[Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online: Introduction]
Do you run a blog?
Would you like to start a blog?
Wouldn’t blogging and earning at the same time be nice?
If you answered “Yes” to 2 of these 3 questions, please stay with me and continue reading.
For those of you who don’t have a blog yet, but would like to create one, I’ll show how to easily do so closer to the end of this article. I’d like to keep true to the title and start by explaining what’s involved in turning the blog into an earning mechanism.
Table of Contents
Do Blogs Make Money?
I’ve seen many blogs that people run just for fun. Sometimes, their posts promote certain products and services, but there is no Call To Action to be seen anywhere. When they are asked about digital marketing, they say that they don’t know what it is. This means to me that these bloggers don’t apply any techniques and strategies to make their blog visible to users and well attended, and they don’t earn any money from their promotions.
If you already have a blog and it’s not bringing you revenue, what a miss! Even if you do it just for fun, why not earn an additional income while having fun? And by the way, it’s a passive income: for work you’ve done once (wrote a post) you’d be paid over and over again.
Do Blogs Make Money?
Yes, they do!!! Some people make a lot of money by blogging: 6 and even 7-digit annual income!!!
As a non-professional blogger, you can still get paid for helping like-minded people get what they need and receive commissions.
What generates revenue?
Sales.
What do you need to make a sale?
- Storefront or showcase
- Product(s) or service(s)
- Customers.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to have YOUR OWN products. You also don’t need to keep inventory, ship, process returns and provide customer support.
- Your blog is a storefront or a showcase.
Please pay attention: I’ll use these two words as allegory later again to explain the difference between domains and subdomains when talking about creating a new blog. - You promote other people’s products and services through your storefront.
- Your blog’s readers are your potential customers.
Before we move on and start talking about what products you could promote on your blog, where to find them, who is going to buy them, and how you can get paid, let’s make sure that we speak the same language and understand each other.
A Blog is a type of website or a part of a website where the content gets frequently updated. When we say “website”, we refer to a more static set of web pages. To a “blog”, you write and publish posts regularly. That’s the only difference.
Your blog is usually oriented around a specific topic targeting a certain audience with related interests. This theme and group of people interested in it is your blog’s niche.
Visitors who land on your blog post by searching for certain words in Google and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo are your organic traffic. Organic traffic your free audience, and thus every blog owner wants to increase it.
The words people type in the search engines to find the information are keywords or keyphrases, but for convenience, we will simply call both keywords.
External links are the links in your blog post referencing other authority websites.
Internal links are the links in your post referencing other posts and pages on the same website.
Your Website (Blog)
The foundation of any online business is a website. If you have one already on your own domain – it’s your storefront. If it’s a 100% free website, it must be hosted on some subdomain. Then, it’s more like your own showcase in somebody else’s store.
A few tasks for you:
- Define a niche of your existing or future blog.
- Tell me in the Comments field below what it is.
- Also, tell me in the Comments space whether you have a blog on your own domain, run it on a subdomain, or don’t have a blog yet.
The niche of the blog that you’ve created just for fun without planning ahead for earnings could be pretty broad. It might be something like travel, or wellness, or pets, or photography, or fashion, or beauty, etc. These would monetize better if broken down to several blogs, each one in a narrower niche. Then, they could reference each other through the external links, which brings you an additional credit in the eyes of search engines.
If you don’t have a blog yet, think upfront of a narrower niche in the area of your interest, knowledge, passion.
Believe it or not, the more focused topic and well-targeted audience increases the organic traffic and brings up your authority as an author.
- The visitors will trust easier that you are an expert in a narrow niche of your blog and your authority will grow faster.
- Google will be able to match better the keywords people are searching for with the content of your blog and send in interested readers, who, in turn, will stay longer on your site and engage better.
For example, instead of Travel niche, I’d recommend choosing something like this:
- Travel [Location: Region, Country, or even a City]
- Travel by [Transport: bicycle, train, cruise]
- Travel for [Category of People: campers, wildlife lovers, students, budget travel, luxury travel]
The more searches are closely relevant to the content of your blog, the more people will stay on your blog, read, respond to your prompts, click on the links you offer. Thus, there will be more conversions, which directly or indirectly lead to sales, which lead to the revenue you get from your blog.
