Blogging refers to writing, photography, and other media that's self-published online. Blogging is in trend right now. Most people started blogging and earning a lot through it. Blogging also provides a chance to do affiliate marketing also.
Okay, so let's start here I'm going to tell you exactly how writing a blog do it all for free right now for you.
1. Right Way To Start A Blog - Niche
So the number one point is start your blog the right way just like a home needs a great foundation.
Firstly we'll choose the right blog niche. The first question most people have while doing blogging is, what the hell do I blog about? most people end up overthinking. In this process the mistake most people make is when they start out, they start trying to like sole search for their passion or go on some yoga Zen meditation retreat to find enlightenment, and find their purpose. But the truth is this is kind of the opposite of what you need to do because when finding your purpose or finding your passion it happens through taking action and getting feedback from the action that you're taking. So I'd recommend to start your blog about something that you either have experience in or something that you want to learn. If you'll ask me, I've started Business, Freelancing, Investing, Marketing, Tech related types of blogs, as you are reading this business related blog. I personally gone on this topics for blogging because I loved this topics and have experience in this, so that I can share it with all.
Another way to think about this is what topic or subject do you bring up all the time with your friends and family. Like the one that you bring up over Thanksgiving and Christmas and during the holidays etc. Search for that topics which you can share that with others. like, Entrepreneurship which is in trend now-a-days. That's a good topic for you to talk about on your blog. So choose a blog niche and a topic that you are either interested in learning about. Or something that you kind of already know about.
2. Choose Domain Name and Design your Blog
The next step is to select your domain name. So the domain is another word for URL and the URL of YouTube is youtube, like google is google. Again this is another place where most people spend a lot of time overthinking. Mine first blog was on devocrux.blogspot.com which was a free domain. Of course, to buy domain you need money. That's why, initially I hosted my site on free domain. That name honestly which is chosen is kind of weird most people don't know how to spell devocrux. lol! But, go ahead and give a try to yourself. Your name really doesn't matter when it comes to a business in blogging. You'd be surprised by how little names actually mean Samsung could be a local music. store, Avis could be a place where you bought drones on the internet. And SpaceX could be a website dedicated solely to astronaut horn. The thing that defines these businesses is not their name. It's what they do!! So don't ever think it you don't have to come up with some perfectly clever name or need an paid domain to succeed as a blogger. I promise finally you want to set up your blog with the right hosting in the right platform and by far the best place for you get started is WordPress.
Now I know there's some other options out there like wix.com and Squarespace but the problem with those is those websites are more geared to stand alone, stagnant websites. So something like a personal portfolio or a resume they're really not that great when it comes to getting continuous blog traffic coming in over time to your blog. And having continually updated posts they're just not optimized for that what's gonna end up happening. If you start with a Squarespace our Wix you're gonna end up going back to WordPress anyway so just start there I understand that WordPress has kind of a higher learning curve for most people. So, in starting you can also start your blogging journey from blogger.com that's very good website to start with. Actually, my this article which you are reading now is on blogger.com only which was mine 1st website. Then, you can also easily transfer to wordpress if you think you need more higher kind of functional website.
Okay, so let's walk through some simple steps to make your blog clean and beautiful. Firstly you want to choose a great blog theme choosing the right blog theme is like choosing the right or wrong car at a used-car dealership you choose the wrong car you're gonna spend hours and headaches on the car breaking down and on maintenance. On fixing everything it's gonna be a constant hassle in your life. Versus if you choose the right car and you never have any problems with it you're gonna feel great. Right now in wordpress the best free themes out there are flash, blog ocean WP and Hestia. While some of the best paid themes are Divi and Genesis and don't forget to install the Elementor plug-in. Because it's a great page builder that's a perfect drag and drop for a newbie wanting to get started and building their blog and making it look the way that you want to. Another important part about blog design is optimizing it for mobile. Over 60 to 70 percent of visitors on the Internet these days are visiting through their phones. So some things might look amazing on your desktop it might look really good on a phone so always check your work.
Choose an easy to read font like a laddu or an open sans or Roboto because ain't nobody got time to read that cute but illegible font. Okay, so now you've started your blog and got a design like you want to. Let's move on to step three.
