Are you looking for a way to generate income with your blog? Creating a blog and making it profitable is an idea that is appealing to those that are looking to become financially free.
It is in fact one of the most tried and true strategies to earn income online. Having said
that, it is not a simple matter of putting up a blog and Voila! The truth is that most people that try to earn some type of income through blogging fail. Why is that?
There are many reasons why they fail. Chief among them is that it takes many hours of work, over a long period of time, to start seeing results. Unfortunately, most people get discouraged or lose interest.
Scammy online programs that promise unlimited riches with minimal time investment don’t help either. They are the main reason why skepticism is extremely high.
Perhaps you have been conned by one of those scams? I know I have. I am embarrassed to say that I have been scammed many times. I fell victim to my own laziness and greed and jumped from one internet scam to the next. I wanted to earn money fast and was hell-bent on finding a quick solution.
After years of chasing this impossible promise I finally learned that there are no get-rich-quick techniques. Hard work and consistency are king.
This is no different from any other brick and mortar business. Fortunately, it does not take 2 to 3 years to start seeing the fruits of your labor with affiliate marketing. It usually takes 6 – 10 months of hard sustained work to start seeing results.
Generating income through your blog is totally dependent on the effort you put in. The more you work, the more you will earn.
Back to the topic at hand!
FOLLOW A BLUEPRINT
If you want to generate income with your blog all you need is a good blueprint and a reasonable set of expectations. This post will provide some general guidance.
Bloggers that have successfully earned income online generally follow these steps:
- Pick a Niche – A niche is a set of people that share an interest. Dog owners would be a broad niche. People that love Anime are a niche. Jeep owners are a niche. You get the idea right? The way you will make money is by helping the people in your niche. More on that later.
- Create a Blog – This will eventually need to be on a domain you own. You will need to secure hosting and start up your blog. This is often a daunting task for most individuals.
The good news is that you do not need to be a technical wizard to get a blog up and running. There are very good step by step guides that will walk you through the appropriate steps. There are also a few tools out there that will setup a fully functioning blog for you in less than a minute. Check out this video:
- Create Content – This is what will allow you to make money. You will need to write (or have someone write) engaging content that will bring readers to your blog. The information you provide needs to be original. As important as original content is that your content needs to be helpful!
The secret to success with blogs is that your primary focus should be to HELP your audience! Notice the emphasis on help? The reason for emphasis is that most bloggers fail because they try to SELL instead of HELP.
Your niche has a set of known problems or pain points. If you figure out what those are and write helpful content around those problems, you will be successful. Ultimately you want to put your audience in front of the solution to their problems. Check out my other article if you want more information on the specifics of finding a niche’s pain points (scroll down to the section titled “Pick A Niche”). Once you find the pain points you can move to solve the problems
- Monetize your blog – This is where you actually earn money! The “create content” step above was the foundation to monetizing. You have found a problem or problems that affect your niche. You have written engaging and helpful content to help them. Now you need to find a solution to those problems and offer it to your readers. This solution can be one that you created or it can be something that someone else created. For having solved their problem, you earn a commission. I will expand on the different ways to monetize your blog.
Let me explain. Let us say you picked dogs as your niche. You found that many dog owners complain about dogs barking too much. The dogs they love are actually barking so much that it is driving them insane.
On your blog, you write engaging and helpful content on barking dogs and information surrounding the problem. Why is it that they bark so much? What do the experts say? You provide relevant and helpful information.
If you look online, there are many solutions to this problem. You can offer one of those solutions to your readers and earn a commission for doing so.
Based on your research and experience make sure you give them the best solution you can find. This can be referring them to a dog obedience coach, some physical product or a digital course.
In fact, I just looked up “stop barking dog” on google and it returned a bunch of ultrasonic dog silencers. I looked at the first one and it is sold through a company that has an affiliate program offering 10% of each sale.
In our example above, Let us say you researched the problem thoroughly (remember your main goal is to HELP your readers).
After researching, you determined that the first silencer shown above was the best solution to the problem. You then recommended it to your readers and many of them purchased it through your link on your blog.
The merchant for the first two silencers offers a 10% commission for selling their products.
