Blogs enable anyone with internet access to share their thoughts and opinions online. A blog (short for weblog) is an online journal that enables people to share their views online and interact with visitors via comments. This article share how to make money blogging.
Blogging is the act of writing, promoting and maintaining a weblog. While there are many blogs with no financial interest, the so-called pure blogs, a number of bloggers are motivated to start blogging because of the possibility of making money.
Blogging for money is a trend that is on the increase worldwide. Here we share a brief overview of the concept called blogging and how to make money blogging.
Blogging is very popular today because blogs are very easy to setup. All you need to start blogging is the thought or opinion you wish to share with the world and internet access.
Another factor that has made blogging popular is that popular blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress are free. Just open an account and you can start Blogging immediately, ready to make money blogging.
Technology has also made blogging with mobile phones possible. All these have contributed in making blogging popular. You can read our article on How to start a Blog for a guide.
Pure bloggers are passionate about blogging their opinions. They are okay with the satisfaction they get blogging their thoughts online. The feeling of importance and having people reading their views is enough for a pure blogger.
On the other hand, entrepreneurial bloggers are motivated by the possibility that they can make money blogging. Like pure bloggers, they are passionate about blogging their opinion, but are more business minded.
How to Make Money Blogging
To make money blogging you need to take it as a business. You need to adopt a marketing philosophy of satisfying your visitor’s wants.
Hence, what you are blogging about should be what your visitors want to read. Entrepreneurial bloggers do not write what they want; they write what their visitors want.
Of course, you should be blogging what you are passionate and knowledgeable in, but you must write it in a way that satisfies your visitors.
Niche Blogging is Better
To make money blogging, you must focus your blog on a theme (a.k.a. Niche Blogging). Blogging about too many unrelated contents is counter-productive. Your blog must have a purpose that you can define in one or two sentences.
In the same vein, each blog post/entry on your blog site must have a purpose. If your blog is about food, all post must focus on food and nutrition.
You should not be blogging about music on a food blog, except the music is about food. It is also important that you target specific keywords in your blog posts.
Blogging about a specific subject will attract people interested in such a subject to your website. There are millions of blogs on the internet, so by focusing your blog on a theme you can differentiate your blog from the crowd.
It is also easier to create your blogging voice and influence if you focus your blogging to a theme (niche). This will make your blog easy to be identified in that subject and if you are good, you can become an authority in that subject, blogging your way to prominence and more money.
Blogging on a specific subject area will also make it easy for Advertisers. Once Advertisers can clearly define the purpose of your blog, they can easily decide whether your blog meets their needs.
Blogging about a specific subject is also good if you are using Google Adsense or other context based advertising services. A blog targeted to a theme will feature keywords associated with the theme.
This makes it easy for Adsense robots to serve relevant Ads to your blog. The more relevant Ads displayed on your blog, the more clicks you are likely to get and the more money you can make. Blogging on a specific subject or theme will usually result in more money in the long run.
Niche blogs are also more successful with affiliate marketing. So, if you want to make money blogging a niche blog will be a better choice.
Focus your Content on Keywords
Blogging for money starts with an idea, then keyword analysis of that idea. To make money blogging you need to know words and phrases that people use when searching for your subject area in search engines. These words and phrases are your keywords.
In fact, keyword analysis should determine the name of your blog; it should also determine the title of your blog posts. If you have focused your blog on a theme, find keywords relevant to your blog’s theme and base your posts on them. Before blogging about any topic, do a keyword analysis first and determine relevant keywords.
Use tools like Ahrefs and MOZ to discover new keywords relevant to your niche. You can also use such tools to discover keywords that your competitors are using in order to compete better.
A keyword rich website will perform well on search engines. Good performance on search engines will drive traffic to your blog, which is key if you want to make money blogging.
Driving Traffic to your Blog
Your ability to make money blogging depends on the volume of traffic that you can generate on your blog. Most of your traffic is likely to come from search engines.
The volume of traffic depends on how high your blog ranks on important keywords in your industry or blog niche on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
A blog filled with quality contents and properly targeting relevant keywords will always rank better on search engines. Therefore, good keyword analysis will lead to good ranking, which leads to high traffic, and finally to more money.
Register your blog with webmaster tools of Google and Bing and submit your sitemap. This makes indexing your blog faster and probably easier for search engines.
Blogging with search engines in mind (a.k.a. SEO) is a great idea. A search engine friendly blog is very important if you want to make money blogging as search traffic converts better.
Share your blog posts on social media services like Facebook and Twitter. Ensure you open a Facebook page for your blog and each time you post a new entry on your blog share the link on your blog’s Facebook page.