3. Create Attractive and Creative Content
What I mean to say with attractive content is like, create the content people need! It's time to answer the million-dollar question of what should I write about? Well this is actually a rather simple answer if your goal is to make money you need to create the content that other people are searching for on the internet. Every day millions of people type in searches into Google, Pinterest, YouTube when looking for videos and articles and blog posts trying to solve their problems. If you're able to serve that content to them, then that's the best way to be on top of those search engines. Well it's very easy to make money online. Okay it's not super easy but it's a lot easier than you think.
Here's how you do this first. You start doing keyword research see there's all sorts of tools on the internet to see how often people are typing in certain terms. So if you searched that people look for how to make money blogging, over 135000 times per month. And that's exactly why I'm writing this article. Start with a tool like keywordseverywhere. It's a completely free Chrome extension that you can install and type into a search bar you will be able to see the volume of that search term being looked at. Another great free tool that most people often under use is Pinterest, type in your topic into the search bar and hit enter after the page loads if you look to the right you will see all sorts of additional suggestions. These are keywords people are looking for as well and using this method will help you come up with endless topics that you can cover on your blog or website. After using these tools for a while you can upgrade to more professional tools like Semrush.com and Google's keyword planner which will give you more accurate search data. Now this doesn't mean you only have to post things that people are searching for. There's room to create your own sort of unique content. When making money blogging, you just need to follow the 80/20 rule.
80% of the content that you create should be that things that people are searching for and problems that they're trying to solve. And 20% should be where you flex on them, a little bit and tell them a little bit more about you and the blog about the things that you want to write about.
4. Get Traffic from Different Sources
Okay, so after your first 5 posts are written it's time to move on to step number 4 and time to get traffic to your blog. There are lots of ways to get readers to your blog there's Pinterest, Facebook, Google, SEO, YouTube, Instagram, guest blogging, email drips, forums and I'm sure a dozen more that I haven't listed there. The biggest tip that I can give you right off the bat is to start with one traffic source I know there are lots of entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk telling you that you need to be everywhere and be on every social media and be on every platform. But the truth is, that's kind of a one-man show what ends up happening with most people is when they try to be everywhere they usually end up just sucking at everything. That's why I always tell my followers to try to instead of sucking at everything, master 1 or 2 of these things. Like Red Foreman said don't half-ass everything, pull last one thing. Keep up, with a smart mouth and my foot will be nine-tenths of the way up your ass.
So the next question you should probably have is, How do I find the perfect traffic source for my blog? There are tons of different factors to consider here including competition type of platform demographics of your target market and more. So to make this simple here are my thoughts on the top 5 traffic sources,
Facebook has the most users of really any social platform. But it also comes with the highest competition and Facebook has recently made algorithmic changes that really doesn't feature blog posts anymore. It's very few and far between that you'll read blogs much where the content is geared towards memes and video content. And things that just aren't blog posts, Facebook groups however are still going very strong and it's actually a great place to meet like-minded bloggers. But it might not be the best source for driving traffic to your website but that being said I wouldn't write it out because those groups can be so valuable especially to beginners starting off. To find these groups you can just type in your search term into Facebook search bar and hit click groups and you'll see dozens and dozens of groups on almost any topic. Again not the best way to drive traffic to your blog but a great way to interact with potential customers and peers and people you look up to in your industry.
On instagram you'll find that Instagram follows a similar trajectory as Facebook where it has a high amount of users but it also has a high amount of competition. And the thing is it is a purely visual platform yeah you can write captions in the description but really if you're not creating dope images you're not gonna get anywhere on Instagram. So the niches you want to be in to succeed on Instagram are going to be mainly visual things like travel, health and fashion work really well. Because they're visually stimulating unfortunately and something to keep in mind it's kind of stupidly hard thing to get people off of instagram and on to your email list or on to your blog posts. And over to your products people tend to stay inside of the app and Instagram is designed in that way that being said we've had students like the college nutritionist go to $10,000 per month and more running a successful Instagram.
