As a regularly updated website, a blog features content which is shown in reverse chronological order. The content of a blog tends to either provide insight, or entertain the audience. It’s quite hard to establish yourself within your industry and build a voice of authority within your niche if you don’t have a blog that you update regularly, or a regular online presence.
A blog helps you gain clients and grow your business. Your skills and talent are, unfortunately, secondary when it comes to the success of your blog.
If you come from a creative field, you should think of your blog as a portfolio which you build with examples of your work, in order to establish yourself as an expert in the field. For example, a website designer that devotes their blog to consistently posting tips on building and optimising a website, installing plugins, and so on, is likely to be popular with people who are building their own websites. It’s also possible for you to monetise this pursuit by offering your services, and gain a list of loyal clients.
In our last blog post, we explain how you can make money with a new blog in 2021. Let us now look into why blogs are resourceful and profitable through offering engaging content.
There are some good reasons why you should start a blog as a profitable pursuit:
- You have the ability and flexibility to set your own working hours and earn an income as a blogger
- Turning your blogging venture into a business
- Learning how to grow your own business
- Helping your audience with issues they are having and improving their experience of a service
- It’s fairly easy to make money through affiliate marketing
- Getting the opportunity to work with successful brands, influencers and businesses
In order to comprehensively grasp the ways of successfully earning money from blogging as a beginner, you need to firstly evaluate what it is that you are bringing to the field.
What is the value that you provide through your blog?
Why would someone visit your blog in the first place?
The speed and volume of the internet in our daily lives
Every day there are more and more people using the internet, which means that there are countless people that you can cater your blog to.
With the increasing numbers of people that use the internet, there exists a need for online products, services, courses, and general commercial environments. While your audience can resonate with the tips, stories, help and advice that you put out, it’s more than possible for them to be drawn in by the transactional aspect of your blog. It’s much easier to sell these to a loyal audience that’s drawn to your particular niche category.
Blogging provides your audience with a trustworthy source
Blogs have always been the best way to build a bridge of trust with your audience. With this acquired trust and loyalty, it becomes much easier and smoother for you to suggest recommended services, products, etc.
If your blog does not have its own branded products or services, which is normal for beginner blogs, don’t worry! Through affiliate marketing avenues, it is easy for you to sell and advertise products and services which you personally recommend. This, of course, becomes easier if you have a loyal audience who you’ve built trust with.
Traffic from social media platforms
Having successful social media platforms by keeping them active and engaging will certainly benefit the traffic on your blog. It’s actually quite unlikely that you would get noticed as a business if you don’t have functional social media accounts which you keep active and update on a regular basis.
Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter (just to name a few) can actually bring loads of views and traffic to your blog. Use these platforms to share new posts, and tag other businesses, bloggers and even influencers who might be interested in your content. This will help you broaden your reach to an even wider audience.
Building a following on social media platforms is, of course, not as easy as it once used to be, but with the help of effective social media strategies it’s much easier than you might think. Pinterest, for example, due to its higher income demographics diverts a lot of users to blogs, generating more traffic.
Other things you can implement within social media in order to generate more traffic, include giveaways and competitions that will generate more likes and shares of your content. Once your following grows, remember to keep your audience interested by posting on a regular basis, and not just when you’ve put out a new blog post.
It’s recommended that you design your social media accounts with the same design and colour schemes as your website, to achieve a consistency and recognisability that is associated with your own personal brand.
You have to work quite hard to build a large amount of followers on social media. The amount of followers you have can a lot of times signify to other brands and businesses, or anyone who uses the internet, whether your content is legitimate. This is seen as evidence by brands that your audience actually engages with your content.
With a strong social media presence, you become useful to brands and businesses as they see you as a potential way to grow their own audience. Once you strengthen your social media presence to that extent, you can even charge for sponsored social media posts.
To start a blog from scratch that makes money in 2021 cannot come without hard work and a fair share of challenges. Don’t let these deter you! Don’t let the fact that many bloggers make pennies from monetising their blog each month, discourage you from doing it yourself.
