text.
As I mentioned above, keep it simple in the beginning. Later, for best results, you can combine text with other shapes to make your content more interesting.
Great content has the following characteristics:
- It’s unique to your website (it’s not an exact copy of an already published post)
- It’s free of spelling and grammar mistakes
- It’s meaningful
- It’s insightful
- It’s unbiased
- It’s something that helps people do something / understand / learn
- It’s easy to read
Don’t worry if the above list doesn’t make much sense for now, as you gain experience you will understand better.
Features of Quality
Content Let’s take a look at how to create practically good content for your website.
Choose a topic you enjoy reading / researching / writing.
When you start writing content for your blog, you should be able to provide content that meets the criteria of good content (as explained above).
If you are not passionate about the topic, this process will be very difficult and you will give up before you even start.
A money making blog needs a lot of content and you need to come up with a lot of ideas and topics to cover on a weekly (if not daily) basis, so keep this in mind when choosing your niche.
Pick a topic with a decent audience
It’s not enough to be passionate about a topic, others should be too.
Remember, to monetize your blog, you need people to buy your products or advertisers have to pay money for your ad space.
If your selected topic doesn’t have a decent audience, none of the above will happen.
The easiest way to do an initial search for your niche’s potential is to open Google and search for phrases (keywords) that come to mind.
Look for the number of results and types of websites that appear on the first pages of Google.
Don’t go too broad, make it specific.
While you need a decent audience for your chosen topic, don’t go too broad as chances are there are thousands of websites on the same topic already.
Popular topics have a larger audience, but they are also very competitive. Starting now as a solo blogger would make it easier to compete with other bloggers than with online businesses that have teams of writers and SEOs behind them.
I’ll give you an example to make this easier to understand.
Let’s say you have a passion for ‘fitness’ and ‘healthy living’. Searching for ‘lose weight’ or ‘diet’ on Google will get you thousands of results, many of them from online magazines or websites that have been around for years, filled with thousands of content pages.
It’s impossible for a new website to compete with this and get Google traffic for such generic terms.
What you can do instead is refine your topic and pursue a specific niche that is still related to your passion, but with less competition. An example of this is “Healthy Living Advice for Children”.
It is a topic of great interest, mainly from parents who want to learn how to provide a healthy lifestyle for their children, and they also have the money to buy a product (perhaps an ebook) to help them do that.
This process of figuring out what to write in your blog is called keyword research.
It’s a process you should master from the very beginning and I highly recommend that you take some time and read the following articles:
Resources
- The Keyword Research ProcessResearch – 10 Simple Steps to Conduct Good Keywords.
- What Are Long Tail Keywords – The importance of long tail keywords to the success of a blog.
- What Are SEO Keywords – What Are SEO Keywords and How To Find Them.
Step 3: Create Organic Traffic To Your Blog
Let’s summarize the process so far.
Your first step is to register your own domain and set up your blog.
Your second step is to decide what topics to cover in your blog and master the keyword research process.
The next step is to build organic traffic to your blog, and this is what I’ll be discussing in this section.
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic Traffic Statistics
To make money from your blog, you need organic traffic , not just traffic in general. Organic traffic is generated by search engines (usually Google).
What makes organic traffic more valuable than any other traffic source is the ‘user intent’.
A user typing a query in the Google search box has a clear intention. He or she is looking for an answer to a question, wants to learn something, look for information or buy a product.
Their intent is reflected in the actual search terms they use in the search.
For example, if a user searches for “how do I do an SEO audit of my website”, then it is clear that he is looking for a step-by-step guide on how to perform an SEO audit.
It’s very specific, and to be eligible to rank for that term (or related), you need to give Google a thorough guide on how to perform a manual audit.
If you do this right, your blog posts will eventually rank high on Google and you will start to get targeted organic traffic to your blog.
How do you get organic traffic to your blog?
Targeted organic traffic is the most valuable source of traffic for your blog because it is the traffic that converts.
By ‘converting’ we mean a number of things:
- users are more likely to stay on your page, read your message are more
- likely to subscribe to your newsletter
- are more likely to ask questions about your services
- are more likely to buy your products
We will cover each of these in more detail in the last part of the post, but for now, let’s take a look at how to get more search engine traffic for your blog.
You Need Great Content
While I covered this in Step 2 above, I’ll mention this again because it’s extremely important. If your content doesn’t meet Google standards, then anything you read below won’t work.
