How To Make Money Blogging For Beginners

If you are wondering how to make money blogging for beginners, consider this your jumpstart guide.

Whether you have just bought a website and need to pick up some tips to grow it further, or you are starting from scratch, we have the answers you need.

Making money from blogging isn’t the easiest thing to do at first, but with patience and determination, anyone can do it.

In this article, we’ll explore some tips and tricks to starting your own blog, and exactly what you will need to make money off of it.

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How To Make Money Blogging For Beginners – The First Steps

So you know a lot about a subject, or are you very passionate about a subject? Then why not make money blogging about it?

Putting money aside just for a moment, wouldn’t it be fantastic to not only share your information with the world but to have your own personal accounts of everything you know and have learned?

On top of that is the money blogs can earn!

Getting A Website For Your Blog

There are two options when it comes to getting a website to run your blog from, you can either buy a website that is already set up, or you can build one yourself from scratch.

Both of these options come with their benefits and drawbacks. The decision will be personal to each individual.

Option 1: Start A Blog From Scratch

To start a blog yourself, step one is to buy hosting and a domain. The host I recommend is this one.

You will need web hosting as it’s the server that keeps your website running 24/7, this will usually only cost $4 – 10 a month.

Then once you are logged into your hosting account, you simply install WordPress, and start publishing! (Here’s a step-by-step workshop that shows you how to do this).

Why not use a free blogging host?

Many reasons! Although there are a few platforms out there that will let you set up a blog for free, they are not recommended.

As, these “free” platforms can be extremely limiting, and they are never really free.

They will only allow you to customize your blog to a limited extent, and your blog will have a storage limit, which limits you in uploading large images, videos, or sound files.

The blog that you have will also come with a URL that is subject to the site. For instance, if you want to start a blog on cars, the URL will come up as something like ‘www.carblog.wordpress.com’, which can look very unprofessional if you want to take your blog further than casual.

If you use one of the free blogging platforms, they will technically own your blog making it difficult to monetize and make money from.

In fact, it can be very difficult to impossible to actually make money with free blogging platforms as well, as most of the free blogging platforms will not allow any affiliate links or ads on your site which can limit the way you make money from your blog.

As you can see, using a “free host” will actually COST you money by not letting you earn from your site, or own your own content so it is NOT worth it!

Pay for proper hosting from the start.

Option 2: Acquire An Established Website

If you want to make money from blogging, an easy entry is to buy a website that is already profitable, like these ones.

With your own website, you will have complete control over everything to do with design and customization. You will also have no limit on how you will make money from your blog, as you can use any marketing affiliate or advertisements you like.

Plus, your URL will be unique and not have the overseers’ website name as part of it.

Choose Your Niche

Here is the most important part of blogging, especially if you want to make money from blogging. Firstly you need to ask yourself what are you passionate about?

What do you know? Most importantly though you need to ask yourself what do people want?

A lot of bloggers are passionate about very popular things, which is fine.

However, if you are passionate about traveling and want to write a blog about all of the places you’ve been traveling, you are now competing with millions of different people across millions of different blogs that could have been to more places, lived longer lives, or had more interesting experiences than you have.

If you want to write about travel because you think it’s fun then go for it.

Related: Travel blogs that are available to buy now.

If you want to make money from a blog it is important to look at choosing your niche like choosing your business, what are you going to sell? Due to this, you’ve got to do some market research.

How To Choose Your Niche

First of all, there needs to be a connection between what you know and where there is a gap in the market.

If you see that there isn’t a lot of people blogging about gardening, but you don’t know anything about gardening and have no experience in that field, then there’s no point in starting a blog about it.

Why? Because not just because you are limited in your knowledge, but also because you’re more likely to get bored of it sooner, and this will show in your writing.

There are a few starting ways that you can search for a niche.

Firstly, you could start by seeing what is currently trending, Twitter’s trending page is a gold mine for people like us, and if something has come into the media that you know a little more about than the average Joe or Jane, then chances are you are going to get a lot of foot traffic once you establish your website.

Google is a great tool to use when finding a niche, type your niche into Google and see exactly what comes up first.

If you type in ‘travel’, things such as ‘travel insurance’, ‘travel to France’, ‘travel to Spain’, etc. will come up, this means that these are popular searches. If you can word your niches around these searches such as writing blogs about the cheapest places to travel in Spain, you could get a lot of web traffic.

Searching on forums and FAQs is also a great tactic for finding out what people want to know.

When people can’t find the information they are looking for on any website, they will go to question-and-answer forums to seek out the information they need, this is a gap in the market and can be filled by your niche.

Once you know what niche you want to work in, you can use the search bar at NicheInvestor.com to buy a site that fits your preferences.

How To Get People Reading Your Blog

Acquiring a website in a good niche is just the start of having a successful blog.

Even if your niche is very popular with no websites as your competition, you are still going to need to take some steps if you want it to become as successful as it potentially can be.

The first thing you need to think about is the types of articles that you write. The two most popular and main types of monetizable keywords are “best” and “how-to”.

When people are looking at a certain niche they will normally start with two questions, ‘what is the best-’ or ‘how to-’.

For example, if your niche is traveling around Spain then some examples of ‘best’ articles could be “best adult hotels in Madrid”, or “best way to get around Bilbao”.

When people search for ‘best’ something, they are looking for guides that have recommendations from yourself.

Most of these articles will have a high potential to get affiliates that want you to recommend their product or service.

‘How-to’ articles are long tutorials packed with content that is written by someone who knows what they are talking about.