So it can be done on Google too. Google is similar to Facebook and Instagram that it has high competition but it comes with one big difference. And that difference is it's a search platform. So the people that type in how to make money blogging for example will continue to type that in month after month and after month and you will get organic traffic coming in all the time. This is very different than Instagram or Facebook where things are more viral in nature and then they die off over time. So Facebook and Instagram should have this kind of constant need, to roll out this new crazy mind-blowing content went on something like Google. So you can optimize your posts and continue to be shown over and over and over again sucking in that organic traffic. But obviously, because of this value it's very hard to get at the top of search it can take a long time to do and just be prepared that if this is the route that you want to go on, you need to go in for the long haul, it might take you up to six months to get serious traffic to your blog.
YouTube is entirely completely different animal than this mall. It is the highest barrier to enter, by far because most people do not want to get on camera and I understand why this barrier to enter provides. Actually an easy way to connect with your audience build a following and drive them back to your blog and make purchases with them but again comes with a high barrier to enter because shooting videos is difficult and very time-consuming. So if you're extraordinarily good-looking and wanna express yourself, don't mind being on camera YouTube might be a great option for you.
Pinterest, last but not least our favorite traffic source for bloggers is Pinterest. Pinterest like YouTube and Google is also a search engine. So there's that opportunity for organic traffic but unlike Google it doesn't take as long to get results. Personally I had also gone from zero views to over 10,000 views a month on my blogs. Just because of its speed of results and the fact that you can get organic traffic, Pinterest does end up being our number one traffic source for bloggers. If you're in almost any niche I would definitely get Pinterest a try.
Alright so you built your blog, you've designed it, you start to get your first readers, your first visitors checking out the content that they want to see.
5. Build your Subscriber's Fan Club and Email List
Now, it's time to turn those readers into fans. Step number 5 build a subscriber fan club. But to be honest, here's the truth about blogging is that most people are never gonna buy your products until they've built up a certain level of trust with you. And the best place to build that trust is through an email list. If you see that the email list provides us much better purchase rates than just linking our products on our blog. An email list is one of the most valuable assets. If you have as a blogger and setting it up is not as hard as you think the basic formula is that, you first need to create a lead magnet that is just a simple download for people to have a checklist or simple guide will work you'll want to create a small but helpful download for people so that they can give that you can give that to them in exchange for their email address. Then you need to add these opt-ins to your blog with a email subscriber service like a convertkit. This is actually a very easy process to do this way when people are scrolling through your posts they see the opportunity to put it get your download and they put in their email address and receive the download and finally what you'll want to do is create an automated email sequence. This is just an automated sequence of emails that you send after somebody get your download these are called often an indoctrination campaign. it's more like a get-to-know-you thing where you're kind of helping them out with whatever problem that they're trying to solve at the same time sort of explaining a little bit about more about you, about what you're, about why you created your blog, again all design to build that trust and turn that subscriber into a really true fan.
Great now your blog is all set up it's beautifully designed, you're getting people in the door, you're getting your fruit and first few subscribers. Now it's time to make that money chase that paper.
6. Different Ways To Make Money Through Blogging
In this step number 6 we're gonna learn, the different types of ways to make money and they're really five of them what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go over an overview of these different ways and then we're gonna walk you through which steps you should start with at kind of what phases of your blogging journey.
The first way to make money is through ads. Now there are a few different types, the first thing you probably know about our display ads.
1. These are ads that are you're scrolling through content and then you'll see an ad for something. Another term for this is pay-per-click because when somebody clicks on it, you'll get paid.
2. The second type of ADs is something called sponsored content. This is when somebody like a big company pays you to write a review or write something about their product.
3. The third type of ADs is a giveaway this is very similar to sponsor content but instead of the company paying you, they give you their product for free.
I'll get a second way that you can make money through your blog is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing is where you earn money promoting another person's product or service. So let's say you write a post about your top 5 favorite books on whatever you topic your blog is about. What you can do is, you can actually link those books in the blog posts themself and link them to Amazon. When somebody clicks and checks out that book and says okay that looks awesome I'm gonna buy it, like the reviews you know four and a half stars looks good to me when they buy that product then you will get a small commission from Amazon. And that is kind of affiliate marketing now affiliate marketing is a huge category and you can make a lot of money on it.
