- How to monetise your blog posts in 2022 and beyond
- Deciding on a niche and determining readership
- Constructing and designing your blog
- Optimising your posts for search
- Leveraging Google AdSense and affiliate marketing
Let’s be honest, blogging is by no means an easy task, and you can’t expect to receive results overnight but you could rake in thousands if you get it right! As long as you have something interesting to write about and enough patience and dedication to build traffic, nothing is standing in between you and success.
There are also more ways to make money blogging now than in the days when some of the most recognised bloggers started, meaning it’s easier to grow a profitable business from your home.
So, how do successful bloggers make their money?
In this guide, we’ll show you proven ways to make money from blogging and the pitfalls you should avoid.
Sounds good? Let’s begin.
How to Start Earning Money From Blogging
First, you need to come up with an idea and name for your blog.
When considering what to blog about, it’s best to choose topics that interest you and you’ll enjoy writing about often.
After that, you’ll need to find a hosting platform – you could use a free blog hosting service or set up your own website.
While free blogging platforms may sound appealing, one of the drawbacks is that they offer limited services. For example, you’ll often only be able to customise your website to a limited extent and have a storage limit, making it harder to upload high-quality photos and videos.
You might also find that the URL for your blog contains the platform’s branding, for example, “www.yourblogname.wordpress.com”.
However, a subscription-based blogging platform such as Bluehost – which even those on the lowest budgets can take advantage of at just $2.95 per month – provides bloggers complete control over the design and structure of their site.
If you decide to use Bluehost, you can skip past all the extra add-ons except for the domain privacy protection option. While this will cost you a couple of extra dollars a month, it’s a worthwhile investment given that it offers your account better privacy and security.
Once you’ve purchased your blog domain, install WordPress, which has an insane amount of templates or themes available to choose from and then you can finally start writing!
Before you work on monetising your blog, we recommend publishing a few posts to help you generate some traffic and readership.
So, you’ve created a few posts; now it’s time to sign up for a Google AdSense and Amazon Associates account, which are easy ways for you to make money through your blogs. You could also tap into affiliate marketing and sell sponsored blog posts to monetise your content.
Now, we’ve outlined the basics, let’s get into the details of how to monetise your blog.
Step 1: Decide on Your Niche
The reason why 95% of bloggers fail to monetise their content isn’t that they are not passionate enough but because they struggle to look at their blog from a business perspective.
While it’s important to write about something you’re passionate about, remember that it needs to capture your audience’s attention. Furthermore, you want to make sure you have enough market demand to scale traffic if you’re going to succeed.
Hundreds of articles on Google tell us that the easiest way to make money blogging is to write about something you’re passionate about. But those are all outdated.
We’re not suggesting that you write about something that doesn’t interest you, as this will show in your blog. Still, it’s important to understand that not all niches are monetisable, especially if the topic is unique.
Here are several tips for deciding on a blog niche:
- Choose a topic you enjoy
- Determine audience budget potential
- Assess professional leverage
- Research market demand
Keep in mind that the most monetisable blogs include “best” or “how to” in the title. For example, if referring to finance, “Best savings account” would be a popular “best” blog post. Similarly, “how-to” guides in marketing generate high volumes of traffic, with some popular titles including:
- How to create a website
- How to optimise for voice search
- How to create an effective marketing campaign
Once you’ve chosen your niche, find out whether it has the potential for a readership. Remember that the only way to earn money through blogging is to drive traffic to your website.
Step 2: Determine Whether Your Niche Has a Readership
So, let’s assume you’ve figured out your blog niche and you’re going to write about digital marketing.
Now, it’s time to do some research and source the top ten keywords to target. If your top five keywords have high search volumes, this shows that there is significant interest in your topic.
If you’re happy with your keyword volumes, you might also want to look at the keyword difficulty score, which ranges from 0-100, to determine how hard or easy it will be for you to rank for those keywords. For example, suppose your keywords have a difficulty score of 80 or higher. Then you might want to rethink your niche due to the overwhelming competition.
Ideally, you want to target keywords that generate monthly search volumes surplus of 2,000 and have a difficulty score of 50 or less.
If at this point you’re still confident in your chosen niche and think you have the potential to perform well in search engine result pages (SERPs), then spend some time researching your audience’s pain points to help you create content that offers value to the user.
You could see what topics your readership is interested in by performing a quick Google search, which will tell you what audiences in your niche are searching for.
Avoid writing about broad or generic topics and scale your content to avoid writing thousands of drafts. Create an editorial calendar that not only includes posts written by yourself but guest posts so that you can also spend time focusing on:
- Editing
- Proofreading
- Link building
- Outreach work
Successful blogger Adam Enfroy incorporated this method in the first year of launching his blog and acquired over 5,000 backlinks from more than 1,000 domains, boosting his Domain Rating (DR) by +74.
Step 3: Name Your Blog
Now the foundation of your blog has been constructed – you need to figure out a name for your blog.
Blog names play a huge role in how successful they become. It’s what people see first and, as a result, sets the tone for what they think your blog is about, so you want to make a strong impression.
Here are a few questions you could ask yourself to help you develop a good blog name.
- What is my blog about?
- Who is my target audience?
- What is my tone of voice?
- What are my competitor’s blogs called?
Don’t be afraid to include your name in your blog, especially if it’s about your personal experiences, as this will help people find your blog when searching for information about you.
However, if your blog focuses on a product or niche, it would be better to conduct competitor research, reach for a thesaurus, or use online blog name generators to help you develop a compelling name.