If you already have a blog that doesn’t make you any money, even with a broad niche you’d be able to start earning revenue by taking my advice in this post. Narrow niche produces better results, but it doesn’t mean that the broad one doesn’t work at all.
Products and Services to Promote on Your Blog.
If you think out of the box, you’d be able to find something helpful for people in any niche.
Think of the products or services in your niche that could help people experience what your posts are about or learn more about the topics.
Taking travel niche as an example again, this could be accommodations in the area you might be writing about, a guided tour, car rental, places to eat, local authentic gift ideas, etc.
Sports: clothes, shoes, equipment, memorabilia, training programs, books, DVDs, etc.
Photography: courses, camera and lighting equipment, artistic prints, printing, framing and finishing services, etc.
Minerals: books, gemstone jewelry, gemstone arts, collectibles, holistic therapy, healing crystals, etc.
Once you identify the products and/or services you could offer your readers,
find an Affiliate Program for them and JOIN in.
All affiliate programs are free. Do NOT join if you find one that asks for a fee!!!
None of the businesses can withhold the competition nowadays if they don’t have an online presence. Also, most of the online stores either have their own affiliate program or participate in Affiliate Networks such as ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, and many more.
Amazon.com offers its own affiliate program and it owns 49% of all online sales.
Maybe you have a favorite online store… Go to their website and check if they offer an affiliate program in the top menu or in the footer – see image below for an example.
If your product/ service is not on Amazon, and you don’t have a favorite store(s), simply google the name of the product with “+ affiliate” attached to your keyword. For example, “drone + affiliate”
As you can see in the image above, there were 30,500,000 results for my search. Of course, not all of them are closely related to what I was looking for, but many are. One of the links in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) brought me to this program in the image below, which is awesome! Look at the commission rate: 40% – 70%
Once you applied and got approved for an affiliate program of your choice, you’ll get your own affiliate link(s) to the products and services offered through this program. You will then place these links into the content of your post, and if a visitor clicks on your link and purchases something using your promotion, you get paid a commission at a predetermined rate.
You do need to have a website before applying for the affiliate program. Some affiliate programs approve your application instantly, others take some time. Amazon.com has its own routine: you get pre-approved immediately and receive your affiliate link. Your application becomes fully approved after 180 days (it’s half a year – more than enough!) if during this time at least 3 sales were made via your promotions. In case you didn’t make these 3 sales, you’d get rejected, but can simply reapply – no problem!
Please note: in this particular post, I purposely didn’t include any of my affiliate links. However, if you click the internal links in this post, they will take you to other posts that do have affiliate links.
Your Blog’s Audience.
The visitors to your website are your potential customers. Of course, not all of them will click on your affiliate links, but the more visitors you manage to attract, the more conversions you’ll get, the more money you’ll earn.
How do you attract visitors? Well, you’d need to learn how to please Mr. Google. ☺ Fortunately, Mr. Google takes the side of your human visitors and every year becomes smarter and smarter in determining whether your blog is interesting and helpful for people or just a chunk of text stuffed with keywords and affiliate links.
There are certain strategies and techniques that affiliate marketers have to know in order to increase organic traffic to their blog. Applying this set of techniques is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Google bots and other search engines calculate numerous factors in their ranking system of your blog. You get most organic traffic when your keywords rank on the 1st page in Google. If you are on the 2nd or 3rd page, you still get some visitors, but who looks beyond the 3rd page in Google! Very few users do.
Users can customize the number of items per page in Google’s SERP. I have mine set to 50, but very often there are only 10 search results per page. This means that if your keywords are ranked in a position over 30, the chance that people will find your post is slim, and if it’s ranked in the position 150+, the chance is basically zero.
Here are several tips for improving your SEO:
- “Content is King”. It must be interesting, helpful and engaging.
- The content can be written in conversational language, but has to be free of grammatical errors.
- Your blog has to be well formatted: use H1-H5 settings for headers, write short paragraphs with relative illustrations and embedded video(s)
- Fill in “Alternative Text” for all images.