Email marketing through a newsletter can also generate a lot of money. The important thing is to work towards developing a large subscriber list. With an email list, it becomes easier to build a brand for your blog, recommend products, promote any events that you or related businesses are holding, and really encourage people to keep coming back to visit your blog.
Sending off a newsletter through email marketing is a suitable way to make money as a blogger in 2021, as you can earn residual income.
Advertorials
A good way to monetise your blog is also through offering sponsored content opportunities, which are also called advertorials. This essentially means that the articles or blog posts you put out are paid for, and operate as adverts.
Once you build a following and a good amount of traffic to your blog, a business within your topic/niche might reach out and offer you to write an article about their products or services. If you do this successfully, brands, agencies and PR companies will definitely reach out to you in order to discuss sponsored posts. You can also add affiliate links to this paid-for advertorial.
The power of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
With a more and more oversaturated web, it is quite a difficult task to rank well on Google and other search engines, especially in 2021. Even though it’s hard, it’s definitely not an impossible thing to do when you devote time and effort into optimisation.
Search engines value quality content. When it comes to appearing at the top end of search results in 2021, Google sees value in long-form content that varies between 2000 and 4000 words.
A lot of blogs offer valuable advice when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and ways to effectively utilise it in 2021, while you should always do your keyword research and implementation beforehand.
Your blog needs to be attracting a variety of user traffic before it can start to make money in 2021. It needs to contain quality content that’s kept interesting, relevant and resourceful, and have a USP that keeps your audience engaged enough to revisit. This allows you to build a loyal following then look into monetising your content later on.
This can either be the easiest or the hardest part of starting your blog.
By using PPC, CPC, or CPM advertising on your blog, writing sponsored content, and using affiliate marketing, you can make money blogging in 2021. These methods are outlined in our last blog post.
The best ways to look for a niche in starting a blog you want to monetise:
The most important thing in monetising your blog is choosing the appropriate niche. This is where you assert your authority over the topics you wish to cover.
With the internet hosting more and more websites and blogs each day, a mistake beginner bloggers tend to make nowadays is starting a blog without planning to provide something unique or different to what’s already out there.
Let’s say that you choose fashion as a niche, for example. Instead of covering general content related to brands and new collections, you can combine the brands you like with an interest in sustainability and concerns surrounding the environment. You can use your blog to then assess the sustainability practices of popular brands while writing content on designers that use sustainably-sourced materials.
Remember that these topics should spark your interest. If you’re not passionate about what you’re writing about, your audience can tell that your content lacks a level of authenticity and enthusiasm.
Look at blogs that cover similar topics to your niche, and see what they do successfully, but more importantly, what they’re missing. It’s important to find the gaps in your market and attempt to fill them.
You can also promote your blog to bloggers who produce content on similar topics and niches. Even though there is competition, the blogging community can be a supportive and collaborative space where you can promote each other’s content.
Some bloggers even include a page of links within their website which includes links to other blogs. In return, you would add a link to their blog on your website. This is also helpful in terms of your search engine optimisation, and will help your blog climb the ranks within Google search!
It’s also important for you to utilise search engines and Google to keep track of the suggested searches and auto-completion entries that come up in relation to your niche in order to discover what people are searching for. Suggested search topics show you what topics and niches are in high demand.
Forums, groups and discussion boards can also be insightful. This is where people go when they cannot find an answer to their question. It’s then useful for you to note down what your potential audience is asking on these forums and boards. What type of advice are they looking for? This will help you gear your content towards the gaps in your niche, in order to fill them in where there is a lack of available information.
What are the current topics dominating the trends right now?
Think about different types of content creation and how you can fit them all into your blog in ways that are constructive and monetised in 2021. Reviews, interviews, tutorials, guides, lists, are all popular means of content creation that can bring variety to your blog, keeping your audience more engaged.
If you track trends and trending topics, this will be beneficial to you in generating more traffic to your blog. If you find something like a new trend within your niche that hasn’t been covered as much, you should quickly grab the opportunity and establish yourself as a real voice of authority on the subject, before anyone else does.
