Amateur Blogging: How to make money with a blog for beginners?
Is Blogging dead nowadays?
This is a question someone asked me recently. And this is exactly what I wondered back in 2015 when I decided to start my online entrepreneurship journey. I found blogging being the ideal way for me to share my voice and experience.
But the question was: “how do I get people to read my content and will that be something sustainable in the long run?”
Starting a blog is not as difficult as you might think. You don't need a degree in computer science or an extraordinary writing ability to succeed.
This article breaks down the pros and cons of blogging, what are the ways to make money online nowadays with a blog and why blogging is here to stay for a long-time.
Why start a blog?
This FREE online bootcamp helps you start and make money with your blog in 7 days. Enrol now.
A blog is a great way to share your story. It can be a bit technical to setup and understand how to promote your articles online. But once that part is set, all you need to do is write your content and publish it for the world to read it.
It is a great way to share your point of view and experience to an online community looking for answers you may have.
You can blog about anything you want.
If you have an expertise or a hobby you are really passionate about. Sharing your knowledge might benefit others.
You may wonder, why writing a blog and not just use social media platforms and use video as it is the most common type of content shared nowadays.
That’s a great question I am going to answer to in the pros section.
The pros of having a blog
You own your traffic
A blog is your website. It is your domain name that you own and no body else does. Contrary to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or YouTube that are owned by dedicated companies.
Meaning that if these companies decide to deprecate their platforms, and your brand only lives on them, you are at the risk of losing everything.
Contrary to having your own website, where you are the one who owns your traffic.
No matter what happens tomorrow in the social media world. Your followers will have a place to come visit your latest piece of content.
Social media should just be a channel for you to promote your content.
And if you decide to create videos on YouTube, you can always embed them on your website too!
The money resides in your email list and not only on the amount of views your article gets!
Sure, you can sell ad spaces on your website for publishers, and the amount you receive depends on the amount of page views you get.
But, this is not the only way for you to make a living blogging.
The benefit of blogging resides in building an email list. An email list is a group of people who subscribed to your blog and want to hear more about what you do and your journey.
Once you build a strong list, you can use it for multiple things: promote new content you publish, sell products, share updates, offer free products or services, share discounts to your products, etc...
Up to you to decide what you feel comfortable doing.
And to be honest, once you have a strong email list, a website is just an add-on to keep an online presence. Some bloggers nowadays earn a good living by just sending a daily email to their subscribers.
Less is more!
Your content does not depend on an algorithm to reach your audience
Let’s be honest, the social media world is exhausting to keep up with.
Every single day there is a new update, a new trend, a new social media platform that’s created.
If you have an online presence on all of them, this means that as a business owner, you need to understand them all from a business perspective.
And that is a LOT of work.
Some people are great at creating content, but not at running a business and vice versa.
So, imagine if you have to focus your energy in being creative to feed the algorithm on each social media platform just so that your content can be seen by a wider audience.
You will have to put the business aspect of it on a side as you won’t have as much time to invest.
That is the reason why I recommend to anyone starting their online business to really understand the basics of social media marketing and how a marketing funnel works.
Before publishing content on social media to attract more eye balls to your business, you should have a marketing funnel in place that would bring a visitors through a few stages to better understand who you are, what you do and how they could benefit from working with you or learning more from you.
If not you are just wasting your time and energy.
The Cons of having a blog
It takes time to set up a content strategy that converts visitors into subscribers
Starting a blog is easy. Keeping it alive and profitable on the other end is a challenge.
A challenge that not so many people are willing to take. Unfortunately, in the society we live in nowadays, people are short term oriented. They want results fast without putting in the work and the hours.
Running a successful online business requires to have a strategy in place.
How are you planning on promoting your content once it is published?
How are you planning on monetising your content?
How are you going to convert visitors into subscribers?
And how are you going to convert subscribers into clients?
You need a good knowledge of social media marketing to be able to run a profitable blog.
When I got started, I thought publishing my article live was all I needed to do.
I was such a rookie.
This is only when I got exposed to an online course from a travel blogger I followed that I understood how to leverage social media channels to my advantage and get my content exposed to a wider audience.
