Blogging is probably THE best way to make money. It is location-free meaning you are not tied to any place of work, I have worked on my blogs on holiday all over Europe, you only need an internet connection. If you know your subject well, you actually only need your laptop and the occasional internet connection to upload your work.
Writing does take a long time, with practice and good organization it is possible to write several posts in a day. This work can earn money over a very long period, in fact for years to come, with just a little updating and site maintenance.
But over a year your blog can be attracting big enough audiences to make some revenue, once it starts coming in, you can accelerate the pace by outsourcing your posts to other writers.
Make Money Blogging About What?
The choice of niche is very important. If it’s an interest of yours, then all the better, as you should be able to write about it, without too much research. No problem really if not though, just research and then blog about what ( and possibly how ) you have learned it.
Always try to make it interesting to follow, but don’t skip over the technical or the tedious bits, if it needs to be explained, do so.
Finding the right niche is very important. You don’t want to waste months writing articles that don’t work for you. Read my niche research article for ideas and a methodical approach.
Do you have to be an expert?
No but it helps. If you have to do an enormous amount of research on a subject before putting pen to paper, is it really the right niche for you? There is a lot to be gained by becoming the Go-To expert site in your niche. For a start other bloggers will want to link to your informative articles, giving you a boost in your own site’s PR -page rank and DR – domain rank
Covering subjects that will attract readers and Attention
Here the keyword research tools will help you. Plan well ahead. A year ahead if possible. Have a look at my SEO article for details. You need a list of keywords to write about for about a year, on your chosen subject. In this way, you aren’t stuck for good ideas, you can just go to your list and immediately start writing, you don’t have to think about what to write about.
Don’t just write about something that occurs to you. It could be that no one else is looking for that exact topic. Research carefully. Each keyword should have a sufficient number of searches per month on Google, to get the readers in, and eventually converted into buyers, if you’re doing the Affiliate model or clicking the Ads from Google Adsense, if its an ‘interest’ or ‘information based’ blog
Add Affiliate Offers
Once you have around 20 articles on the site, start to look for suitable affiliate products to promote, in each article. It doesn’t have to be complicated, a simple text link to the product is fine. If for example you chose Gardening and wrote an article about “A basic set of Gardening Tools”, just go to Amazon, pick the best set of tools and copy the text or text+banner link and paste it into your article. There is an example of an Amazon link and a full explanation here
Manage Your Expenses
You would be amazed at how little income you can actually manage on, if you really cut down the expenses. Put off the new car decision for a year. Cut out the takeaways, the big price TV package, keep the old phone for another year, shop at a cheaper supermarket, drink Duff beer instead of expensive imported stuff, make sure your phone, electricity and gas are on the cheapest tariff.
If you are able to go Full Time – Go for it
Exchanging your time for a wage or salary is basically going to give you a FIXED INCOME. The whole point of building a blog with all that it entails, is that once it reaches a certain point it will earn far more than you ever could with a 9 to 5 Job, and will then allow you to scale it up, with a minimum of daily work. Which will be a huge lifestyle improvement.
But you may not be able to quit your job straight away or may prefer to do it part-time until finances allow.
Add a Side Hustle
To make ends meet, try offering a service on Fiverr. Learn some photoshop techniques and offer to recolor photos, cut out backgrounds, cut out the ex from photos, yes that’s actually a service! I have a page on freelancing, as it is a popular stepping stone to full-time blogging.
Work hard and a year is all you will have to suffer, true the income will just seem to hover above zero for months, but then in the 5th or 6th month, you will see it rise, slowly at first but faster towards the 10th month, soon you’ll be able to have enough confidence to go it alone, leave employment and start-up on your own. A full-time blogger.
It makes such a huge difference if you’re able to attack this full-time. Suddenly you’re able to churn out articles when previously it was taking several days because of work commitments.
Of course, you could use outsourcing to write some articles or research them, but I would advise against it until you get to the point where you are totally confident that you can do each task. After all, even if you are outsourcing, you will need to instruct the outsourcer what and how you want each article to say. Essentially you will need to keep control of what articles to write – You will become the ideas man/woman. Steering the blog towards the goal, reaping bigger and bigger rewards as you go.
Start Now - Don't Procrastinate
Commit to making money by starting the process NOW. If you don’t, you’ll be in the same situation next year!
I see so many people hesitate or find some excuse to not do it when if they made the commitment, they could change EVERYTHING.
You can easily write between 50 and 100 interesting fully detailed articles in a year, given some direction and research. Even doing it part-time. That is enough to start visitors (traffic) coming and the money coming in.
Choose the Width of Your Niche Carefully
Meaning, if the niche is so narrow that you will run out of things to write about or run into problems finding keywords with any search volume, then think wider, before starting out, or at least start again with a wider audience. For example “Goldfish” is a narrow niche, I can imagine that anyone would struggle to come up with enough article scope to fill a blog.
A wider niche might be “Keeping Pet Fish” at least you might be able to spin out the blog articles for different breeds, Forums , Societies and Bboards about the fish, where to find help, aquarium upkeep, buying fish, breeding fish, water temperature and filtration. The affiliate side might sell equipment and books about the fish and on an information packed website Googles adsense will keep the wolf from the door with ad income. You might even want to expand to physical goods if you can find a good supplier, but that is out of the scope of this article.
Going too wide, in the niche is a big mistake. “Pets” for example would be up against a huge competition and you would find it difficult to get your articles ranked and the visitors coming in.
Keyword Research with Ubersuggest
Neil Patel’s superb marketing tool. Though it used to be free and now only allows three free searches a day, this can still be a valuable keyword tool for beginners, and is far less expensive than AHRefs or Moz, if you do decide to go for the paid version. For guidance on Keyword Tools and my own recommendation see Keyword Tools
Getting Ideas
Here I opened “Pet Fish” in Ubersuggest by clicking on the orange arrow key. The number of Google searches per month 27500 is excellent, but the last column SD – SEO difficulty shows it would be a VERY difficult topic to rank well for.
Note that the low SD for “pet fish names” and “names for pet fish” is a bit of a red herring ( forgive the fish pun ) as I cannot imagine fish names being very monetizable.
Discovering Topics with low competition
This is one of the key points, finding TOPICS with the right search volume and level of competition for your blogging stage now. A new blog has very different needs than an established one.
However, there is hope, when we look at the SERPs ( results seen when you do a Google search ) 2 of the results pages have a low DA (Domain Authority) of 13 and 16. It should be possible to get a DA of 13 after only two or three months if your articles are of a high standard
If you struggle with Keyword research, it may be that your choice of Niche needs better research skills. I have several articles on Keyword Research as it is such a KEY important skill.
Conclusion
Go for it, write the article with your main keyword eg “Pet Fish” as your keyword. If it doesn’t rank straight away, don’t worry, it may well do later. This is a bit like having a bookmark or placeholder, in the rankings
Bear in mind that any article will actually have a rank for many keywords similar to “Pet Fish”, so it is also possible that it will ‘accidentally’ rank for that too.