- Optimize image sizes for the web. Keep them under 50KB
- The recommended length of each post is 1,500+ words, but not shorter than 1,000
- Your blog has to be frequently updated: 2-3 new posts per week are ideal.
- Carefully analyze and choose targeted keywords.
You can use some help from Google itself: it shows you the total number of results – so, you can estimate your competition. It also offers you a few related phrases people search for, which you can try instead in case the competition for your chosen keyword is too high.
If using Google for your keyword analysis, click on “Tools” and select “Verbatim” to get information relevant to your exact keyword. Perform a quoted search as shown in the image below.
Place your cursor in the search field to open up a drop-down list with related searches (left image below). This list and the number of shown results are also printed at the bottom of the last page in your search results (image on the right):
However, a good keyword research tool, such as Jaaxy, is much more useful and will visually present you with accurate and detailed information on your keyword and with many more related keywords ideas.
Below is a screenshot from the same search performed by Jaaxy (note, that there is no need for quotation marks):
As you can see, this keyword is great for a post!
- Use the targeted keywords 3-5 times in each post, one of them should be in the title.
Do it naturally and don’t overload your content with the chosen keywords. In bots’ view, every word and phrase in your content is a keyword. However, you would choose and analyze only one or two per post. Though, you might get ranked for a different phrase in your content as well. - Use clear and simple site navigation.
- Don’t use more than one pop-up per visit.
Pop-ups are disturbing and annoying. Many visitors will leave your website immediately if you attack them with various pop-ups. Such behavior will increase your bounce rate, decrease session duration and your site’s rank. - Include internal links.
You want visitors to stay longer on your website and browse other content. In Google’s terminology, this will decrease your site’s bounce rate and increase its rank. - Use external links to authority sites, but open them in a new browser tab or window – so that you don’t lose your visitors after they click on such link.
- Make sure that your posts display a Comment field at the bottom and encourage visitors to leave you feedback, ask questions, share their own stories there. Always reply to the comments and try to do it promptly, within 24 hours.
Comments are good for higher ranking as they complement the content of the post and reflect on visitors’ interest through their engagement. - Create prominent and well-defined Calls To Action (CTAs)
Good CTAs not only help in improving the rank of your blog, but also play a major role in your conversions. - Don’t stuff each and every post with your affiliate links.
Try to centralize your affiliate links in a few locations, and use internal links in other posts to reference these locations – similar to what I am doing in this post you are reading. - Set Meta Title and Meta Description for your blog, and do it for each post. With WordPress websites, you can install and activate ‘All In One SEO’ or ‘Yoast’ plugin, which will help you tune your blog for SEO.
- It’s good for SEO if your domain name is relevant to the niche of your blog. Use your targeted keywords in permalinks of the posts.
Use Google Analytics and Search Console to track traffic and analyze your website performance and conversions.
The average conversion rate is about 2%. If your blog is set up properly with affiliate links and CTAs that lead to sales, every 2 people out of a hundred will buy something and you, my friend, will earn commissions. The amount depends on the products you promote and affiliate programs you joined.
Once you see hundreds of people visiting your website daily, your blog will definitely make money.
In the next section, I will explain to the newbies how and where they can easily create their blogs. Please continue reading even if you are not one of them. This same place provides comprehensive step-by-step training on all of the above and everything that I was not able to fit in this post.
How to Create a New Blog from Scratch.
I think that this would be an appropriate place for me to tell you a little about myself and explain why I love the platform that I’m about to recommend to you. Please take a few minutes to watch this short video before you move forward in reading.
Click This Link
to learn about the company that offers everything you need to create a new website.
You’ll find my affiliate link in the article referenced above and will be able to use it for joining Wealthy Affiliate as a Starter member.
Read carefully what CTA you are choosing, because that article also contains a link to creating a Premium Membership account.
As I said in the video, I do recommend to upgrade to the Premium Membership at some point, but starting with a free account is a good way to get a feel of whether this business is for you in general and whether WA is the right choice for you to grow your online business with.
You can start creating a free blog and ask the WA Support to transfer it to your own domain name later if you decide to upgrade your membership. By the way, WA Technical Support is open 24/7/365 and provides excellent service to the Premium members.
