Have you ever considered blogging, and do you know how to make money blogging?
If you enjoy writing, you can start your own blog and actually make money blogging. In this (rather long) article, I am going to show you how to do just that.
What Is The Best Blogging Platform To Make Money Blogging With?
There are quite a lot of blogging platforms out there, and there is definitely one that will fulfill all your blogging needs, you just need to find the right one.
Some of the best blogging platforms include:
WordPress (Most Popular Choice For Marketers)
Blogger
Wix
Simple Site
Tumblr
Weebly
Squarespace
Medium
Ghost
Webs
Blog
Svbtl
When I started blogging I started with Blogger. This site is very easy to use, but the problem is the blog will never be your own, and if Blogger decides they don’t like your blog they can simply shut you down with no warning. This happened to one of my sites and I was so angry as I had written a lot of content for it already.
If I had known this from the start, I would have saved myself hours of time.
Use blogger if you are starting a blog for fun by all means, but if you want to grow it into a full-time income then your best bet will be WordPress.
Most of the blogging platforms above are pretty simple to set up, but if you want to set up a serious business, I strongly recommend that you get some hosting and go for WordPress from the start.
You can use WordPress.com to set up a free site, but I strongly recommend that you get yourself some hosting at one of the companies below and host your blog on WordPress.org, because there will be limitations with the WordPress.com free account and you won’t be able to profit from it as much because you won’t be allowed to advertise too much.
Best Blog Hosting Sites You Can Use
I host all my blogs here, as the platform is easy to use, and you can start for free and host up to two blogs with them without ever having to pay a dime.
They do offer you some training to get you set up, but obviously, if you want to get more training, you will need to upgrade.
Once you have decided what the topic of your blog is going to be about, it takes a couple of minutes to set your site up with Wealthy Affiliate. You can read more about them here.
There are of course other great hosting companies out there, but there will be a learning curve to setting up your blog. These include:
Bluehost
iPage
Hostgator
Just Host
Start Logic
Fat Cow
Sitelio
Host Monster
Sitey
Purehost
I suggest you get your blog hosting account sorted out properly before you start on your new blog. Once you have an established blog, it is always a hassle to change hosting accounts.
Now You Can Start Your Own Blog
In order to start your own blog, you will need to find a niche or topic that you want to share with the world. This could be just about anything.
I suggest you write a list of all your passions and interests.
For instance, my list looks something like this:
hiking
knitting
sewing
scrapbooking
horseriding
reading etc.
Next, you need to decide whether you want to build a massive website over time covering everything there is to cover about your topic, or do you want to break your topic down further and build a smaller niche site like sewing machines or tips on choosing saddles.
The smaller niches are easier to rank for quickly as there normally isn’t a lot of competition, but on the other hand, if you build a large niche on a subject you are passionate about, you will never run out of things to write about.
Take for instance sewing. You could choose a catchy name for it like thimble fingers, and then you can start with sewing machines, and later move onto different sewing stitches, tutorials, etc. In this way, your blog has the potential to expand within the same niche without you having to start a new blog.
Try to concentrate on one aspect of your niche site at a time and once you start getting traffic to your site, you can broaden your horizons.
Always remember to choose a topic you love to write about, otherwise, you will get bored. If you are excited about your topic it will show in your work and you will steadily gain a healthy following of hungry readers.
What About Competition
Unfortunately, there will always be competition. You just need to dig out keywords within your niche that doesn’t have a lot of competition. For instance “make money blogging” will be impossible to rank for, but a term like “learn how to blog” has 267 searches a month and very little competition.
So one of the best blogging tips I can give you is to write good content that you can target a keyword that has low competition. Make sure to install the Yoast Plugin if you are using WordPress and you can check whether your post is optimized enough for the keyword of your choice.
What Is A Keyword?
A keyword is a phrasing of words used by people to do an internet search to find out information. A keyword phrase could be any length, but the secret to blogging is to find what keyword is being searched the most within your niche. Then you need to take that keyword phrase and create content around it so that when people type that keyword phrase into the search engines, your website shows in the results.
I use Jaaxy for all my keyword research. If you want to try them, simply enter a keyword of your choice below and with the click of a button, Jaaxy will show you how many searches your chosen keyword phrase has in a month, what the competition is and if it is a good keyword to go with. This will save you bundles of time with your keyword research, and I strongly recommend getting an account with them if you plan to make money blogging. You can read more about Jaaxy by clicking here.
How to Start A Blog
Ok, let’s us say you have gone with my recommendation of starting your first blog with Wealthy Affiliate and you have set up your blog so that it is ready to go – what next.
