Is it really possible for a beginner to make money with a blog? Can you make a living out of blogging or is it just another myth? The answer to both questions is ‘Yes’.

Blogging for money is not a theoretical concept but it’s a reality. Anyone with some basic knowledge of blogging, SEO, and a general idea of how the Internet works can start a blogging business and make money.

How Bloggers Earn Money – An introduction for Beginners

The purpose of this guide is to help you understand how to make money blogging by avoiding mistakes or losing valuable time on tasks that won’t contribute to your main goal.

It took me a number of years to realize the whole picture and find out what I was doing wrong and how to turn things around.

Hopefully, this comprehensive step-by-step guide will put you in the right direction from the very beginning, and give you a solid plan to follow that will generate results in the fastest possible way.

Let’s rewind and take it from the beginning. How do most bloggers make money online and how can you do the same?

1. Setup your own self-hosted blog

This is perhaps the easiest step. It’s so easy these days to register a domain name and set up a blog. All you need is a bit of help and pointers in the right direction.

In summary, to start a blog you need to follow these steps:

Register a domain name
Sign up for web hosting
Setup WordPress
Publish your first blog post!

If you don’t already have a blog, click this link to get started. You’ll be presented with a wizard that we’ll take you through the process step-by-step. In 30 minutes or less, you’ll have your own self-hosted blog with WordPress installed and you can then proceed to step 2.

Mistakes to avoid when setting up your own blog

As a beginner in blogging, it’s normal to make mistakes. That’s perfectly OK provided that you learn from your mistakes and do not repeat them.

When it comes to starting a blog, have these tips in mind.

Keep your focus on your main goal – make money online.

Your goal is to reach a point where you will start making money from your blog, you should not forget that.

I’m mentioning this again because I know from experience that a common mistake beginners make is spending too much time and effort in designing the ‘perfect blog’, forgetting that at the early stages (when there is no traffic coming in), nobody cares about your website’s design, and that includes Google.

I’m not saying that website design is not important, it is, but not at the early stages. Your primary goal at this step is to have a blog running and start creating content that will get you traffic.

There is so much work involved in getting traffic (and potential customers), and you should devote your energy to those tasks from the very beginning.

Make the right decision from the beginning and choose the right platform. By far, a self-hosted WordPress website is your best choice.

Keep it simple

If you are starting out now, try to keep everything as simple as possible. Don’t overcomplicate things because you will get lost in the process.

You have a lot to learn and as you go along, you will change your mind about many things, so save your time and energy for the more complicated tasks

2. Start publishing great content
So, you have a website up and running, that’s great!

Now it’s time to get to one of the most difficult and challenging tasks of blogging, which is no other than creating the actual content for your blog.

Having said that, it is important to understand from the beginning the importance of content for your blog’s success.

Great (good, superb, or fantastic – you choose) content, will get you traffic (we will see below how), credibility, and make you money (in different ways).

So, what is great content?

Great blog content is not necessarily text, it can be images, videos, infographics, or even audio. BUT, for the purpose of achieving high rankings on Google (and other search engines), your content should be primarily text.

As I mentioned above, at the beginning keep it simple. Later on, for the best results, you can combine text with other forms to make your content more interesting.

Great content has the following characteristics:

• It’s unique for your website (it’s not an exact copy of an already published post)
• It’s free of spelling and grammar mistakes
• It’s meaningful
• It’s insightful
• It’s unbiased
• It’s something that helps people do/understand/learn something
• It’s easy to read

Don’t worry if the above list doesn’t make a lot of sense for now, as you become more experienced, you will understand it better.

Don’t go too broad, make it specific

While you do need a decent audience for your chosen topic, don’t go too broad because chances are that there are already thousands of websites about the same subject.

3. Build organic traffic to your blog

Let’s recap the process so far.

Your first step is to register your own domain and set up your blog.

Your second step is to decide the topics to cover in your blog and master the keyword research process.

4. Build a community around your brand

The next step is to start building organic traffic to your blog, and this is what I will discuss in this section.

What is organic traffic?

To make money from your blog, you need organic traffic and not just traffic in general. Organic traffic is generated from search engines (mostly Google).

What makes organic traffic more valuable than any other source of traffic, is the ‘user intent’.

A user that types a query in Google’s search box, has a clear intent. He or she is either looking for an answer to a question, wants to learn something, to find information, or to buy a product.

Their intent is expressed through the actual search terms they use in the search query.

How to get organic traffic to your blog?

Targeted organic traffic is the most valuable source of traffic for your blog because it’s traffic that converts.

By ‘convert’, we mean a number of things:

• Users are more likely to stay longer on your page, reading your post
• Are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter
• Are more likely to enquire about your services
• Are more likely to buy your products

You need to get your technical SEO correct

Technical SEO has to do with your blog set up and how well it is optimized for search engines.