You must have your technical SEO correct.
Technical SEO has to do with the design of your blog and how well it is optimized for search engines.
Your blogging platform (especially if it’s WordPress) is SEO friendly by default, but there are a few things you should check and change to make it even better.
Things like:
- BlogStructure
- URLStructure
- XML Sitemap Optimization
- Using schemamarkeringentagpagina
- Canonicalization
- category- en optimaliseren Your
- Website Speed
- Mobile Kindness and accelerated mobile pages
- Webmaster Tools SEO
are all very important in the process.
You need to get your On-Page SEO correct.
On-page SEO goes a step above technical SEO and has to do with how to make your content and web pages more visible to search engines.
When assessing your on-page SEO, you will be dealing with things like:
- Optimized titles and description
- Post length
- Use of images and video in your content
- Correct use of headlines and
- message formatting Best practices for internal linking for maximum SEO
you need to work on your off-page SEO
All actions described so far to increase your organic traffic, dealing with items that you can change on your website / optimization.
Another very important aspect of getting more traffic from search engines is off-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO is the process of promoting your website on the internet with the aim of increasing awareness of your content, products or services.
In other words, you need to let other website owners know you exist. The advantages of this are great:
- search engines have a greater chance of ranking higher websites that have referrals (links) from other websites.
- You will get more visitors.
- You establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
As I’ve said before,
good on-page SEO can get you to the first pages of Google, while good off-page SEO can get you to the top spots.
The most popular and effective off-page SEO method is link building.
What is link building and why is it so important?
Search engine ranking algorithms are always looking for ways to understand the quality of a website.
The main purpose of a search engine, and in particular Google, is to keep its users happy by presenting them with websites with good content, easy to navigate and generally considered to be of high quality.
In addition to the on-page SEO optimizations, another way to convince them that your website falls into this category is to place external links from other websites that point to the pages of your website.
Other things being equal, the website with the most inbound links will rank higher in the SERPS.
Link building is a complicated topic and one that beginners to blogging find difficult to understand. I know this from experience and from the feedback I get from my blog readers and customers.
What you should know about link building at this stage is:
- it is not a matter of quantity, but above all of quality. This means that there is no magic number for the number of links you need to reach a high position, but where these links come from.
- Links from websites related to your topic that have high Google trust are more valuable than links from article directories or other low-quality websites.
- If you’re into black hat link building (i.e. buying links, exchanging links with others) you’re going to run into trouble with Google.
- Google’s algorithms will penalize your website for manipulating their algorithms and as a result you will lose all your rankings.
How do you increase the number of visitors to your blog through link building?
The most popular link building methods are:
- Guest posting on websites that are bigger and more famous than yours.
- Link to other websites from your content and contact them to let them know. If they find your website useful, they can decide to return the favor.
- Contacting other webmasters and introducing your website and content
Step 4: Build a community around your brand
Once you have a blog with great content and the traffic starts to pour in, your next step is to build a community around your brand.
A common mistake beginners make is to skip this step and go straight to the money making part, but this is not the most efficient way.
Before you sell anything (conversions) you first need to gain the user’s trust and this is achieved through community building.
Note that I have used the term ‘brand’ and not just blog and this was done on purpose.
At this stage, you should stop thinking of your blog as a hobby, but you should change your thinking and approach it the way you would approach a ‘real’ business.
We all know that branding is a very important aspect of the success of any business and your blog is no exception to this rule.
There are many things you can do related to branding (like having a clear logo, unique tagline, etc.), and community building is one of them.
What is community building for a blog?
In simple terms, what you are trying to do is create a community of people who will follow your blog, interact with your content, and buy your products or services.
The most common ways to do this are through:
Email Marketing
People who subscribe to your email list (also called newsletter) are a valuable asset to your blog. You can use your email list to notify your community when new content is available on your blog, ask for their feedback, and sell them products or services.
This will not happen from day one, you have to gain their trust first by providing value through your emails, but at the end of the day it is one of the most efficient methods of creating a community around your blog .
In my case, 20% of the monthly sales of my SEO courses are generated through my email list.
Social Media Networks
Some people don’t like to receive emails, they prefer to use social networks to read their news, communicate with their friends and generally spend a lot of their time online.