You need to understand how to build a personal brand online, how to automate parts of your business, and how to find ways to monetise your content whether you own a product or not and whether you publish content regularly or not.
Whether you are just getting started or already are running your business but would like to know how to scale it, if you do not have those basic social media marketing foundations, you won’t succeed.
You can watch this FREE social media web-class from my mentors if that is something you are curious to learn more about.
Unless you are an SEO ninja!
SEO is the foundations of getting your articles ranked on the first page of search engines like Google. There is a learning curve as it is quite technical, but once you master it, your website will generate a ton of traffic without any paid advertising.
This requires you to do :
keywords research before starting writing your blog articles
trends research to know the type of content people are interested in learning more about
structure your blog article in a way that is easy to read and “Google friendly”
backlink outreach. Basically if you’d like your content to be seen by more eye balls in the industry you are in, you’d reach out to websites with a higher domain authority to link your content from their websites. Consider it like a shout out on social media, but in that case it is from a website to another website.
If I lost you, do not worry. Nowadays SEO is not the only way to drive quality visitors to your website. It is a more sustainable way to do it, but not the only way.
And to be honest, this method kills your creativity as you do not create content you enjoy but do it just for the sake of bringing more visitors to your website.
Although, it might be a strategy to use from time to time to boost your website traffic.
But today, any blog can increase their number of visitors thanks to Pinterest. I wrote a complete guide on how to use Pinterest to promote your blog articles. There is also a learning curve but much easier than SEO in my opinion.
How do blog make money?
The biggest advantage of blogging and owning your website is that you can do and sell whatever you want, as long as it helps your audience of course. And that it is a great source of passive income.
All you need is write the content once and publish it in front of the right audience. It is recommended to write evergreen content, meaning content that will stay relevant no matter when a person reads it, whether it is today, in a week, in a decade or more. This way you won’t need to update the content regularly.
But these types of blog articles will be the one that make you money while you sleep if done the right way.
There are many ways to make money with a blog.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money blogging because it's a low-risk, high-reward scenario for you as an advertiser. You only pay for results (aka sales or leads). Advertisers get massive ROI (return on investment) because they don't pay for the ad unless someone clicks and converts.
If you're creating content anyway, you might as well build your affiliate marketing strategy into it because it can be very lucrative.
Here's how to get started with affiliate marketing:
Sign up for an affiliate network. This is where all of the merchants you will be promoting live. Each merchant has its own commission rate, cookie length and products available to promote.
Find relevant products and services to promote. If someone is searching for "red sneakers," it doesn't make sense to send them to a website that sells red dresses — even though both items are red! This is called relevancy, and it's what separates affiliate marketing from every other advertising channel out there. It also makes your readers happy because they can find exactly what they are looking for on your blog instead of being bombarded with random ads.
Start promoting! If you do the research on your end, you'll never have trouble finding great products to promote
The most known affiliate network are low ticket affiliate programs like Amazon, shareasale, awin, etc..
But, the best is to promote high ticket affiliate offers where you can earn up to 60% commission per sale. This is what I focused on since the beginning and this has allowed me to earn a sustainable income since then.
i.e. If the product is an online course that costs 500$, I can earn a commission up to 300$ per sale. Compared to promoting low ticket products in the range of 7$ to 97$ with only 10-15% commission per sale. Do the maths! Less is more!
If interested to learn more you can click here or on the image below to read a full guide I wrote.
And if you’d like to learn how to set up an affiliate marketing business from scratch, check out this free web class and discover How Thousands Of People Are Earning An Income Online Using Affiliate Marketing And How You Could Do It Too!
Adsense, Mediavine
Online publishers look for online real estate to promote their offers. If your blog meets their requirements, it is a great source of passive income.
You can generate additional revenue by placing ad space on your blog for business owners, bloggers and corporate companies. You can do this with BuySellAds.com which is a big marketplace with over 600,000 participating websites and provides you with great ad formats that are already optimized to get the most out of advertisers’ budget.
Note: Some companies will require you to have a treshold amount of online visitors per month to be approved.