The most important thing about writing a blog is to create interesting and helpful content and a lot of it. The more content you create the better.
Now each post that you create on your blog should be a minimum of 500 words long and must be content that is focused on helping somebody out there to understand your topic or niche better.
Never ever copy somebody else’s content. Always rewrite content, in your own words and add your own spin to it.
Best Way To Get Your Blog Up There Quicker in order to Make Money Blogging:
A great way to start off your blog is to start off with a huge article that will cover an aspect of your topic in great detail. This post shouldn’t be shorter than 2000 words in length and you need to make it really good.
You don’t need to rush this post and you can even use high competition keywords in this post because as your blog grows, these keywords will slowly start to overtake some of your competition. Even so, if you have some great content to start your blog off, you will be ranked better by Google, who will see you as an expert in your niche.
When writing your content write like you are having a conversation with somebody and use easy language so that you keep your audience interested in what you are saying.
Keep your paragraphs short and your writing clear – black on white to make it easy on the eyes of your audience.
Once you have this really long post, you need to promote it and try and get some links through to your site. Try sharing on sites like Pinterest, FaceBook, Twitter and Google Plus. Find some other good blogs in your niche and write to them asking them to share your content with their audience.
Never ever pay somebody to get links for you. If you get links from a lot of spammy sites, this will damage your reputation and your rankings.
Be selective who you get links from. The higher the Domain Authority, the better your post will do.
The more links you get from other high-quality websites, the faster your website will climb up the search engine results and the more traffic you will get.
If you want to make money blogging, this is key. You will need loads of traffic to visit your site in order to make money in the first place. No Traffic = No Money.
Take this special long post of yours and make it a sticky so that it can be cornerstone content to brand your site. Now when you write shorter articles, try and link to them from your main article in order to link your website and get the juice flowing all around.
Keep working on promoting your key posts and adding more content to your blog and over time your blog will get more traffic.
Now How To Make Money Blogging?
This is the part that most people misunderstand.
In order to make money blogging, you need to be in it for the long haul. Depending on how much time you put into writing for and promoting your blog, you will have to look at this project as a long term goal. Some bloggers see their first payment within three months of starting their blog and others six months to a year.
The trick is not to give up on your blog. It will gain traction and momentum providing you continue writing and promoting it on a regular basis.
Once you have a blog that is getting a lot of traffic each day, this is where you have the potential of making a lot of money.
Think of your blog as a shop, and the more feet you can get through the door, the more you will sell. This works the same with a blog, however, you are going to need to try and get thousands to view your blog each day if you want to make a full-time income.
In order to make money blogging, you can monetize it in the following ways:
- Affiliate programs like Amazon, Clickbank, eBay and Sharesale to name a few. These sites sell a lot of products, and all you need to do is review one of them on your site and place a link on the site that the advertiser will give to you. If one of your visitors clicks on this link and purchases a product, you will earn a commission. In fact, you will find an affiliate company for just about any product you want to sell online. Simply Google and you will find one best suited to your site.
- Adverts. Companies like Google will pay you to place their adverts on your site, and if your visitors click on the ads, you get paid even more. Some marketers have thousands of visits to their sites every day and make a full-time income simply using Google Adsense.
There are other methods on how to make money blogging, like selling your blog for a profit or letting other people place an ad on your website for a fee. The possibilities are endless.
More Blogging Tips For You
Choose the Correct Niche
It is always best to choose a niche with very little competition, and preferable something that you enjoy writing about, or even something that you know a lot about.
One of my most profitable blogs is in a small craft niche, and it only gets about fifty visitors a day, but because it has very little competition it makes sales.
Niches like this one are very competitive and very difficult to make money with, unless you manage to get some of your posts to the top of the search engines.
So best choose something like gadgets, hobbies, movies, cars or kitchen accessories. The choices are endless and there is also an endless supply of good niches out there.
Find Your Own Angle
Once you have chosen your niche, it is important to put your own spin on it. Most mainstream niches are very overcrowded, and if you write about what everyone else is writing about, why would anyone want to visit your site.
Try to come up with ideas that will make your car site different from all those other car sites out there. Believe it or not, even though it isn’t always easy, it is possible.
Get Repeat Visitors
One of your main aims on your website or blogshould be to get most of your casual visitors to return. If you can convert your casual visitors into repeat and loyal followers, then you know that people are enjoying your content.
If you can get this part write, there is no way that your traffic won’t grow over time.
Quality Over Quantity
Rather than publish lots of mundane content just to get your blog full of posts, rather make one really great post. Even if it takes you a week to write, you will get better results over the long term, because the quality of your content will attract more people.
