How to make money blogging?
Here is a guide how to start blogging and make your first income online.
Top monetization sources for your blog
So, how to monetize your blog? Here are top sources, which I’ve found
1. AdSense
Include AdSense ads on your blog. However, you need to have hundreds of thousand of page views per month.
2. Affiliate
To tell the truth, I’m not yet full scale income blogger, just starting out. I’ve made some revenue online, but it’s not enough yet. So, I’ll update this guide to share some lessons I learned.
My top lessons
It’s hard and takes time
My first lesson, is that this is actually pretty hard. There is a lot of hype around online blogging, youtube, etc right now, but it takes a lot of effort to get there.
From what I’ve seen from successful 6-7 figure bloggers, is that patience in combination with hard work is the secret sauce to success in online blogging.
It took Glen Allsopp from ViperChill whooping 11 years to finally generate 7-figure yearly revenue with hard work.
Other now famous bloggers – Alex and Lauren from Create and Go spent 6 months (ok, that’s less than 11 years 🙂 working on blogs day and night, without making a dime and spending a lot of money.
So, you need to think long term.
Of course, there are lucky occasions, when your instagram story or youtube clip can just take off and you suddenly can collect $2000 from adsense account from one video, you didn’t even remember posting.
But, in most cases it doesn’t work that way.
Blog – a full scale business
If you accept blog just like some hobby thing, which will never work out – it will never work out.
You should believe in a thing you are doing and plan long term.
Imagine a blog, which attracts 500-700K monthly visitors or a Youtube channel with 10 million monthly views. That’s a huge audience! It can be bigger than some TV stations with hundreds of employees.
Think of blogging not as some site, which can generate couple hundreds of dollars per month, but as your own media corporation.
No budget? Not an excuse anymore…
So, Internet brings a lot of power and opportunity – you can catch attention of millions of people just with your phone, and you can run a full scale team with help of freelancing sites.
In many cases, you also don’t need some fancy gear, rented studios, massive budget, etc.
Focus on one thing and close it. “Be a closer”
With blogging it is very easy to get distracted. You can choose so many mediums (text, image, audio, video) and so many niches (travel, fitness, finance, career, text, online marketing, lifestyle, finance, etc).
In my experience, you need find your best medium and best niche.
E.g. travel videos on youtube, tech podcast or online marketing blog. If you notice, that this type of content is getting attention and you enjoy creating it – just focus on it and cut everything else. Ok, maybe not that strict, but it’s about that.
From monetization and management point, it’s much better to have one 100K blog, than ten 10K blogs.
After you’ve chosen your blogging fit and traffic/subscribers/views are growing – set a concrete aim and achieve it.
E.g. let’s reach 1K subscribers or 50K monthly sessions on my blog.
Test, test, test – before going full scale
Don’t invest a lot of money in a project you didn’t even test.
Always test before throwing money and resources.
In startup/tech world it’s called – MVP – minimum viable product. The idea is, before creating a full scale product, just test a simplest possible, but working solution.
In my experience, this approach in 100% relates to blogging.
Before buying all expensive gear, renting a studio, software, online subscriptions, etc – you can easily test if some topic, idea or project has some traction: via free Wix website or a simplest video on Youtube or recording podcast with your phone and posting great Instagram photos without $10K camera.
You can test many ideas very cheap and see on early stage if there is some potential. After that you can move forward.
It’s not about you…
Maybe it’s a surprise, but your blog, in a way, shouldn’t be about you. It should be about your audience.
While blogging, you shouldn’t think how to boost your ego, but how to solve problems and help other people.
Successful bloggers
Best courses
In order to make first money and then even more serious money blogging, you will need to invest in some courses. A lot of bloggers don’t show their top secrets with a free option. But, it will be worth it. Here are some courses.
Back to you