Consider making money with sponsored posts
Some bloggers earn a lot of money from sponsored posts. This means that companies pay them to post on their blog. This is a good way to make extra money and get access to products and services you wouldn't be able to use otherwise.
Instead of focusing on building followers, focus on your engagement with those who have already found you. Posting sponsored content is a great way to make money. You can also link to your personal blog and mention that you'll be producing more high-quality content on there.
Have your own products to sell on your blog and share with your audience.
By selling your own products and services, you'll build trust with your audience and help them solve their pain points. It's important to choose products that align with your brand and to promote them in authentic ways. Always deliver on your promises.
I have products ranging from e-books to online courses which I sell on my blog.
This is a great way to make extra income and to also support my blog with ads and affiliate links.
When you have products to sell , you also get the chance to reach out to advertisers and companies who can help sponsor your product or service.
My products help provide ways for my followers to grow their visibility online and earn passive income streams.
Your blog is a great way to share information about your particular area of expertise.
If you can also sell products on your blog, all the better!
From ebooks to online courses and other digital products, the choice is yours. The biggest advantage is that you do not share a percentage of the sale with third party company.
You gain 100% of the sale and everything is automated.
Sell your services
Make money blogging by consulting with others in your industry. Consultant-bloggers can help solve problems for their peers to make a lot of money in the process. Blogging allows you to be self-employed and to make money within your niche by solving problems that people encounter.
*shameless plug* If you’d like to work together, I offer social media consulting services to help you build your brand and monetise it.
Those are the main ways to make money with a blog.
You could do them all as you could just mix and match with what you feel the most comfortable with.
My recommendation is to start with one, make sure it works and start building another stream then.
If you do them all at the same time, it will be too overwhelming.
There are many other ways to make money online that I did not mention in this blog article. If you’d like to have a more complete list, I wrote this guide 16 Ways To Make Money With Social Media For Beginners that you can download here or by clicking on the button below
What are the blogging trends for the years to come then?
According to Prnewswire “The global digital publishing market is expected to grow from $44.8 billion in 2019 to about $66.7 billion in 2020 due to an increase in demand for digital publishing as more number of people are staying at home for self-quarantine/lockdown.
More amount of digital services are being consumed for entertainment as well as knowledge gaining with the help of digital publishing content such as news, articles, journals and others. “ -
As long as publishers will keep investing money into this industry, there will always be a need for bloggers to create content related to a specific industry.
And as long as Google will monetise their platforms thanks to digital publishers, you will always have an opportunity for your website to be ranked on the first page results of a query.
So, to answer the question “ Is blogging still a valuable way to make money online” The short answer is “Yes, BUT”
Yes, a blog is a great way to build a personal brand and an online authority in your specific niche.
However, like everything, it is better to diversify your sources of revenue using the monetising strategies described earlier.
I personally started blogging in 2015 to share my adventures around the world. At the start it was just a way to share my passion for traveling with my friends and family.
Curious to know how I started a travel blog that allowed me to finance my travels around the world? I share all my secrets in this free ebook. Download your copy now!
I used Facebook and Instagram to promote my content back then and this allowed me to gain up to 10K followers on Instagram within a few months.
This is when I looked for ways to monetise my content and enrol into this course to learn how to monetise a blog and a social media following.
And I still do up until today.
If you’d like to start your blog and learn how I have built my blog and monetised it, I created a free online bootcamp to help you setup your blog and have it up and running within 7 days.
Just click on the image or the button below to join.
Here is what you will learn:
Day 1 - How to find your niche?
Day 2 - Market research and validate your ideas
Day 3 - How to build your online brand
Day 4 - What blogging platform to use
Day 5 - How to create compelling content to attract your ideal audience
Day 6 - How to launch and promote your blog on social media
Day 7 - How to make money with your blog
Yes, You can make money blogging, even if you're a beginner.
If you're just starting out, blogging can be an excellent source of passive income. Blogging is simply a collaboration with the world. By creating great content, you draw people to your blog.
The more people that come to your blog, the more money you will make through ads and affiliate marketing.
If you enjoyed reading this article, make sure to like it, it actually makes a difference. And if you know anyone that could benefit from it, feel free to share it with them.