Not to mention the backlinks that you will get from other sites if they enjoy your content. This can only help your quest to get to the top of the search engines.
Make Friends with Google
Whether you like it or not, you need to get to know how SEO works, as your aim is to get Google and other search engines to send you loads of traffic without you having to advertise.
Learn how the search engines work and optimize your content and your pages to that you can increase your exposure within the search engines.
It will take some effort on your part, but the results that you get long term are definitely worth it.
Slow and Steady does win the race
If you want to make money tomorrow with your website that you started yesterday, I am afraid you are in the wrong business.
Most bloggers take a couple of years to to make a decent income from their blogs. Just to get your traffic growing takes time.
As long as you keep working on your blog on a regular basis, it will grow and at the same time bring you more and more income.
As your traffic increases, so will your income, but it is a slow process, and you need to get your mind around the fact that you need to enjoy the journey, rather than be in a rush to make your first million.
There are many bloggers worldwide that make a full-time income through their blogs. With a little perseverance, dedication and hard work there is no reason why you cannot join them.
So, what are you waiting for, the sooner you start your blog, the sooner you can make money blogging and the sooner you can fire your boss.
I don’t like the sound of Blogger, the way they treated all your work by deleting your blog, Charming!
I agree with you regarding setting a website up to blog is the safest route in securing your content as you have unfortunately found out.
WordPress are very straightforward to build, I was an online newbie when I started. I learnt the ropes fairly quickly through the Wealthy Affiliate training program, pretty basic stuff really, once shown you’re away.
The hardest part I find however is attracting visitors to your blog, there’s quite a bit to learn and implement here to accomplish increasing traffic into your website, it’s a matter of following a regular pattern for every written post you create and publish.
Do you affiliate market to earn revenue through blogging? This is the method I am using by inserting affiliate links into posts and earning commissions when visitors purchase via these links.
I have made the odd conversion, however my ambition is to earn regular income, here’s hoping.
Simon.
Thanks for stopping by Simon. Yes, I do use affiliate links for certain things if they are relevant, but I am working more on placing ads at the moment, as with a lot of traffic this could be the ultimate hands off income.
How awful that you lost all the work you did with blogger. I’ve been working on my blog for about three months now.
I’ve only got about 20 posts up, and I can only imagine how horrible I’d feel if I somehow lost it all. Do you have any recommendations on how to back up your content?
Yip, its the worst feeling.
I am not sure how to do it on Blogger if that is what you are asking, but on WordPress you can simply use the export button under the tools tab. In this way you can back up a file to your computer.
This is also useful if you need to move your blog.
Hey there,
I have been working on freelance writing sites like iwriter and am now looking to set up my own blog. In iwriter, adding your spin to an article was considered illegal.
But I have seen you recommending it. Does it mean it is legal to do it with your own blog or is there a legal way of spinning them?
I have been penalized so many times. What is you advice on it? Have I been doing it wrong?
I know that the search engines don’t like duplicate content, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t take a PLR article, use the ideas and totally rewrite it with your own spin on it. Never ever just copy the article into your site without changing it and adding to it, as then it would be pointless, as people can get that same information elsewhere.
Nice job. I’m sure there are lots of frustrated writers and would be writers who want to get there work out there and become interactive with others…..but don’t know how. I remember trying to go it alone with WordPress several years ago. I spent much more time trying to figure out how to build the blog than on what I was trying to say. I gave up and eventually found Wealthy Affiliate. I love all the options you present, as you showing people how to make money off their writing. Thanks for the info.
Glad to be of assistance Warren and thanks for the awesome comment.
Your post is very informative, and it’s a shame that blogger deleted your content without warning. Thank you for posting a warning about this service.
I operate a couple of blogs and I love the tips you give for writing content; especially the idea of writing one long post, then a few shorter posts that surround the same concept, then linking to the shorter posts from the one long post.
I’m going to start implementing this strategy on my blogs today! GREAT information!
The trick is to make your feature post really good and with as much detail as possible. You can then also use this post to rank for a few different keyword phrases that are related, which will help a lot in getting more traffic to your site.
Best of luck and let me know how this works for you.
Hi there….
Your article on blogging tips certainly was easy to understand. In particular the explanation on ‘keywords’ and what they are…. That they’re basically what people type into their browser to search for information. It evokes an image in my mind that the internet is really like a plate of spaghetti where you have to make it easy for people to find your meatballs inside the tangle of messy strands of pasta. I would imagine that to be vital information to bring people to your website blog pages. I found this article very easy to read and instructive.
Thanks for stopping by Roldan, and glad to be of help. All the best with your website survivaldominance.com – it looks great.