You need to make sure you have a social presence on the same channels as your potential followers.
There are many social media networks out there that you can use, but since you are just starting to set up and establish your blog’s brand, it is better to focus on those channels that have been proven to be more effective than others ( when it comes to building followers). ), and these are Facebook and Twitter.
Start building your fan base on Facebook and spend 10-15 minutes a day on Twitter as well.
Remember, your goal is to connect with people who can become potential followers and customers of your blog, and not just everyone who has a social presence. Do some profiling and choose your target audience wisely.
Web Push Notifications
This is another way to connect with your community. People who sign up for push notifications will be notified every time a new message is published and when you want to send them a new message.
Respond to comments
Last but not least, don’t forget blog comments. I am not referring to comments that you can write on other blogs, but to respond to comments that other people post on your blog.
If someone comments on one of your articles, they expect to get a response back, and ignoring these articles is no good when you’re trying to build a community.
Check out some of my older posts and you will find they have dozens of comments. What I do on a daily basis is try to respond to each of the comments and help my readers in any way I can.
I do not approve all comments; I only post comments that are meaningful (not spam or self promotion) and this encourages more people to post their comments.Resources
Social Media Marketing for Beginners – A Simple Guide to Using Social Media to Promote Your Blog
Step 5: StartMoney Selling Ads
MakingHave you noticed how many things you need to do to get to the making money section ?
While this blog post is about making money from your blog, almost ¾ of the content is related to activities that take place before that and that’s how blogging for money works in real life.
As a reminder, it’s imperative to understand that you wo n’t be making money from your blog if:
- you don’t have enough organic traffic,
- you don’t have a decent email list,
- you don’t have a community of loyal followers.
- You don’t have any content that converts
Assuming you have successfully completed the above tasks, let’s take a look at how to make money online and reward yourself for the hard work.
Selling Ad Space: Google AdSense
I’m a great AdSense lol, I admit! I’ve been an AdSense publisher for over 15 years now and while there are alternatives, Google Adsense is still one of the best ways to make money online.
I use Adsense on my blogs and so far I have earned a tidy 6-figure amount.
I am not using Adsense on this blog because, as you will read below, there are cases where AdSense is not the best way to monetize your blog.
A few things to know about making money with AdSense:
Simple and reliable
Adsense is very easy to use and reliable. All you need is a blog with great content and a lot of traffic.
You add AdSense to your blog and when people click on one of your ads, you get 68% of the money paid by the advertiser (the remaining 32% goes to Google to prove this service).
It’s reliable because you know that Google will pay you on time and do everything it can to protect the system from fraud and spam.
You can choose what type of ads to show, how often to show them, what the ads look like and much more.
How Much Money Can You Make With AdSense?
The amount of money you can make with Adsense depends on three things:
- Your organic traffic levels.
- Placement of your ads
- The number of advertisers available for your niche.
Let’s quickly examine these factors: it is
clear that the more traffic you have, the more money you can make with Adsense. It’s that simple.
To make money with Adsense, you need people to click on your ads and the position of your ads on the page is a very important factor.
While the best way is to test different ad placements and find out which ones work better for you when putting Adsense in your main content (as opposed to the sidebar and footer), you can expect higher click-through rates (CTR) and this means more revenue .
Ads that are above the fold also perform better.
Here’s an example of Adsense ads in the content of a blog post.
Adsense is a keyword-based auction type system. When a user searches Google and then visits a website that has AdSense ads, it will attempt to show the user ads that are relevant to the query.
If there is a lot of competition i.e. a lot of related ads then this will increase the money the advertiser will pay and the money you will earn.
Can you advertise your blog or products through AdSense?
Yes, you can do that via Google Adwords. AdWords is the system used by advertisers to serve ads that appear on Google Search and Adsense websites.
However, keep in mind that you cannot use Adwords and direct PPC traffic to a landing page that has Adsense. In the past this was a method that made some people a lot of money, but not anymore.
When is the best time to use Adsense?
- Use AdSense on websites that cover many topics (news portals, magazines, newspapers, forums, etc.).
- Use Adsense on websites in the healthy living niche (fitness blogs, weight loss, etc.).
- Use AdSense on websites that have many page views.
When is the best time NOT to use Adsense?
- Don’t use Adsense if you can create and sell your own products or services.
- Don’t use Adsense if you can make money from affiliate marketing.
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