This is the basic road-map to success that most of my students follow. Of course you have to put in the work to get there, but it is perfectly possible to achieve most of the above in one to two years and generate a good income.
How to Earn from a Blog
Most blogs monetise in one or more of these ways:
- Adsense or Ezoic Ads
- Affiliate Marketing
- Offer a Course
Use Google Adsense
Over the first 6 months of a new blog, the articles you write will not have much traction – not attract many visitors, though Ads might be a way to get some early visitors if you have the capital to invest.
Once you start to rank articles in Googles SERPs (search engine results page) you will start to get visitors. Then you can apply for Adsense.
This will show ads on your site and earn a small amount. It takes a few months of constant blog post writing to get “trust” from Google and start to see your posts ranking on that first page, for a query.
When your site gets to 100 to 200 ranking posts size, the income from Adsense will become significant. You may choose to go with Ezoic or Mediavine, which have higher payouts, but demand a certain minimum number of page-views per month, to sign up.
Some big sites, especially in the “money” niches make enormous amounts purely with the Ads shown.
Affiliate Offers
The best way, by a mile, of earning decent amounts for a beginner, is to blog about “How To…..” show your readers how to do something, for example, I show my readers tips on using Canva. Somewhere in each article, I will offer Canva Pro via an affiliate link. This earns me a commission from Canva.
This method works the best. In the past, a “review” of a service or a compare X and Y type article, very popular methods also worked but sharing your own personal experience and useful knowledge about a service or App like Canva, or product like a Camera for example if you wrote the article.” Getting the best results from a Canon MX200 using autofocus” there would be a good number of visitors coming to read that and hopefully some will follow your affiliate link to buy the camera or accessory.
Write a Course
A lot of bloggers will offer a course, directly on the blog. It is easy to provide with eBooks. I strongly suggest that you provide a FREE course – in order to collect email addresses, and a PAID course.
Here is a great eBook tool to take most of the work out of ebook publishing.
In its simplest form, you repurpose content you already created on your blog and simply enhance it with more detail.
You can also do it by creating a video series. An eBook may also be published on Amazon Kindle, or you can create an account on many Course Providers like Coursera, Udemy, etc. This makes it easier for your audience to find your course, especially while your audience is small, but will cost a fee from the provider to list your work.
Build a Business
The articles in the section “Building a Business” on this site, are written to explain in full detail, each step of the chart above. It IS important to do them in order, more so at step one – Niche selection, than later on, where you might choose to introduce things earlier or later to suit your own blog and t he results. For example you might be an expert already, in your niche and decide to start the blog AND create a course at the same time. The course would be available to purchase on your blog and there are many external course sites, you can upload your course to
- Udemy
- Skillshare
- Thinkific
- Coursera
- Kaplan
- e-learning marketplace
- Udacity
The map above takes into account the money ( capital ) that you may or may not have, to start your business. The actual amount needed to buy a domain and hosting is very small, just a few dollars for the domain name and a few dollars a month for the hosting. For most people this easily affordable, but to not exclude anyone without any capital at all, you can advertise your skills on Fiverr for example and generate enough to get going with ‘gigs’. This is explained in the “how to become a freelancer on Fiverr” article, in the Start Here section.
Freelancing is also included there for when you need to outsource writing. With the best will in the world, keeping up blog post writing for a long period, is hard work. It is essential that you are able to write them yourself initially though, in order to be able to instruct freelancers properly on what exactly each post should be about. Even if you have the money to outsource this work, be prepared to write everything, for at least 3 months, to get a true picture of the work required.
The Art of Selling
A big part of being successful in affiliate marketing is being able to persuade, to make a good argument for, to educate people about, your particular product or service.
If your background is not from that area, my own background was electronics, then like me, you will find it very useful to learn the basics of copywriting.
Good copywriters are very expensive. Copywriting is to be found in all the parts of blogging and affiliate marketing. It really pays you to acquire the skills, so do check out that section on the blog and be prepared to research it. I would even consider starting up on the Fiverr platform offering copywriting services. The ONLY way to become a good copywriter, is to practice over and over again, so why not get paid to do it?
Building a List
Over and over you will see the advice, to build a list – meaning a list of names and emails. It can become the most valuable thing you do online. Whereas a visitor to your site, may result in a sale, the proportion of people who purchase on the first view of an Ad is very low, maybe less than 1%. This means most potential customers 99% leave your site never to return. Don’t forget that you had to pay for an Ad to get that click to your site, if they hit “back”, that cost is wasted.
Read about the essentials of List Building
Most visitors need to be reminded several times over a period of time before they get out their wallets and buy. That is the key, if you collect your visitor’s name and email, you can keep in touch. You know what Ad or Page bought them to your offer page, so you can send out a couple of ‘educational’ emails, telling them what great benefits your offer has, in more detail, then send the offer again. In this way, you will make many more sales. You may have a second offer, which you might try if the first is unsuccessful, again the cost of getting that first click to your site is not wasted, sending emails costs zero.
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