When you sell your own digital products and services there are a few different kinds, first are ebooks these are electronic books like kindle downloads there are printables and workbooks where people can purchase a printable that you've created and print them out and use it for themselves. Something like a journal or a workbook. Before you make fun of that or think anything sarcastic about it I do know a blogger who makes over $200 per month selling printables mind-blown online courses. So online teachings and trainings that where you can teach them via video and finally there are membership websites where people pay a certain amount to get access to regularly updated content usually by yourself.
There are physical products also, we can sell products also. Now you can easily find physical products they're actually a lot easier to sell because they're tangible. When they buy that product they get something tangible back. But it's much more satisfying usually than a digital product. But also as well there's margins to be had. So there you have to ship the product, you have to create the product, you have to manufacture the product.
Services speaking engagements like speaking engagements for dog-walking, coaching, virtual assistants, freelance writing and whatever service people or whoever need, you can sell it. Through your blog in fact it's a great way to do this because you're already building massive trust with your audience.
Okay, those are the types of ways to make money through blogging. Now we're gonna get into the point where you should be starting step number seven.
7. Monetize your Blog with Google Adsense
Okay, so after setting up your complete website, start with ads and sponsored posts. The first thing that we see bloggers doing when they first start their website is usually running around trying to throw up Google Adsense on their website. To make a quick buck the problem is that the reality of your ad earnings are probably gonna fall pretty short of your expectations. When I did this the first time I remember, I threw up these ads and I thought I'm gonna get a ton of money coming in automatically per month. Because I had a decent readership, there you know one of these days could be tomorrow I'm gonna be a millionaire and I think after a full month or a full week I had only made two dollars and 93 cents. That's not enough so you can understand that, this wasn't working mathematically for me as a viable way to make a ton of money I thought I was gonna write off ads forever. But that was only until that only. Later on that, now I make over one thousand dollars a month with ads. Here's how I'm able to do this. My blogs get a lot of traffic like over one hundred thousand views a month and because I get that amount of traffic I was able to partner with premium ad networks. So really specialize really awesome networks that can give me higher returns on the ads and the clicks that we do get so.
Here's a recommendation for newbies like yourself ads are kind of a good place to start for newbies just because it can be motivational or give you a little inspiration at the beginning. But it is not the primary way you need to be monetizing you can be focused on the bigger picture here. Try to wait until you're getting a consistent amount of traffic so you can partner with premium ad networks. The one that I partner with is one called Adthrive.com but there are a few others including media.net, propellerads.com and I'm sure a few more this will net you a lot more money than just throwing up Google Adsense and praying that somebody clicks sponsored posts. Sponsored posts as explained before are where people are paying you to write an article on your blog usually kind of reviewing their product or service these articles often come in the form of print reviews and recommendations.
So it is a viable way to make money and make money pretty quickly sponsored posts might be perfect for you if you love to write. It can find good opportunities that fit your niche want to build relationship with other companies and brands in your niche and want a way to diversify your blogging income. Sponsored posts might not be right for you if you face a lot of time constraints it can be very time consuming finding good opportunities and filling out the required work and have your heart set on passive income. You're technically still trading hours for dollars here.
8. Master Complete Affiliate Marketing
Now it's time to take things to the next step with step number 8 progress and master affiliate marketing. There are risks associated with every form of monetization method when it comes to blogging but affiliate marketing is unique. As it will teach you not only how to sell but it will also prepare you for creating your own future products. Mastering affiliate marketing is usually kind of one of the key steps to becoming a successful blogger you'll see that a lot of successful bloggers first start on affiliate marketing. and then progress on to higher margins with their own products and services just like in my example when we talked about writing a blog post on the top 5 books and your recommended niche you can start out by doing this exact process with Amazon Associates. This is the very small, very easy way to start out in affiliate marketing and it progresses and gets much more advanced later on.
How you do this with Amazon Associates is easy and the reason I tell you to start out there is because everybody uses Amazon. It makes a very simple way to get your first few transactions and feeling good about blogging and its potential right off. The get-go getting signed up isn't too hard just go type in Amazon Associates to Google and you can join for free. Once you're approved you can recommend Amazon product on your blog. It can creates an awesome form of passive income for most bloggers. Once you sold a few affiliate products on Amazon it's time to start leveling up your affiliate marketing and thinking about going to big affiliate networks and partnering with a bigger product. So there's networks like Clickbank, ShareASale, CJ affiliate, Impact and so many more these networks are going to give you a much higher price Commission than something like Amazon.