Let’s take a closer look at the two types of Membership available at Wealthy Affiliate:
- Free Starter Membership
- Premium Membership
Free Membership allows you to build two free websites. They will reside on the SiteRubix subdomain. As I explained above, a website built on a subdomain can be free, but it is more like a showcase in somebody else’s store rather than your own storefront. A website built on subdomain also loses some credits in rank to a blog running on its own domain name related to the niche.
So, if you want a free blog, these are sacrifices you’d have to make.
Building a website on the Wealthy Affiliate (WA) Platform is extremely easy and takes only 30 seconds. WA takes care of the technical part behind the scene. You only need to provide a part of the domain name related to your niche, the title for your blog, and choose one of 12 available free WordPress themes. Then, click the “Build” button and you are done.
Your own part of the domain name should be the same as the title/ name of your website without spaces. Your site’s URL will look like shown in the image:
YouChosenSiteName.siterubix.com
If you were building a site on your own domain, the SiteRubix would not be a part of the URL. Your URL would be in the following format: YouChosenSiteName.com
Choose any theme – it doesn’t matter which one at this point. You’ll be able to change it later.
Once the build is complete, you’ll see your website with preloaded sample content created by your theme. You can delete it, and start creating your own content. Or, you can change the theme at this time with no problem. After you started creating your own content, you should still be able to change the theme, but you have to be more careful as some elements you’ve created may not be compatible with a new theme. Have a full backup of your website if you find yourself wanting to change the design later.
There are 10 free lessons offered to the Starter members in phase 1 of the Online Entrepreneur Certification course. They will walk you through creating your first page and a post. 30 Free keyword searches in Jaaxy are included in Starter membership.
Here is what I mean when I say that free website is a showcase in another owner’s store:
MyWebsiteName.SiteRubix.com
is “renting” (for free) the space in the SiteRubix store.
MyWebsiteName.com
is owning the MyWebsiteName.com store
(the domain name price is somewhere between $10 and $15 per year).
With the Premium Membership, WA offers web hosting for 10 websites of any type: either on your own domains or free websites on the SiteRubix subdomain.
With the Starter Membership, you can only have 1 free website on the SiteRubix subdomain.
Premium members also have a selection of 3,000+ design themes to choose from (comparing to 12 available to Starter members).
And of course, Premium Members have access to endless courses and training modules in all areas of online business as well as weekly Live Webinars, which are recorded and accessible at a later time.
You can find the Membership Comparison table in this Wealthy Affiliate Review. It shows all features and prices. There are absolutely no upsells – Premium Membership opens up access to everything you need and Wealthy Affiliate offers. Your own domain name(s) is the only extra spending to the membership fee.
I do not encourage you to sign up for Premium right away unless you are reading this before December 3rd, 2019.
The Starter Membership gives you an ability to “look around the platform” and decide for yourself whether you want to go Premium or not. You can upgrade at any time later, and if you make your decision within your first free week at WA, I offer you as an action-taker $30 off your first Premium month.
In Conclusion…
Of course, the scale of this post does not allow me to give you comprehensive training on SEO and optimization of your blog for conversions. I hope that I’ve done a pretty good job considering the blog post format.
To create your own free website easily,
sign up for Free Starter Membership with Wealthy Affiliate
using the links in the referenced article.
In order to get full comprehensive training, unlimited keywords searches and analysis in Jaaxy, web hosting for up to 10 websites on your own domains, be part of an amazing worldwide community of like-minded people, receive support 24/7/365 and much more, you’d want to upgrade to the Premium membership at some point. Do it within your first week and receive $30 off your first month.
There are also other ways to increase traffic to your blog, but they are outside of the scope of this post, and some of them are not free. You’d be able to learn about them when you become a WA Premium member.
There are more ways to earn money from your blog, such as running an email campaign, using social networks, placing 3rd-party ads on your site (also thoroughly explained at WA to the Premium members). I don’t recommend ads until you see hundreds of people visiting your blog daily. These ads pay you pennies, but drive your readers away from your blog and thus from your own affiliate sales.