The silencers go for around $100. This means you would make around $10 per sale. That can add up quickly!
This is the general framework for earning money with a blog. There are multiple sub steps that can be inserted in the process. You can use social networks to engage and communicate with your audience. You can use Videos in addition to writing content…
Before closing let me share some specific ways to monetize your blog. There are many different opportunities to earn through your blog. Successful blogger make sure that they have multiple streams of income from their blogs, not just one. This means that they use more than one of the techniques shown below.
MORE MONETIZING OPPORTUNITIES
Affiliate Marketing: This is the method outlined above. It is an agreement by which online retailers and product creators pay a commission to external websites that refer sales to them. You present your audience with a product or service they need ( a solution to their problem). If they purchase that solution through one of your links, you get a commission.
Basically a lot of companies have the goods they want to sell but not the resources to market those goods. They pay website owners that are able to market their goods. Affiliate Marketing is a very proven model that was started by a certain company named Amazon in the mid nineties.
The model has been extremely successful and has been copied by just about everyone that has an online presence.
Commissions can range from extremely small to thousands of dollars per referral.
There are many types of products that affiliate marketers can promote. Here are 2 of the most common:
Physical products: These are real life products that people buy online. Think Amazon, Walmart or any other retailer out there. These companies will pay us affiliate marketers for sending traffic to their pages and having one of our referrals make a purchase.
Digital products: These are things that reside online. eBooks, digital courses, membership sites, hosting sites, WordPress themes………. You get the idea!
The good news about digital products is that they usually pay a higher commission. Because they do not require the expense to produce like physical products (factories, shipping, tariffs…..), the product owners can afford to give us a much bigger share of the sale and still make money.
Some affiliate marketers prefer digital products over physical ones. I like multiple streams of income so I promote both!
Ads : You can rent out space for ads on your site. Depending on how much traffic you get, you can charge a premium for companies in your niche to place ads or banners on your site.
Sell your own product: This is ideal because you forego the need to share commissions with affiliates. This is a no-brainer because you keep more money in your pocket. Many affiliate marketers become product creators and eventually migrate from promoting someone else’s product to promoting their own.
The transition is easy to understand. As an affiliate marketer, you need to know your niche in and out. Eventually you create your own solution and offer it to your audience!
Sell Services: If you have a skill that is marketable, why not offer it as a service? This is a very popular model for making extra money. People that can build websites or write content are in high demand. They can leverage those skills to earn extra income.
Tutors, caterers, service providers (painters, plumbers…) all fall into this category.
IN CONCLUSION
That was a lot of information! I am sorry if it was overwhelming but I aim to be as thorough as possible. While this post was pretty comprehensive, it has not even scratched the surface.
The short answer to the question of whether it is possible to generate income with your blog is a definite YES!
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It is absolutely free! You can check it out at your own leisure. You can go through the free training and make use of the 2 free websites they will let you build.
If you liked the video above on how to build a site in a minute, that is the exact resource you will be able to access with my recommendation!
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I know I did, and it was the best decision I made!
To your affiliate success,
Mike
Hi Mike,
Great article and I love your honesty. I have tried blogging many times and gave up because I wasn’t seeing results in the first few months. It takes patience and hard work as you have stated.
What are your views on social media? I have always struggled with it.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for asking that question. Social media plays a role in affiliate marketing. There is no doubt about it. I struggle with it myself though. I find that it is very hard for me to stay engaged and to reach my audience when I try to use all the social media that I can. It was taking a lot of time and not yielding a lot of results traffic wise. I changed my strategy and have been a bit more successful (still working on it). I focus mostly on Pinterest and twitter. I dropped Instagram and FB because I just could not get into it on those platforms. Focusing on 2 platforms has made a world of difference to me.
I hope this helps
Hi Mike,
you have made the affiliate marketing process so simple and uncomplicated. Like you stated, follow the blue print and stick to it.
I’m glad I read your article as its refilled my energy levels which were low. thanks for the blog!
Hi Tarun,
I am glad you enjoyed the post. Having a blueprint is really the best way to go. It basically takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. If you want financial security and extra income, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to go. Keep on keepin’ on!