Also open a Twitter account for your blog and share your posts there as well. Socialise with your fans on Facebook and Twitter with regular blogging updates.
Gradually your fan base on these social networking sites will increase and drive traffic to your blog. Register with Blog Directories. This will help your blogging effort.
Another way to build traffic is to have an email list. With an email list, you can send future posts to subcribers to your email list giving you a steady stream of visitors. An email list is also a good way to make money blogging as you can share promotions with your email list.
You should also provide feeds for your visitors to subscribe to. Feeds will enable your blog visitors to subscribe to your blog if they find it interesting. Subscribers to your feeds will be alerted each time a new post appears on your blog.
Subscribers to your feeds are your loyal visitors (customers) and can help spread information about your blog, so take them very seriously. Having feeds will generate additional traffic for your blog site.
Ad Placement is Essential
You can generate all the traffic you want, but without proper ad placement, you will not be able to make money blogging. Find out where your visitors usually concentrate their attention and place ads at such locations.
Ads displayed on your blog must be contextual (related to the content on your blog). Google Adsense is a contextual Ad service that will display Ads matched to your blog content. You make money each time a visitor clicks on an Adsense Ad displayed on your blog.
To make money from Affiliate marketing, make sure that the Ads on your post are related to your content.
If you are using Google Adsense for financing your blogging, make sure that the first Ad unit appears in the hottest Ad space on your blog. This is because Adsense display ads in order of their earning potential.
So, a click on ads on the first Ad unit will likely earn more money than those on the second Ad unit and so on. So, by ensuring that Ads that earn more gets the most clicks, you can increase the amount of money you currently make from blogging without increasing your traffic.
Post Regular Updates
Blogging has been so misrepresented that most beginner bloggers think they can make money blogging from the very first day. However, blogging requires lots of hard work especially in the early days.
Posting regularly is key if you want to make money blogging. Your blogging effort in the first 6 months should aim at posting something new once everyday or at least 3 times a week.
Thereafter, blogging something new once or twice a week will be okay. Do not just be blogging nonsense, publish quality, keyword-rich and targeted contents. Search engines love content.
Give them good content today and they will come back for more tomorrow. The more they love your site, the more traffic you get. Remember you make more money with more traffic.
Do not Copy other people’s Work
Originality is very important in blogging. Do not copy other people’s work. Copying other people’s work is very easy and may even favour you in the short term, but in the long run your bubble will eventually burst.
It also deprives you the opportunity of being an authority or an expert in what you do. Sooner than later everyone will know you are a cheat. Blogging other people’s work also means you are always behind.
How to Make Money from your Blog
So far, most of our points have focused on building traffic to your blog. You may think we are ignoring the main thing, which is making money from blogging.
But the truth is that without building traffic to your blog, you will not be able to make money blogging. Making money from blogging is the after-effect of building traffic.
Once you build traffic, you can now decide how to monetize the traffic generated by your blogging effort.
Advertising is the most popular method used for making money blogging. You can use context based Ads service like Google Adsense to make money on your blog.
You can also sell products for online merchants like Amazon, Jumia, Konga, AliExpress, Gearbest as an affiliate marketing associate or sell your own products. In affiliate marketing, you earn commission on products sold.
You can also use your blog to promote your own product, business or service. In such a case you will be blogging about your area of business or service.
One important point to know about using advertising is to ensure the ads are relevant and related to the topics you are blogging about.
Blogging for money is possible; it will require a lot of hard work and determination, but it is possible. You will not make money with just blogging one post.
You will require to post on your blog site continuously and consistently if you want to make money blogging. The more purposeful posts you have on your blog the more money you can make from blogging.
Blogging for money pays the bill for free-blogging, start blogging for money and save blogging from extinction.
A lot of people have been misinformed about blogging. The purpose of this is to provide accurate information about blogging. People are making good money from blogging.
Yours truly is one of them. However, blogging is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Blogging requires hard work like any other business. Blogging requires a business plan.
It also takes time, like is the case in any business to make money blogging. You also need to draw-up realistic expectations from blogging. You need to work hard first.
To make money blogging you need reasonable traffic (visitors) to your blog. Beginner bloggers should focus on building traffic to blog and less on making money. Build more traffic to your blog and money will follow. Give yourself a target of 700 unique visitors a day.
If you can build your daily traffic to 1000 unique visitors a day, then you are on your way to making reasonable money from blogging. Building traffic takes time, but with hard work, persistence and the passion for what you do, you will eventually succeed.
