How Do Bloggers Make Money?
The moment you decide to use your blog to make money, you’re no longer just a blogger. At that moment, you also become an entrepreneur, and your blog becomes a small business.
You’ve probably heard of financial planners giving free seminars to attract clients, right?
Well, blogging is a lot like those free seminars. You’re giving away your expertise and knowledge in the hopes of attracting customers and then gaining their trust.
In other words, if your goal is to make money with your blog, use it as a lead generation mechanism. Nurture those leads until they are ready to purchase, and the profit can quickly snowball.
How to Make Money Blogging
Anyone who wants to learn how to make money blogging needs to follow a few required steps. I’ll explain each of these steps below, but first, let’s give you a quick overview.
This is how you make money from a blog:
- Set up your blog
- Write content that gets lots of traffic
- Convert visitors into email subscribers
- Send those subscribers content that builds trust
- Sell products or services your audience wants
The problem?
It’s hard to do. The process is simple on the surface, but each step is enormously complicated and requires extraordinary skill. Below, we’ll explore these steps a bit further.
Here’s how to make money blogging:
Step 1: Set up Your Blog
The first step is to set up your blog, but where do you start?
- You have to pick a topic for your blog. What’s it about? Marketing? Health? Gardening? Many are tempted to start a blog that combines several of their interests, but I recommend keeping blog as focused as possible. (It would make no sense to talk about gardening and marketing on the same blog, after all.)
- When you’ve picked a topic, you need to get a domain name. You should brainstorm a few good options and then run them through a domain checker to see if they are still available. (Tip: Pick one that doesn’t obfuscate your blog topic. You domain name must give some sense to what your blog is about)
- Once you’ve picked and purchased your domain name, you need to get web hosting. You’ll find many companies offer cheap hosting that’s perfect for bloggers just starting out. We recommend SiteGround (affiliate link).
- Next, it’s time to install WordPress, which is the best blogging platform you can use. Fortunately, most hosts offer an easy install option from within your account.
- Lastly, you want to upload a good-looking theme so your blog looks professional. You’ll find free themes available online that you can download and install, or you can pay for a premium theme.
When you’re all done, you’ll be ready to publish content and start drawing traffic.
Step 2: Write Content That Gets Lots of Traffic
If you want to make money blogging, you need to publish content that draws lots of traffic.
But how?
Well, your content will draw the bulk of traffic through two main channels:
- Search
- Social
Search traffic will find your content through search engines, while social traffic will find your content through social media. If your content fails in both these arenas, it will only draw pitiful traffic — certainly not enough to produce a decent income.
That means you need to…
- Research which keywords your audience is typing into search engines. You can do this by using keyword tools like SemRush, Ahrefs, and the Google Keyword Tool. (Ideally, you want to choose keywords that have lots of search volume, but low competition.)
- Research what kind of content they typically share on social media. You can do this by running blogs on the same topic as yours through Buzzsumo. (Though, just to be clear, you shouldn’t just copy their ideas. Use them for inspiration to create something of your own.)
When you have your topics, the next step is to write a useful post that helps your audience reach a certain goal. And take note: Your have to write a stellar post. Your post should outshine all its competitors.
Because once your post is written, you need to promote it to drive initial traffic. And if that initial traffic isn’t impressed, the post won’t take off, and you’ve done it all for nothing.
Step 3: Convert Visitors into Email Subscribers
Once your blog is getting visitors, you need to focus on building your email list. It’s by far the biggest factor in determining how much money you make as a blogger.
Why?
Because you don’t just want visitors, you want recurring visitors. You want visitors who come back to read and share every post you write.
But they won’t, unless you remind them. And you can’t, unless you get their email address.
That’s why you must convince them to subscribe. Then, you can send them an email whenever you publish a new blog post.
Here’s what you need:
- An email marketing platform: This allows you to send mass-emails to everyone who subscribes to your list. (We recommend Mailchimp for beginners.)
- Sign-up forms on your blog: Visitors need somewhere to enter their email address. You can offer sign-up forms in your sidebar, at the bottom of your posts, and/or in a popup.
- A bribe to subscribe: You need to give visitors a compelling reason to subscribe, because they won’t easily part with their email address. You can incentivize them by offering something valuable for free.
With those three items in place, you’ll be ready to collect emails.
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Step 4: Send Those Subscribers Content That Builds Trust
People won’t buy from you unless they trust you. So before you bombard them with links to your sales pages, you need to take some time to build that trust.
You build trust by sending them content that gives them tremendous value — for free.
This content should help them reach a certain milestone or give them an “Aha!” moment that brings them closer to their goals.
When they see for themselves that your advice works, they’ll not only trust you more, they’ll also be curious to discover what valuable insights your paid offers might give them.
When they see that your free content gets them results, they’ll know that you’re the real deal and not some phony scam artist. And when they see how valuable your free content is, they’ll be curious to see what they could gain from purchasing your products or services.
Recommended reading:
Step 5: Sell Products or Services Your Audience Wants
Make money blogging by selling these types of things
Now that you’ve built an audience and you’ve gained their trust, you’re all set to start selling products and/or services.
Just make sure you offer them something they truly want. That might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people spend weeks or months creating a product that hardly sells. They’ll create the product that they want to create, because they think it’s what their audience needs, only to discover their audience isn’t interested.
Don’t assume you know what they want. Research your audience or run a survey to discover the biggest problems they need solved right now. Then create a product or offer a service that solves it.
That’s how to make money blogging.
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