How to Make Money Blogging Online

There are tons of writers who are making money blogging online. There are tons of writers who aren’t making money at all despite their efforts. What is the difference? Why are some people making money and others falling flat. I’ve experienced both and realities and can finally say that I know why some bloggers fail miserably. It has nothing to do with great content. It has more to do with learning how to market themselves online.

Consistency Is Key

When it comes to blogging, you want to ensure that you are consistently putting out content. In the beginning, you are going to be building a following. This means that only your friends and family even know about you. Search engines and social media shares are going to be far fewer than when you become known within your online community.

Many people jump into blogging and they think that great content will keep their audience interested. Family and friends can only take you so far when it comes to sharing your posts. After awhile, they may not be as interested in some of your hobbies and their enthusiasm to share you content may wane. If your writing quality isn’t great, you won’t get strangers to share your work, so make sure that your quality is high.

Search engine algorithms recognize how often you are posting and how long your site is around. There are a lot of people who put up websites and then drop off of the blogosphere after two or three months. Search engines know this and tend to wait until you’ve been around for four or five months to start referring people to your website, so don’t get discouraged. The traffic to your site will pick up, but just understand that the first few months may be a bit on the lean side.

Monetizing Your Blog

For some people who aren’t making money from their blog yet, they have selected the wrong channel. Some people are relying on adsense or amazon affiliate links to make money from their websites. While adsense is a good avenue to earn money, it relies on heavy traffic, which is not what happens when people are just starting their blogs. Traffic seems to grow over time. It can have a snowball effect, but if you are relying on adsense alone, you may be working for pennies that will only be realized after a few months.

The Amazon affiliate program is great because there are a ton of products to promote. There are tons of categories and niches to promote through Amazon links. However, Amazon is one of the lower paying affiliate commissions at 6%. The great thing about Amazon is that you can earn commissions from any of the purchases a person makes through Amazon after they visit your site. The downside is that it has to happen within 24 hours, so if you are promoting something that requires a lot of consideration, such as a treadmill, they may want to sleep on the decision and read more reviews before making the purchase.

It is important to look for higher paying commission products. Ideally ones that have recurring commissions or additional upsells to maximize your income potential. Some examples of these could be subscription services. For example, if you are in the weight loss industry, BeachBody has an online workout program that people can subscribe and stream workouts. This can provide recurring commissions as people renew their subscription every three months. Clickbank has products that often have upsells of offer memberships. (Click here to learn how to become a clickbank affiliate) Reviewing products with upsells and recurring commissions can help you get into profit from your blog.

Sources of Revenue for Bloggers:

• Affiliate Commissions
• Adsense
• Blogging jobs for someone else’s blog

Creating Content for Search Engine Optimization

You can organically grow your audience through friends, family and social media, but to extend your reach and truly maximize your blogging efforts, you should be maximizing your content for the search engines. This will help you broaden your reach. When search engines list your website on one of the first pages for the keyword, you are likely to pick up the traffic of people who are looking for this content.

Effectively learning how to maximize your keyword research can help people to find your website along with the affiliate links that help you to make money from you blog! It is essential to use keyword research tools that are frequently updated with the search engines’ algorithms in order to accurately understand what competition you are up against. If you misjudge your competition for your keyword, you could land on the second, third of fourth page of google and never realize any traffic from your keyword optimized article. Jaaxy is the keyword tool that I have been using to find low competition, high search volume keywords.

Whether or not you are able to earn commissions on your affiliate links will be determined by the amount of relevant traffic that is sent to your websites. You will want to have very specific keywords that relate to your affiliate product. For example, if you are targeting the weight loss groups, you may want to use a long tail keyword such as “how to lose weight with a ketogenic diet” and connect it to a product that gives them more information on that topic. 

Understand Your Audience

If you are blogging about parenting or restoring cars, make sure that you understand the latest trends and techniques. If you don’t, you won’t be able to relate to your audience. Your content won’t be viewed as credible. You may be a great gardener and can share a lot of information about composting and seed saving, but when it comes to city gardening, you may be a bit lost as to why people want to know about vertical planters. You should be join groups and discover what people are talking about in your nice. Discover the popular products and the ones that are coming out. Writing reviews for these products on your website can earn you a nice, tidy commission.

In the beginning, you may feel like you are shooting in the dark and not entirely sure who your target audience is or not. That is okay, encourage people to comment on your site. Read and pay attention to the comments. If people keep mentioning a product, check it out and write a review of it. Comments are a great resource for discovering what is important to your audience and what they want to know more about. Make sure you are following up on all the comments that are made on your website, especially in the beginning.

Get Feedback on Your Website

You can ask friends and family members for feedback on your website. If you are a member of an affiliate marketing group online, you can seek feedback from other affiliate marketers. They can let you know if your website is difficult to navigate, has a funny layout, needs some upgrading or if you need to improve your content. I have appreciated being a part of the Wealthy Affiliate community because getting feedback on my websites has been so valuable. Not only has it helped me to improve the look, but I have been able to correct some affiliate marketing mistakes that I was making. At first, it can be hard to take some criticism, but then I stopped taking it personally and looked for ways to fix the problems and make corrections.

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