[Innovus]

How to Make Money Blogging: Monetizing a Blog 101
F.A.Q

Can you make a livable income online?

Yes! Absolutely! It is completely possible to make a livable income by blogging online. In fact, you can probably attain a salary similar to your current one (assuming you’re making a moderate five figure salary)… in under two years.

Can most people do it?

No. If everyone blogging was making money doing it then everyone would quit their jobs. Making money online is a lot like acting or playing sports, in the sense that: there’s a low entrance threshold so it really takes a lot of effort and talent to get noticed. I’d say maybe 1% of people who try to make money online really do it successfully. What separates this 1% from the other 99%? They are SMART. Intelligence is the talent required to be a good blogger.

Do I need to know how to program websites?

You do not need to be a computer programming genius, no. However, it will definitely help you and save you a lot of money if you are web savvy. I would suggest reading up on the following subjects:

- Blogging Software
- HTML
- CSS
- SEO

Will putting ads on my website hurt my traffic?

No. This is a common misconception, however if you are not getting any traffic having ads on the website will not make you any money. I generally make it a rule of thumb not to put any ads on until I start to see a steady increase in real traffic, the ads will do me no good without traffic anyway.

Questions to ask YOURSELF

Am I interested in my blog’s topic?

This is a very important question to ask yourself before you begin investing your time into your blog. A lot of new bloggers, especially bloggers that have started blogging with the intent of monetizing their blog down the road, make the mistake of blogging about a popular topic rather than one they are personally interested in. 9 times out of 10, when someone does this their blog is lackluster. If you are not interested in your own writing, how do you think other people will feel when they read it?

A lot of people try to make copycat blogs (blogs where all you do is take content from other blogs), this will not work. DO NOT COPY OTHER PEOPLE! I cannot stress this enough, creating a copycat blog (with the sole purpose of monetizing it) WILL NOT MAKE YOU ANY MONEY. Google places a very high value on original content when ranking pages in its search engine. If you are creating a blog and simply ripping off of other peoples content you will NOT rank well in Google and will have a harder time bringing traffic to your blog. Nobody likes a copycat, don’t be one.

Do I have the time to start a blog?

Blogging is a time consuming process, and when I say time consuming.. I mean time consuming. I usually spend at least 2-4 hours a day writing blog posts. If you do not have at least 6-10 hours a week to devote to blogging, chances are you will not be able to make money blogging. It’s a sad, but true. Depending on your blog topic, you may also have to spend time researching for every article you write. For example, technology bloggers need to stay up to date with the most recent technology. This means reading multiple articles about the technology before even sitting down to write. Most successful bloggers will suggest that you release 5+ blog posts a week with a length of 300-800 words.

Do I have enough motivation?

Even if you have enough hours in a day to blog, they’re worthless if you do not have the motivation. If you want to make money blogging it’s going to take time. You probably will not see any money in your first year, but you need to continue to make UNIQUE and HIGH QUALITY content if you want to earn money down the road. Blogging is an investment, you will never see immediate results, but in time your hard work will pay off.

STARTING A BLOG

So, you’ve read through everything so far and you still want to start a blog? That’s great, I’m proud of you. Let’s jump right into things then.

Blogging Software

What’s that? You don’t know anything about blogging software? I thought I told you to read up on it! Don’t worry, I’ll help you out. I run this blog on wordpress, and I suggest everyone who has an interest in blogging to do the same. It’s 100% free, and it is definitely the most user friendly blogging software there is (in my opinion). There are a bunch of great addons, plugins, and themes which are all also free so there really isn’t much to complain about.

Now, I do want to make note that I do not suggest using free hosted services such as Blogger if you plan on monetizing down the road. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great service, but as someone who has intention of monetizing your content, these free services will only tie you down. You will not have as much control over the layout of your website, and in the end you’ll be building up someone else’s assets. In the end you will be at the mercy of the service that is hosting your blog, they can shut you down for any reason or no reason at all. It will be more work upfront, but in the long run hosting your own blog will be a much better investment.

Web hosting is relatively inexpensive, and there are plenty of 5 star hosts to choose from. I recommend hostgator as they are cheap and their customer service is very good. I know many people who host with them and I have hosted websites with them many times. If you are interested in hosting there you can use coupon code: “pennydiscount” to get your first month for $0.01, or you can use “ryandeming25″ to get 25% off any purchase. They also sell domain names which is something you will need if you are hosting for yourself. If you’re reading this part of the article that means you believe you have the time and motivation to blog, so I would suggest purchasing a year of hosting with the 25% discount. :)

Choose Your Niche

Choosing the right niche can make or break your efforts. Choosing a niche that is too small will not generate any traffic, but be careful to not bite off more than you can chew. As long as you choose a niche with a broad appeal you should be fine. My niche for example is entrepreneurship, which allows me to talk about a wide range of topics such as marketing, finance, monetizing, etc.