Do Blogs Make Money? Yes, they do, and yours will too as long as you are willing to invest some time in learning more techniques and strategies for optimization and make adjustments accordingly to the training created by the expert marketers.
Please use the Comments field below to ask questions, answer the questions I asked you above, and give me your feedback. I’m always delighted to hear from my readers and usually reply within a day.
Wishing You Great Success in Blogging and Earning!
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I’m convinced by the explanation and would like to get started making money blogging. There’s just one thought that holds me from actually starting which is the discouraging words my friends on Facebook told me when I posted that I am interested in starting a blog. They said, most people prefer to watch videos on Youtube than reading text posts in blogs. Is that true? Or, do blogs still have the chance of winning over video posts on Youtube?
Hi Gomer,
Thank you for the challenging comment.
It’s true and unfortunate that many people don’t like to read anymore. I’m convinced that not all of them, though; many still read. I agree that YouTube videos are very popular nowadays. I’m not sure if blogs can win over them, but I am sure that they still have a chance to live and earn alongside YouTube videos.
Videos have some disadvantages as well.
They are not as easy to navigate as blogs are. People tend to scan through the blog first to verify if the information is truly relevant to their interests. That’s why it’s very important how we format our content. It’s hard to scan through a video – so, one may lose some time before he/she realizes that the video does not answer his or her question.
A blog post may include a video, while a video does not have room for much of written text.
Also, people whose first language is not the language used in the video, may prefer to read in that language rather than listen. That I know first-hand! 🙂 Accents might be hard to understand too.
I am confident that blogs will live for many more years. You know, bloggers are not restrained from having a YouTube channel as well. 🙂 These two sources complement each other and yet, each can generate its own stream of income; two is better than one!
All the best to you,
~ Julia
Wow! You have not only shared the essentials when it comes to blogging but also, clarified all my doubts on the possibilities of making money with blogging. A big-time thumbs up to you for sharing all these here. I truly believe that anyone who follows and adheres strictly to all you have shared here would find it a lot easier making money from blogging. I wish I had something like this when I started out with blogging. Thumbs up to you for sharing.
Hi Rodarrick,
Thank you for stopping by, reading and commenting. I’m glad that this makes sense and you found some clarification for yourself.
Wishing you great success in your blogging and earning.
~ Julia
Thanks for this post on how to run a blog and how to make money on them. Initially, I thought that to be a blogger you have to work some extra work or have a lot of money to run it. Seeing this post made me understand that it’s really not necessary just for you to have the time and be focused. I found this post very interesting because a friend of mine does open blogs for free and then he doesn’t use it to earn money, because he doesn’t know how to. I wanna ask… Is a blog only use in online affiliate marketing alone? Thanks.
Hi Rose,
That’s correct, having a blog does not require a lot of money. However, it does require time. Even for someone who already runs a blog and invests time, it would take extra time to learn and adjust it for earnings. Affiliate marketing is the cheapest, easiest and most popular way to make money from blogs, but as I mentioned in my post, there are other ways to monetize a website too, and Wealthy Affiliate teaches them all.
Thank you for your comment. Wishing you all the best,
~ Julia
Hi Julia,
thanks for your informative post on the Blog site. People who don’t have a blog yet, but would love to create one, herein show how to effortlessly accomplish that towards the cease of this post. A Blog is a sort of website or a part of a website where the content material gets regularly updated. When we say “internet site”, we seek advice from a more static set of internet pages. To a “blog”, people write and put up posts often. That’s the handiest difference. From a Blog people must earn revenue by getting organic traffic, affiliate program, ads, sharing links and so on.
Your post is really appreciable for those who have an interest in the blog. Thanks for the nice sharing.
Hi Irin,
Thank you for commenting. You understood this correctly.
Though, as I mentioned, external ads would be the last thing I’d recommend to people who are just starting their blog or are at the beginning of monetizing it.
Best,
~ Julia
Great post here.Thanks for sharing all of this information. It would help quite a lot of newbies who are just getting into blogging and what it entails here. I agree with you that blogging can make a lot of money and one can even live basically on it. Going by the way you have simplified the information here, I believe no one would encounter any issue on the path of becoming a blogger. Also, being a niche blogger pays better.