Whatever you decide, keep your blog name short and concise to make it more memorable and avoid choosing a random or offensive name.
Step 4: Design Your Blog
Let’s assume you’ve found a niche, thought of a blog name and installed WordPress CMS to run your blog. Now it’s time to design an enticing blog that will help readers appreciate your content and give you an edge over your competitors.
Make sure the background and foreground colours contrast to make your text easy to read, as this will impact bounce rates and, in turn, monetisation. Also, make sure your lines are sufficiently spaced, and that spaces between paragraphs can be easily distinguished.
Don’t forget to include a comment section and social media buttons to allow people to interact with your posts and share to their own social platforms. After all, more visibility will drive more website traffic and create more opportunities to make money.
Use high-quality visuals to break up the text and infographics or charts to help users comprehend any data you refer to in your blog.
Design and layout are fundamental if you want your blog to be profitable. If your blog looks unprofessional, outdated or unappealing – there’s a good chance that users will question your credibility.
Step 5: Write About Interesting Blog Topics
Blogging with purpose will increase market share, engagement, revenue growth, and ROI. The only way to achieve that is to offer readers valuable content.
But what if you’ve already exhausted your best ideas on previous blog posts?
One of the most common questions we get asked by new bloggers is: What topic should I write about?
Our content writer has shared some tips to help you come up with some potential blog topics.
- Make a list of questions commonly asked by your target audience
- Don’t write about a topic just because you see others monetising from it
- Make a list of your audience’s pain points and challenges
- Test out ideas to see what works and what doesn’t
- Look at past content that has performed well and write related content
- Write about news or the latest developments in your industry
While you need to be interested in the topics, don’t base your content on your own interests. Remember the purpose of your blog is to generate content that provides value to users and addresses their needs and concerns.
Step 6: Optimise Your Blogs Content
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential for any business. Optimising your website will improve its performance in SERPs and attract a more qualified readership.
Whether you’re a small blogger or well-established in the online community, you should utilise SEO to build a strong web presence, promote user engagement and create opportunities for link building.
If you’re using WordPress, download a plugin called Yoast SEO, which will provide you with a range of tips and suggestions based on your primary keyword to help you optimise your content and improve readability.
A Chrome extension called SEO Minion is also a favourite at Soar Online, as it allows you to check for broken links, identify the number of h-tags on the page, whether ALT tags have been used on images and much more.
Step 7: Sign up for Google AdSense
Ads are another effective way to monetise your blog, but you’ll need to be smart about it.
One of the biggest mistakes bloggers make is hoarding their sites with ads, which frustrates customers and ruins the user experience.
AdSense works by serving ads relevant to the content appearing on your blog and pays you when a user interacts with that ad. As the ads are relevant to the content and readership on your blog, AdSense can provide a potentially lucrative opportunity for bloggers and a healthy revenue stream for your blog.
All you have to do to start earning money through Google AdSense is sign up for an account. If you don’t have a Google account yet, create a new one and complete the step mentioned above.
Step 8: Build Relationships And Encourage Guest Posting
If you start to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche, you could acquire valuable backlinks to your website.
Once you’ve generated a list of approximately 50 potential contacts and have reached out to those people on social media, we recommend using LinkedIn as it is a professional platform; you’ll then need to start your email outreach work. You can use LinkedIn advertising campaigns to boost your visibility on this fantastic business platform, the company quite often offers free trials and credit benefits on occasion.
Facilitate this process by using an email template, which could look something like this:
Hi (First Name),
My name’s [Insert Name] and I’m the [Title] of [Blog Name].
I’m connecting with you because I think your [Target Blog] is incredible and I would love to collaborate on content.
If you’re interested in guest posts, I wondered whether you’d be interested in link building? I currently write [X] guest posts per month and would be happy to link to your site in my content.
I’d love to contribute to your [insert positive, relevant adjective] site and am more than happy to pitch some topic ideas that I think would benefit your blog and your audience. I’ve provided some samples below:
[Insert Samples]
Please let me know if you’re interested, and I look forward to hearing back from you soon!
Best wishes,
[Your Name]
Using an email template will save you a lot of time and scale the process as it allows you to start new relationships and pitch guest posts simultaneously.
If you receive a positive response, you’ll then need to pitch the perfect topic.
Before you do this, perform a site search, “site: [their domain name “topic”]” to double-check whether your topic idea already exists on their site.
You’ll also want to make sure that your topic and keywords have SEO value and can bridge any gaps in their content, which shows that your content adds value to their site.
Last but not least, ensure that the topic matches both of your audience’s interests. Check out a few of their blog posts and try to match their style and tone, so your content doesn’t feel like a mismatched piece.
Step 9: Leverage Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money from your blogs.
In fact, almost all of the most profitable blogs leverage affiliate marketing, which refers to the process of earning a commission for advertising a product or service made by another person or company.
However, to be a successful affiliate marketer, you’ll need to create solid content that ranks highly in Google and mediates buyer decisions.
Remember that if people search for “best” or “how-to” posts, they’re not ready to purchase yet and instead want to read comprehensive reviews. That’s good news for you and your blog.
Your posts act like search intent mediators, attracting traffic from search engines to offer advice on these products or services and persuading people to click the affiliate link.
How do you take advantage of affiliate marketing?
It’s simple really, all you need to do is write transactional-themed blog posts.
If you’re interested in learning more about blogging, take a read of our ultimate guide on How To Improve Engagement With Blog Posts.
