The entry into blogging is very easy and simple. Therefore, you find many people who get into it as a hobby and they don’t stick with it long enough to make money. Many of them don’t learn how to earn money with blogging and just as they are building their audience, they give up. Others can’t seem to stick to one topic or niche and fail.
Blogging an actually provide you with a steady income if you learn how to earn correctly and implement the skills correctly. For many people, blogging has taken the place of their day job. It does take focused effort and goals to get to that earning potential.
Create a Blog
Creating a blog is the first step. For those affiliate marketers who want to pinch pennies and spend more time than money on your blog, there are some great free blogs to get you started. Blogspot.com is a free blogging platform. You can start building your audience on a blogspot website without any monetary output. This is an excellent way to test the waters and determine the look and feel of the blog that you want. It allows you to test out what you would like to research and write about.
If you are certain about what type of blog that you want and you definitely don’t want to have a blogspot.com or siterubix.com address, you can invest a little bit more money in a website url and hosting. This will give your blog a more professional feel and give you a bit more control over how you earn money with your blog.
Identify a Niche
Once you have a blog set up, you want to identify your niche and target market. This is important because if you send people who aren’t interested in your products to your website, they are unlikely to purchase them. Most likely, they will just leave the site. Having a niche, such as gardening, enables you to create posts that would be interesting to gardeners. It helps you to identify products that gardeners need and to write reviews for them.
If you are very familiar with your niche, you can better identify the needs of the market. You can deliver information to them that they may not know about.
Keyword Research
Once you know what niche you are focusing on, you’ll want to find out specifically what terms are they looking for online. What type of problems are they searching the internet to solve? If you have answers to those problems, you can make money. If we take the gardening theme, you may want to look up the keywords, “How do I keep deer out of my garden?” or “How do I naturally prevent aphids?”
By researching these terms, it will allow you to know what to write in your blog. For this post, I selected the keywords, How to earn money blogging. I knew that my audience was interested in earning money and blogging was a free method of affiliate marketing that I could incorporate into my posts. There were a lot of searches for how to earn money with a blog, but surprisingly few quality websites using it as a keyword. Most writers are utilizing a different keyword, “make money with blogging.” However, since earn money still gets plenty of searches per month, I selected it for the title and to use throughout the blogpost. You should be able to do this with keywords related to your niche.
Sign up for Affiliate Products
Here’s where the money will come into play! You are going to sign up as an affiliate for products that are relevant to your blog. Affiliate programs are literally everywhere! You can join clickbank and discover products related to your niche. Amazon has an affiliate program and pays out for the products that you refer from your website. Commission Junction now know as CJ affiliate is another great affiliate program that offers a wide variety of things that you can market on your website.
It is easy to find out what products have affiliate programs. All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of their website and look for a link that says affiliates. This will take you to a web page where you can sign up to become an affiliate. You will be assigned a unique link to post on your website. When people click on the link and purchase the products that you have reviewed or recommended, you will earn a commission.
As you write more content, you start to attract a larger audience. As more and more people visit your website each month, the likelihood that you will make sales increases. As your sales increases, your income will increase as well. You will start to earn passive income from your initial efforts because people will continue to search for the keywords that you selected.
More Ways to Earn Blogging
As a blogger, you can find opportunities to guest blog on someone else’s website. These gigs are sometimes paid, but sometimes they are not paid. When they are not paid, it still may be worth the exposure. Freelancing opportunities are often available at sites such as fiverr.com, odesk.com or upwork.com. At upwork.com, you will be competing with other people for writing gigs, but you can set your own rates. Some companies also hire bloggers to keep their audiences interested and their websites fresh.
You may want to get additional training and assistance for your blog and learn how to master keyword research from other affiliates. Affiliate marketing is constantly evolving and people are learning new and exciting techniques all the time. Wealthy affiliate has a free 7 day trial and online course that points you in the right direction and can help you learn the correct things to do as an affiliate marketer.