Monetize Your Blog
When Should You Start Monetizing Your Blog?
There is no fixed number when it comes to traffic or how long an email list must have to make money with your blog, because it all depends on what you sell and how you sell it.
However, clarifying two things right away will help you a lot:
- Get regular traffic : You don’t need tens of thousands of visitors, but having at least a thousand visitors a month means you’re doing things right.
- Grow Your Email List : Again, you don’t have to aim for something crazy here. We’ll show you examples of people who had a small list, but still knew how to use it to their advantage.
These two things are important, but most importantly, monetizing your blog efficiently is all about numbers.
For example, if you need to earn £6,000 from your blog:
- You can sell a £ 200 product (such as a course) to 30 people.
- Or sell a course from £ 600 to 10 people.
- And also ask for £ 6,000 for a client consultation.
- Monetization is math, not magic.
This doesn’t mean that the key to monetization is simply to raise the prices of what you sell. Rather, it means that you should choose a monetization strategy that aligns with where your blog is or where you want it to be in the future.
In this article, we’ll show you how to monetize a blog and make money online, whether you’re getting thousands of page views a month or just starting out.
We will show you some solid strategies other bloggers use to generate income from their blogs in different niches and show you how to do the same with your blog.
1. Become a Freelance Blogger In Your Niche
One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to become a freelance writer for the top blogs in your niche.
Think about it, you probably started your blog because you have experience / knowledge in that area, so why not use them to your advantage?
Companies are looking for people who can create content to propel their marketing efforts , so who could create that content better than someone who already has knowledge in that niche.
How To Find Blogs To Write For
The best way to find companies or blogs to write about in your industry is to simply do a Google search for related keywords and see what happens.
Because clearly, the blogs that appear on the first pages of Google are investing heavily in content marketing.
For example, if I were looking for blogs to write about in the fitness industry, a simple search with terms like “Fitness blog” shows me this:
You can also search for terms related more specifically to your industry. For example, in the case of fitness, something like “Workout Programs”:
2. Sell Ebooks To Your Audience
Selling ebooks is one of the most popular solutions bloggers choose to monetize their blogs. It’s perfect because it’s relatively easy to create and usually comes at a price that most visitors can afford.
But ebooks do more than just allow bloggers to monetize their blogs quickly. As a blogger, selling an ebook can be the fastest way to make sure people are interested in what you are doing enough to pay for it.
Ebooks are also a low-risk solution for your website visitors because it allows them to evaluate the value they acquire before buying more expensive products.
Where to Sell Your Ebook
You can choose to sell your ebook directly on your blog or through platforms such as Gumroad or Podia.
Selling your ebook on your site can be profitable, as you will get 100% of the profits.
How to Make the Book
If you don’t have the time or skills to write a book on your own, you can hire ghostwriters to do it for you.
You can find ghostwriters on facebook, LinkedIn, Scripted and even Fiverr . Keep in mind that, like anything, you get what you pay for. More experienced ghostwriters will cost you more than beginners.
You can also create your book cover with tools like Canva, Photoshop and Snappa or you can pay for a service like 99designs and let a professional create it for you.
3. Create and Sell Online Courses
Another way to monetize your blog is to sell online courses. What keeps most bloggers from creating their own course is that they think you need to be some sort of expert to teach a course.
But that’s not true, all you really need to teach in a course is to know more about the people you teach and to be able to present the information in a way that people will get something useful out of it.
4. Start a Coaching or Consulting activity
Sometimes people want to have more detailed and personalized instruction than there might be in a book or course, and so they turn to an individual coach (or consultant, depending on the type of services you offer).
Coaching or consulting is a monetization strategy that most bloggers who have been successful in selling books and courses turn to and want to create an additional revenue stream.
But it’s not just for established bloggers. Consulting can also be your monetization strategy right from the start.
Coaching, like most of the monetization strategies we’ve already covered, is based on the ability to use your skills and experience to help people solve their problems.
