Having a blog is a great potential business, one that allows you to be your own boss and work flexibility. This means that it's great for parents or students to get into as you determine your work/life balance.
Consequently, here are 5 steps to earning money blogging.
Is blogging worth the effort though? Doesn't it take years to get established enough to go self-employed? Well, here are my reasons to start up and earn money from a blog. Some favourites include:
Having complete control: If you've ever disagreed with how something is run or what your boss tells you then you'll appreciate how satisfying it is to have control over your own work! Being a blogger means you can take it into any direction you'd like and there's nobody else to answer to. Run things how you think will be the most efficient and beneficial for you.
Flexibility: As mentioned before, you can work when you want, how long you want and where you want. You can go back to the student days of sitting in a cafe and borrowing their wifi, or treat yourself on holiday without having to book time off! You can do whatever you want without your income suffering or stressing about other events in your life. If you have children then this is would fit perfectly around the time commitments or regular distractions.
Work for your own wealth: You're no longer working to make someone else richer, so all your effort and hard work goes straight towards your own gain. It's also a much bigger incentive to work harder and effectively so that you can earn more for your time.
Limitless earning potential: There's so many big bloggers out there making tons of money, for example Michelle from Making Sense of Cents makes a massive $69k+ (around £52,000) per month from her blog and it can also be done in the UK too.
Generating a passive income: Having a passive income should be your main goal – this is money that we earn indirectly or after putting in the work only once e.g. affiliate links. Traditionally this would be writing a book or owning rental property, however this is now so easy to do with a blog.
The numerous opportunities: With blogging comes so amazing opportunities, events as well as freebies!
Without further ado, here are 5 steps to take when you want to earn money from blogging. 3, 4 and 5 can all be done together, or in stages.
1 – What will your blog be about?
The first step is one where many people get overwhelmed and they don't continue. Deciding what to write about is important as it means finding your niche. You need to find the right balance between getting it right but not letting it paralyse you. Start by thinking about what interests you – be it helping others earn money or talking about beauty- and what you can write extensively about. If you met me and we went out for dinner, what would you talk to me about, nonstop? That's what you are going to want to blog about!
2 – Build your blog
You will be pleased to know that you don't need a lot of coding or HTML knowledge to get your website up and running. You can choose a free website such as wix, but if you are serious about making money from your blog then it's worth investing and taking the plunge to get yourself onto self hosted WordPress. Alternatively, you can use websites such as GoDaddy as your host or domain name provider. There's a lot of sites like this available so make sure you do your research beforehand.
3 – Create useful, awesome and amazing content
After your happy with the design of your blog, you need to get started on your content. It may be worth brainstorming 20-50 blog titles or topics to get you started. All bloggers post at different times and there's no “tactic” to the most efficient times to post, especially when you're launching a new blog. Your biggest priority is having enough content on your blog to keep people reading, but you don't want all your best content published within a week and then no updates for months.
The best tip to ensure that your content is useful, interesting and relatable is to visit your favourite blogs and figure out what they do to make them stand out or engage you. This can be anything from the design of their blog, to the subjects they talk about, to their tone of language etc. Whatever you like, try and adapt this to your blog post (originality is key though)!
Popular posts are often answering questions that people might google. This could be applied to any topic which is why it's such a great tip. Whether it be how to save for a holiday to best restaurants in your area etc. Do your research, see what you have a lot of knowledge about, and get writing!
It might be worth having a lot of posts written and scheduled in advance so that you can spend your time getting visitors to your blog without worrying about new content. You could start with one month's content, but if you are super organised then you might even want to go up to 3 months so that you can focus solely on promotion.
4 – Get visitors to your blog before you start earning money blogging
You have a gorgeous website and some great content…what's next? You next task is to get people to visit your blog and read your content. There are lots of ways to do this as well as resources available on the internet to help, for example Lena Gott's book about how she went from 17,000 page views a month to a massive 350,000 page views a month in just 9 months.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is what makes your blog posts come up on the first pages of Google, Bing or other search engines. This means that whenever somebody types in something related to one of your blog posts, or a key word, it'll come up as some of the top searches on Google etc. Search engine optimisation can take lots of time so here are 5 tips to get you started:
Search engine optimisation can take lots of time so here are 5 tips to get you started:
- Install a plugin – Yoast is a good one but you can also use All in one SEO. Using a plugin will give you prompts (to increase your SEO) for every post you write to guide you on where you can improve
- Make sure your website is mobile responsive – that they automatically adjust to fit a phone or tablet. Some themes do this automatically so it might be worth baring this in mind when you pick yours initially
- Write to answer questions that people will be searching for – like we mentioned before
- Link to other posts on your blog- rather than link it “click here” put the relevant post's name instead
- Submit your sitemap to search engine sitemap how to submit your sitemap to Google.
There is so much that you can learn about SEO but don't get too carried away. There are other methods to increase traffic too.
Social media
Social media is such a great tool; whether it is posting photos of your products, promoting latest posts or just engaging with readers. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and even YouTube, allow people to find your posts through different means so you may often have different audiences. Twitter is possibly a blogger's favourite and a high referrer. Check out 8 ways to grow your blog with Twitter for some pointers.
The key to promoting your blog with social media is to engage with others and not just keep pushing your own posts. You can engage with others by chatting to them, retweeting or sharing and liking their content.
Guest posting
Posting on other blogs within your niche is great for several reasons:
- You can get a link back to your blog (beneficial for your SEO)
- You are introducing yourself to new readers
- Potential for new readers and opportunities in future
When you are looking to guest post make sure that you can deliver a blog post quickly (maybe even have some already written and you can pitch it to them) and make sure that you are getting a link back to your blog.
5 – Earning money blogging
Figuring out how you are going to make money from your blog is the biggie. There are tons of ways that you can make money from your blog, here are just a few examples:
Affiliate marketing: Affiliate marketing is where you promote a product or service through a link and earn a commission for every sale is bought via that link. A good guide to get started with affiliate marketing is this post by Emma Drew.
Display advertising: The easiest way to get started with display advertising is by using a service such as Google Adsense. The way it works is simple: display the code on your blog and earn some advertising income every time that your advert is displayed, and more when it's clicked.
Sponsored posts: As the name suggests, this is a post that is sponsored by a company. They'll ask you to write about them, their products or their services for a fee. This can be a great boost to any blogger's earnings and is often a big source of income. How much to charge is always difficult to decide.
Make money from your social media: You might think that only the big names with hundreds of thousands of social media followers can make money, but the truth is that anyone can! If you have developed at least a decent social media following then it's worth consider monetising your social media accounts through sites like Buzzoole, SocialPubli and FameBit.
Sell related products or services: Are there other products and services that you can offer? Could you maybe write an e-book or sell your services as a social media whizz? If you have an artistic flair, then you could maybe have an etsy store alongside your blog.
Have you seen Thrifty Mum's blogging goals for 2018? There is lots of inspiration there.
Other benefits of blogging can include items to review and this could be anything from an item of clothing to a holiday!
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