Hi Shelley,
Thank you for stopping by and for your feedback.
You made a good point. I totally agree that niche-focused blogs are more profitable. I guess the solution to earn more revenue for someone who already has an established blog, which addresses a wide range of topics, would be to split it into two or more narrow-niche blogs. Wealthy Affiliate allows its Premium members to have up to 25 websites, and Starter members can have 2. I would keep the existing blog because website age plays an important role in its ranking. Then, I’d move only irrelevant posts to another website(s) and set redirects to avoid “File not found” errors.
Warm regards,
~ Julia
Big thumbs up to you here. I am a newbie to making money online and I was even rather clueless as to making a blog. Thanks for detailing this information and how exactly to make money online. This is really great for me to know. Also, I would like to know if there is a need to have capital before I can start to earn well online through blogging or what else do I need apart from the things you have explained here?
Hello Julianne,
If you are a newbie, the only spending I recommend is to purchase a Premium Membership at Wealthy Affiliate and buy your own domain. If you act today, WA still runs its Black Friday Offer: $299 for a YEAR (49% off the regular price). A domain name costs $10 to $15 per year. Everything else you’d need is included in Premium. Free membership at WA can get you started and gives you 2 free websites on SiteRubix subdomain, but 10 free lessons will not be enough for a novice blogger; you’d want to have unlimited access to all available resources, and they are endless at WA!
Wishing you great success in launching your blog,
~ Julia
It takes a lot of work to do but yes many blogs do make money doing what they do! There are a lot of great sites that offer tons of tips to help people get started which I think is awesome.
Hello Luna,
Actually, running a blog takes much more time and work than tuning it up to make money. To run a blog, you’d need to post new content frequently – that takes time! Optimizing your blog for search engines to produce organic traffic and joining affiliate programs is not much work at all compared to writing the posts. But first, you’d need to learn how to do it properly. Once the knowledge is there, incorporating it into your writing will become second nature, and SEO tasks will only take a few minutes of extra time before publishing each post.
Thank you for your feedback.
~ Julia
What a great comprehensive guide and list of actionable tools to help one to start blogging and progress at making money from it as well. Fantastic post.
Thank you, Sarah. I’m glad you found it informative.
Best,
~ Julia
This is an excellent post for anyone who is new to blogging or wanting to start affiliate programmes. Too often, there are blog posts suggesting the owner made thousands of dollars after just two months of blogging. The reality is nothing like that. Blogging is hard work, it takes time and there is a lot of learning to be done at the start.
Hi there,
I agree with you, some bloggers make blogging and earning sound too easy because they write to promote their services and not to help people. That’s a big mistake: they offer sale speeches instead of sharing honest unbias information. However, we grow our audience by earning trust. Bloggers who lie to their readers won’t get hundreds of visitors per day and thus won’t earn much money.
I hope, I made it clear that blogging is a lot of work, but for people who blog for fun, it’s a pleasant job. Monetizing their blog requires learning. After they gain the required knowledge, applying it doesn’t add too much to the work they already do.
Thank you very much for your feedback.
All the best,
~ Julia
When I started blogging I never realized how much work it actually was and how much goes into the behind the scenes of it all. I seem to be learning something new every day that I didn’t realize. Whether it be social media related or affiliate marketing. This is a very comprehensive post that I will reference again.
Hi Scott,
Thank you for your feedback.
Blogging indeed requires a lot of work and we do learn something new every day. That’s fun, isn’t it? I love learning new stuff, don’t you? The brain, like any other organ and even more so, needs to exercise and stay active in order to be healthy and well-functioning for many years to come.
Have fun and be well!
~ Julia
I can’t stress how important it is to not put affiliate links into ALL your posts. I know several bloggers who do this. It’s a bit much at times.
Hi Fatima,
That’s correct. Not only affiliate links repeated many times on every post make it obvious to the readers that we are trying too hard to push out a sale rather than help them to solve their problem, but they are also recognized by the bots and negatively affect our ranking.