5. Make Money with Display Advertising (Banner Ads)
In the blogosphere, there is hatred of on-screen ads. A lot of people say it’s a bad monetization strategy because you can’t make a lot of money.
In most cases, they might be right, but there’s a reason why display ads are still popular despite all the negative comments they get.
The reason is that they work and are the fastest, if not the most profitable, way to start making money with a website.
In fact, some bloggers start with display ads until they can find more profitable monetization strategies. For many, those first few euros give enough motivation to keep the blog going.
6. Become an Affiliate Marketer
You can’t write an article on how to make money blogging without talking about affiliate marketing . This constitutes one of the most common ways bloggers make money online.
In fact, affiliate marketing powers much of the web, about 15% of the digital media industry’s revenue comes from affiliate marketing, and in the US affiliate marketing generates as many ecommerce orders as emails.
With affiliate marketing, you promote other companies’ products in exchange for a commission for every sale you help make.
Affiliate marketers work like most salespeople. They help promote and sell a company’s product and get a commission when someone buys.
7. Generate Revenue With Sponsored Posts and Reviews
Making money from sponsored posts and reviews is one of the less common ways to monetize a blog, probably because you need a lot of traffic and credibility to do it.
With sponsored posts and reviews, a blogger will charge a company a commission to blog about their product and give their opinion. The product is exposed to the blogger’s audience and the brand gains visibility and new customers.
When you think about influencer marketing, your mind brings out the images of the influencers you know on Instagram and Youtube.
8. Sell Physical Products To Your Audience
Another way to monetize your blog is to sell products directly to your audience. Some bloggers even move from selling a few articles to launching full-fledged ecommerce websites alongside blogging .
9. Sell Digital Products To Your Audience
Sometimes the best way to solve the public’s problems is not to sell a physical product, but software and digital products.
Clay Collins got the idea for Leadpages from his blog, where he wrote about landing page optimization. When Clay started giving out landing page templates for free, he found that people wanted more.
10. Start A Podcast
Podcasting is booming right now. According to Paid Insights , as of April 2019, there are over 700,000 active podcasts and over 29 million episodes.
More people are starting to listen to podcasts around the world. Here is the percentage of the population that now listens to podcasts all over the planet:
What is Needed to Start a Podcast
Most people overestimate what they need to start a podcast, and therefore will never start. But, if you already have a computer, you will need a few other things to get started, such as:
- A microphone : You can buy one for just £ 15 on Amazon.
- A headset – you probably already have it.
- Audio Editing Software : There are free options like GarageBand (Mac) or Audacity (Windows).
- Podcast Hosting : You can find plans for just £ 10 per month.
- A Skype or Zoom account : if you plan to include interviews on your show.
- That’s it, now you can start creating episodes for the whole world to listen to.
- Finally
While it’s easier than ever to start a blog, most bloggers, as the ConvertKit study shows, have a hard time monetizing it. Blogging alone doesn’t generate revenue unless you can find a monetization strategy that works for your blog.
What you need is a good understanding of the numbers needed to be successful with your monetization strategy and a determination to work hard to promote what you have to offer.
Reading this article is the first step, we hope you now have the strategies and tools to start making money with your blog.
To wrap up:
A good way to gauge which money-making avenue is best for you, is by considering and weighing what other bloggers and businesses in your industry are doing.
To generate a full-time income through your blog in 2021, you need to use several income streams from a wide selection of sources.
So, to monetise a blog you need to set aside a lot of time to figure out how to generate more traffic. The more traffic you generate, meaning, the more you grow your audience, the more attractive you are to brands and advertisers.
Some bloggers go down a monetisation route relatively early. It ultimately depends on how much time, effort and resources you are willing to invest within your blog, the size of your prospective audience, and also how lucky you are with this pursuit.
As we have seen, it is possible to make money from blogging, but the amounts tend to vary. Give it some effort and time, and you will be able to do quite well. Remember not to shy away from experimenting. Not all these tips will work for you, so don’t be scared to adjust your ways, see what works for you, what works for your audience, and what doesn’t.