But keep in mind they're going to be much more difficult to sell. Because they're not checking out using Amazon's platform you have to learn how to build a lot of trust with your readers and that's why I said at the beginning you start an email list because that's the best place to start selling higher priced affiliate courses and products and other things. Yeah okay, now you've got some money rolling in a from affiliate marketing. Starting to get down the sales process and learn about how to sell through your blog and how to build trust with your readers you're building a fan base building people who are interested in, what you're doing.
Now it's time to talk about to create your own products and services both physical and digital. But it is not a full-time income for a blogger. The power of creating your own products and services is that you can control the margin, so you control the prices, you control the sales page, you control the entire system, and the entire flow of selling your own product. That's why all the biggest bloggers you know all the ones that are making the most money well they sell their own stuff. This does not have to be digital products either this can be physical products as well. The key here is to do something better than what is before you. So you don't want to just go around and replace your affiliate links with your own crappy products and not a good version of it. Only replace products that you can truly replace and do it better. The goal here is to make a better experience for your audience. If you make a worse experience for them the results are not going to be what you want as well as there's always gonna be products that are better suited as an affiliate product versus you creating your own. And just something to keep in mind something like hosting. Like I'm not gonna create a hosting company so I'm gonna partner with somebody like Bluehost, who is a hosting company where I can sell hosting packages also as said before you can sell your services whether you're a public speaker, virtual assistant, freelance writer. You can sell all of these products and services on your blog. Selling your own products is the only true way to scale your blog and this is how you take something from a thousand dollars a month to ten thousand dollars a month and do so passively, do so without actively, constantly having to work and trade hours for dollars.
Okay, at this stage you've come a long way started your own blog, you designed it well, you created awesome content, you drove traffic to the blog, you collected email subscribers, you've been monetizing in a variety of different ways and now you've got kind of your blog set up. You've made your own courses, made your own products, you've found your audience, found your voice, found these things. Now, the next part is actually a very fun part of blogging.
9. Scale and Optimize Your Blog
So step number nine is scale and optimize your website. This is the really fun part because really you've done a lot of the hard work. Now your job is to just scale what you do and again this is what makes blogging such a different thing. Let's say going and working for they're gonna pay you let's say $500 a month. Wow $500 a month!! $500 a year to do customer service right but when you're blogging and creating your own products and services just a few tweaks here are there are getting a blog post to go viral or are creating some new content immediately raises up your income. And this is kind of a two-part process I want to tell you how it works really quickly sales equals traffic times conversion rate. And I want to tell you how your conversion rate on your sales page is 1% so for every 1000 visitors on your sales page you make 10 sales.
Now let's say you add a few testimonials to your sales page and include a couple more and your email sales funnel that bumps your conversion rate to 2% which means that you have just doubled your cells. Now a 1000 of visitors is getting at 2 percent which is 20 sales. So you've just doubled your income that's really crazy. Now let's say you start working on Google SEO, as an additional traffic source and are able to get an extra 1000 customers to your sales page that doubles your sales page. Again, because 2000 visitors times 2% equals 40 sales you've just quadrupled your income. That is the big difference between blogging and going out and making $500 a month working customer service. It is a giant leap because the amount of work you do ends up reflecting much better on the actual income that you make.
The final piece on How To Start Blogging & Make Money Online is to scale and to raise up those conversion rates. And here's some of the main ways that you can do this you can add in testimonials and prove your page speed, make changes to your sales pages, make changes to your sales funnel, and a few other marketing changes but those are the main ones. This part of making money online with blogging is really fun because you can often see the changes right in front of your eyes and it's very cool to watch.
Conclusion
All right let's summarize this once and get the data here, in point number one we started our blog in the right way, number two we design our blog and make it attractive, number three we created the content people need, number four we got traffic to our blog by focusing on one to two traffic sources, number five we build an email list to build up those lists of fans turn those subscribers and those readers into the fans who actually love what we do, number six we learned the types of ways to monetize and monetize mainly with ads and sponsored posts, number seven we master affiliate marketing, number eight we make our own products and services, and number nine we scale and optimized our website.
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