Pick a niche that you are genuinely interested in. As I stated above, choosing to write about a topic just because you believe it will make you money will get you NOWHERE. It is a recipe for failure and I do not want to see you get sucked into that hole. As long as you write about something you love, can make that something appeal to a global audience, and provide genuine value to your readers, your website/blog will flourish.

Also, don’t forget: we’re monetizing here. A broad niche opens up more space for potential advertising partners. Writing about a laser pinpointed topic over and over will exhaust that supply, but choosing your niche solely to get advertisers will end in failure. I cannot stress that enough.

Last of all, make it clear to your visitors what your website is about. Although you may think you’re being clever with your website name or title, other people may not understand that and decide the website is not worth their time. Always be clear and concise when naming your website, clarity will always yield better results.

Posting on Your Blog

There are many different opinions for how frequent and how long blog posts should be. I generally do not adhere to them, as I’m not too concerned with building a following. Most bloggers, as I stated previously, will tell you that being more frequent with shorter posts will result in better search engine indexing. While this is true I believe that as long as your posts all contain genuine content, traffic will come regardless of post frequency and length. However, if your sole purpose is monetizing, I would say that following the standard (short [250-750 words] posts, at least 10x a week]) will bring in solid traffic numbers for you.

MONETIZING YOUR BLOG

Assuming I haven’t scared you away yet, I will finally start talking about the reason you found this post. MONETIZING YOUR BLOG! So without further adieu… the most important thing in monetizing your blog is…

TRAFFIC!

So, you want to monetize your blog? Well you aren’t going to do that without any traffic. Why is traffic so important? Well for most forms of online income generation, your traffic levels will generally directly correlate with your income levels. Double traffic (generally speaking) means double income. More traffic means more product sales, affiliate sales, ad clicks, etc, etc.

Building traffic is BY FAR, the hardest part of monetizing any website, because unfortunately in regards to traffic, the rich do get richer. By that I mean, once you have high levels of traffic, you get indexed higher in search engines, and therefore more people find your website. More opportunities arise with high traffic levels, that is just one example, hopefully you get the point. As long as you’re intelligent, and web savvy you should be able to begin to build some traffic, and once you have traffic you can leverage that to build even more traffic.

How to get traffic…

There are many ways to build traffic. If you are interested in reading a few good ways to build traffic check out my other article: How to Bring Traffic to a Website or Blog.

Different forms of income

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, well that applies to online marketing/monetizing as well. Multiple sources of income will always be better than just one. Here are a few that I suggest using on a blog:

Adsense / PPC advertising
Donations
Affiliate marketing (I use clickbank)
Advertising sold to individual advertising
Having multiple sources of income is mainly a safety net, but they do not interfere with each other. I am not going to make any more money from PPC advertisements if I stop selling affiliate programs. Likewise, if I stop selling affiliate programs I will still have the other 3 sources of income to keep the money flowing. However, if you rely on one source of income and it dries up, it is never too late to add more (assuming you have steady traffic flowing through your website).

Automated Income

All of these sources of income (with the exception of #4) are automated sources of income. Once they are in place on the website, I’m done with them, all I do is deposit the checks (if I’m not having the money directly sent to my bank account).

Running a blog is easy thanks to automated income. You have no employees to deal with, no boss to answer to, no products or inventory, no customers, no nothing. You just write, and you’re able to generate a reasonable income. It’s a great situation to be in.

That’s all folks!

That’s all there is to it. Long story short, you build traffic and put ads on your website. The actual monetizing isn’t the hard part, it’s building the traffic that most people have trouble with. However, if you’re intelligent, post unique, timeless, meaningful content, you should have no problem bringing traffic to your website. I hope that I was able to help you with any questions you had, and that you learned something from this article. Thank you for reading How to Make Money From Your Blog: Monetizing a Blog 101.

[KaptaiN]

Very nice tutorial, thank you for posting this.

[syngress]

Very HQ guide, really good read cheers :)

[Hacker 4949]

Good tutorial thanks for writing such a long thank u mate.

[Rentox]

this is really helpful, thank you for the post!