Some examples of this could be, “how to drive around Spain on a budget”, “how to stay in Seville for less than $500”, or even “how to make money blogging for beginners”.

These can also be packed full of affiliate links to help you make some money.

Keyword Research

Once you have your niche and are aware of how you are going to write about your niche, you have to find at least 10 keywords that you can target in your first articles.

You will have to use a keyword research tool. There are many reputable keyword research tools out there such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ahrefs, all of which allow you to see exactly how your keyword is being searched and by how many people.

With these, you can see the search volume of your chosen keywords, if the search volume is over 5k then this shows there is enough interest in this topic to start a blog about it.

These keyword research tools also show you the difficulty of setting up a website under this keyword.

A high keyword difficulty will mean that there are a lot of websites that have this keyword already and it would make it difficult for your website to rank among them.

Try looking for a high search volume and a lower difficulty rating for your keywords.

Increasing Blog Traffic

If you follow the steps to have an informative blog, using keywords that are searched regularly, then you should have a good amount of blog traffic just from Google searches.

However, a good amount is never enough, and there are some other ways to increase your blog traffic.

This could mean promoting your blog on social media, and making a social media account for the blog that you have which can easily get new people interested in your blog.

You can even invest in some paid advertising on Twitter or Facebook that will make your blog accessible to wider audiences.

You can also increase your traffic and your notoriety by connecting with other bloggers in your niche, commenting on their blog posts, and sharing their articles can help make yourself known.

Some bloggers will even link to your articles in their blogs and have a wider community connection.

Having other successful blogs link to your articles will massively help with your Search Engine Optimisation, (SEO), which is how likely your blog is to come up in Google searches.

It is also very important to keep up to date with your blog, don’t just write an article and be done with it, keep updating all of your articles and adding new ones in relation to the changing world around you.

Newer content is much more likely to be put on the front page of Google than older content, it will also be more useful to your audience if your articles are up to date.

How Can Blogs Make Money?

Now that you know how to make a blog and successfully run a blog allowing as much internet traffic as possible, you can start looking at ways to make some money off of your blog.

There are three very popular ways of making money from blogging, these are the use of affiliate marketing on your blog, the use of display advertisements, or sponsors.

Affiliate Marketing 

Affiliate marketing is the most popular way of making money from any website. It works by adding in-text links to an affiliate that are tracked by that affiliate.

You can make a small commission every time someone clicks that link and makes a purchase. Almost all eCommerce websites will have some sort of affiliate programs, such as Amazon, Etsy, ASOS and others.

Signing up to sites such as ShareaSale and AWIN can be an easy way to get into affiliate marketing and connect you with thousands of brands from across the world.

When you are writing an affiliate article, the most important thing you can do is be genuine and authentic, the readers want to know your honest opinion and you should only encourage readers to purchase items you think are good.

That being said, if you don’t like a product, do not write about it, writing bad things about a product that you’re getting commission for may be a waste of your time.

Display Ads

Display ads are a visual way of advertising that can earn you money in one of two ways.

You will either get a certain amount of money for every time someone clicks an ad on your website or a certain amount of money for every 1000 impressions that the advert gets.

Adverts will usually take up space on your blog, so if you are thinking of using display ads then make sure there is some space on your blog where ads can be placed.

This is usually at the top of the blog in a banner fashion, hence the name. Google Adsense is a quick and easy way of getting started in using display ads, and will even give you an estimation of how much you will earn from them.

But as your traffic grows, you will want to upgrade to a premium ad network.

Sponsored Content

Having some sponsored content is one of the best ways to make some money from your blog.

Having sponsored content is basically having someone pay you to write something amazing about what the sponsor is trying to sell.

For example, if you write about candy and Hersheys wants a good review of their new chocolate bar on the front of Google, they may pay you to do one.

Sponsored content normally comes around when you have a strong and consistent audience on your blog, otherwise, there is no point in using you as an advertising tool from your sponsor’s perspective.

You are more likely to be approached for sponsored content if you have a good social media following alongside your blog.

Digital Products

Selling your own products is undoubtedly the most lucrative way to make money blogging and digital products are one of the most passive ways once the product has been created.

You have probably seen different bloggers selling eBooks or online courses.

Well, just consider it may take them a month or two to create the product. But then once they have set up the sales page and appropriate funnels they can sit back and let the sale roll in.

Note – A funnel is just where you try and create an obvious path for your reader to take on your site e.g. someone clicks on your Pinterest pin, they read your blog post, they sign up for your email freebie, you send them an email automation which includes some information about your product and then ideally they purchase your product.

If you had a product for sale for $150 and 20 out of the 10,000 people that visit your site each month purchased it you would be making $3,000 per month.

Offering Services

Providing a service is very similar to selling your own digital products except the passive nature of the income is removed.

You would set up funnels in a similar way and still have to market to gain customers.

Many bloggers offer things like blog audits or social media management, particularly while their site is becoming established.

This is an excellent way to gain authority within your niche and additional experience whilst bringing in some income.

However, the not-passive nature of this income makes it harder to sell the website, as most buyers want to acquire websites that earn passively.

How To Make Money Blogging For Beginners – Conclusion

Having a blog can be a brilliant way to make income passively through affiliate marketing, advertising, or sponsored content.

But you first need to have the right blog with a niche that fills a gap in the market and keyworded articles that are going to make people want to read what you have to say.

Check out our current website for sale listings and see if your perfect site is waiting for you. Then, attend a blog monetization class at HerPaperRoute to pick up some expert stratgies.