Having said that, the clear calls to action must be on each post: whether it’s to leave a comment, sign up for newsletters or click the button to get to the next post which contains affiliate links and generates revenue. We should not leave our readers uncertain about what to do next after they finished reading one page. In-text internal links are not enough, CTAs have to be more prominent.
I hope this makes sense. Thank you for your comment.
Best regards,
~ Julia
It’s incredible to see just how much opportunity exists in the world of blogging today, a medium that wasn’t available not that long ago! Many bloggers (myself included) start as hobby bloggers just to get our feet wet and make the transition into blogging professionally over time as we gain confidence in our skills and ability to create and market our content. It’s certainly not an easy way to make money, there’s a lot of work involved, but it’s SO worth it! Thank you for all the tips.
Hello Britt,
Thank you for the comment. No, it’s not easy, but a laptop lifestyle is definitely worth it, and the beauty of blogging is that we can choose a niche accordingly to our interest. Otherwise, who would want to blog as a hobby, right? Not only blogs allow us to share our passion with the whole world, but they also support our families financially – a little or a lot, depending on how much time and effort we are able to dedicate to our work, which is also a hobby.
Warm regards,
~ Julia
Great post and thoughtful inside. I do agree blogs have tons of opportunities to make money and it is a huge blessing for us! We do have a lot to offer!
Thank you, Lyosha.
~ Julia
There are definitely some great opportunities for making money from blogging. Not just from affiliate sales but also ads and Ebooks or courses. Thanks for all this valuable information. There is so much to learn when you’re starting out as a blogger and I’m constantly increasing my knowledge.
Hi Kelly,
Thank you for stopping by. Yes, there are many ways to earn money online, but affiliate marketing via blogging is the easiest path for beginners. I do not recommend placing ads in a blog while traffic is not huge – they earn for bloggers very little and drive visitors away from their site. Courses and membership type websites are a different type of online business – much more complicated to manage than personal blogs. Selling eBooks is yet another animal 🙂 But yes, any business can be promoted in blogs. Wealthy Affiliate provides training for all types of online business, but also suggests Affiliate Marketing as a starting course.
Have a wonderful day,
~ Julia
Wow this looks like such a detailed guide. With so many hints and tips for sure. Many people will find this useful x
Thank you, Melanie.
Such a wonderful and exhaustive guide for new bloggers and to be bloggers. All aspects so well considered including monetizing. Great post.
Thank you. I’m glad that you think that this guide is exhaustive and covers a lot of aspects. That was my intention… 🙂
All the best,
~ Julia
You sure do offer a lot of information in just one blog post. I agree that there are so many ways to make money with your blog. It sure does take a lot of work though, optimizing it, advertising your posts through Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram and trying to come up with good lead magnets that no one else has offered before. But at the same time writing about what you are interested in is so rewarding!
Alexandra,
Thank you very much for your comment and for mentioning the additional tricks to get more traffic. However, a blog well-tuned for SEO on its own will do well. Once your posts are on the first page in Google for targeted keywords, you get traffic! Then, as you said, you can get even more visitors through YouTube/ Vimeo channels, advertising on other social networks, email campaigns, etc.
For those readers who are new to marketing: if you don’t know what lead magnets are, how to advertise on Facebook and other social networks, or how to create and publish videos, all these additional techniques are also explained in the Wealthy Affiliate training modules as you move on from the beginning phase of learning to more advanced ones.
Wishing you all the best,
~ Julia
You can totally earn money through blogging. I started mine for fun too then slowly change it so that I can start earning. Those are wonderful tips and a detailed explanation about the said topic. Really helpful especially to those who are new to it
Thank you, Lyanna.
It’s helpful for me to hear that you too started your blog for fun.
It’s very important for a blogger to know and understand his/her audience. If I was writing for hobbyist-blogger, and one didn’t exist, I’d be wasting my efforts, right? So, I truly appreciate yours and a couple of other comments here confirming that they started their blog as a hobby. If you did, there must be others who do it currently 🙂 If you decided to learn and turn your “just-for-fun” blog into a blog making revenue, then others may want to do the same… The intention of this article was to help them get started, and you just confirmed that this information is helpful. Thank you!
Happy blogging to you, and great success in earnings!
~ Julia