Creating a blog to make money from is something that many people start and many people abandon. The reason for this is that website traffic doesn’t initially pick up right away. Often people will get the writing itch and it doesn’t stick around after the initial novelty of writing something and having other people read it goes away. When deciding to create a blog to make money, you will want to make sure that you have enough interest in the topic and enough determination to stick with it after a few months.
Choosing a Blog Topic
Your blog topic should be something that interests you. You can choose something that you already know a lot about to create a blog about, or you can choose something that you want to learn more about. There is going to be a market for almost everything online, so don’t worry too much about what products that you would promote to earn money from your blog at this point. Select something that interests you and you think will still interest you six months from now. Depending on how much effort you put into the blog, it could take you that long to get your first sale.
Find a Platform to Blog On
There are free blogging platforms that are available, so you can get started without investing $15 in a domain name and about $100 for hosting. Blogger.com, Wix.com, Weebly.com and wordpress.com will all allow you to create a free blog on their platform. However, it does not look as professional to your readers to have your site hosted on a free platform. Your advertising may be limited to affiliate links on your website instead of google adwords. This is actually not a bad thing, I personally don’t use the google adwords advertising on my website. Some free platforms may put their own advertising up and make money from it.
I’ve used Blogger to test out websites before. I’m currently writing this blog on a free siterubix website and plan on purchasing a URL as it gets more traffic and I figure out my brand. When you are getting started, the free blog platforms are excellent for testing new ideas and seeing what type of content works for your audience.
WordPress is the standard for most blogs that are hosted. There are a number of different theme variations to change the overall look of your website. Different plug-ins will allow for a lot of different features and enable social media sharing buttons, etc.
Create Content
Your content is the reason that people come to your blog. They want to learn something new. They want to discover what you have to say about different topics. Your content can come in many forms. You can review products, provide how to information, share ideas on a solving a problem, talk about what you are learning or doing in your life. You can get ideas for content almost everywhere. Conversations that you have with friends can spark an idea that you want to research. Trending topics are always a great idea for content because they are highly likely to be shared by other people.
As you create content that, you will want to make it interesting. Don’t just write up a lengthy post on how to do something. Add pictures to it. Break up the block of texts with subtitles, so that visually people aren’t overwhelmed by a sea of text. Another great thing that you can do when creating your content, is add some video to your posts. Is there a youtube video that supports what you are saying? You can add it or create your own youtube video to support the content.
Get Discovered By Google
Once you have started a blog, you are going to want to make sure that people are consistently finding your blog. You want readers to comment on your content and share it with their friends. Ideally, you want search engines to recommend your content for the keywords that someone has just searched. These are people that you wouldn’t have normally reached because they aren’t in your circle of facebook or twitter friends. Google is the best source of new traffic that you can have. To get discovered by google, you are going to want to create posts that have a high search volume, but low amounts of competition.
You will want to learn keyword research. Ideally, you are looking for keywords that have over 100 searches per month, but the competition is going to be less than 100. Fewer competing websites means that you are more likely to rank on the first page of google for the keyword that was typed into the search engine. This is ideal.
Be patient. It can take a couple of months before Google recognizes and starts to rank your website. With steady, consistent effort, you should be able to rise in your ranks with google and consistently get traffic to your website each month. Keep in mind, the goal of getting more traffic is to make more sales!
Get Social – Share Your Blog!
Like I said, the goal is to have a lot of traffic to your website. This increases the number of eyeballs that are in front of your affiliate links. With high quality content and properly placed affiliate links, you will make sales. Sharing your website on social media is one way to get more traffic to your website. Initially, you will be sharing it with your friends and family who may or may not be interested in your blog’s topic, but they love you and they’ll check out what you are doing. They may even share it with their friends and family.
Other great places to socially share your blog are on LinkedIn, in facebook groups, on twitter, and Pinterest. Facebook groups on the blog’s topic are ideal places to share your content. This is because those people are going to be interested in the topic that you are writing about. Be careful though, facebook groups often do not allow promoting products, so you want to make sure that if you are sharing your post that it isn’t a promotion of the product.