Your blogging platform (especially if it’s WordPress), is by default SEO friendly, but still, there are a number of things to check and change to make it even better.

Things like:

• Blog structure
• URL Structure
• XML Sitemap optimization
• Use of Schema Markups
• Canonical URLs
• Optimizing your category and tag pages
• Website Speed
• Mobile Friendliness and Accelerated Mobile Pages
• Webmaster tools SEO

4. Build a community around your brand

Once you have a blog with great content and the traffic starts to flow in, your next step is to build a community around your brand.

Before making any sales (conversions), you first need to gain the user’s trust and this is achieved through community building.

Notice that I used the term ‘brand’ and not just blog and this is done on purpose.

At this stage, you need to stop thinking about your blog as a hobby but you need to change your mindset and approach it like you would approach a ‘real’ business.

We all know that branding is a very important aspect of the success of any business and your blog is not an exception to this rule.

There are many things you can do related to branding (like having a distinct logo, unique slogan, etc.), and community building is one of them.

What is community building for a blog?

In simple terms, what you are trying to do is to create a community of people that will follow your blog, interact with your content, and buy your products or services.

The most common ways to do this is through:

Email marketing

People that subscribe to your email list (aka newsletter), are a valuable asset to your blog. You can use your email list to inform your community when new content is available on your blog, to ask for their feedback, and to sell them products or services.

This will not happen from day one, you first need to gain their trust by providing value through your emails but at the end of the day, it’s one of the most efficient methods to create a community around your blog.

In my case, 20% of the monthly sales of my SEO courses, are generated through my email list.

Social Media networking

Some people don’t like to receive emails, they prefer to use social networks to read their news, communicate with their friends, and generally spend a lot of their time online.

You need to ensure that you have a social presence on the same channels as your potential followers.

There are many social media networks available that you can use but since you are at the beginning of setting up and establishing your blog’s brand, it’s better to concentrate on those channels that are proven to be more effective than others (when it comes to building followers), and these are Facebook and Twitter.

5. Start making money by selling ads

Did you notice how many things you need to do to get to the money-making part?

Although this blog post is about making money from your blog, almost ¾ of the content is related to activities that come before that and this is how blogging for money works in real life.

As a reminder, it is necessary to understand that you will not make money from your blog if:

You don’t have enough organic traffic
You don’t have a decent email list
You don’t have a community of loyal followers.
You don’t have content that converts

Selling Ad Space: Google AdSense

I’m a great AdSense fan, I admit it! I’ve been an AdSense publisher for more than 15 years now and although there are alternatives, Google Adsense it’s still one of the best ways to make money online.

I’m using Adsense on my blogs and so far, I’ve earned a nice 6 figure amount.

I’m not using Adsense on this blog because as you will read below, there are cases where AdSense is not the best way to monetize your blog.

Easy and reliable

Adsense is very easy to use and reliable. All you need is a blog with great content and lots of traffic.

You add AdSense to your blog and when people click on one of your ads you get the 68% of the money paid by the advertiser (the remaining 32% goes to Google for proving this service).

It’s reliable because you know that Google will pay you on time and will do anything they can to protect the system from fraud and spam.

You can choose what type of ads to show, how often to show them, how the ads will look, and many other things.

Can you advertise your blog or products through AdSense?

Yes, you can through Google Adwords. AdWords is the system used by advertisers to run ads that are displayed on Google search and Adsense websites.

Have in mind though that you cannot use Adwords and drive PPC traffic to a landing page that has Adsense on it. In the past, this was a method that made some people a lot of money but not anymore.

6. Make money through affiliate marketing

Last but not least, another way to make money from your blog is by selling other people’s products (digital or physical) for a commission.

This is generally known as affiliate marketing. Here is an overview of the process.

You find which products you want to promote
You enroll in their affiliate marketing program and you get a unique link and banners to use
You add the links/banners in your blog
When someone clicks on the links, they are redirected to the website of the provider
When they make a purchase, you get the agreed commission
It sounds good, right?

Well, is not as easy as it sounds. You still need to find the right products to promote and you still need to test if your readers and community are willing to pay money to buy the products you will suggest.

Conclusion

Blogging for money is not a theoretical concept. Thousands of bloggers are making money through their blogs either by selling ad space, their own products/services, or through affiliate marketing.

All these successful bloggers have some things in common:

• They are having blogs with great content.
• They have managed to build communities around their blogs.
• They use more than one way to make money. They have their own products but they also make money from affiliate marketing and selling ad space.
• They have been blogging for years and it took them a number of years to get to the point of making a living from their blogs.

If you have made it to this point, I will let you go with this:

Everyone can learn how to make money blogging. The amount of money you will make depends on the amount of work you are willing to allocate to make it happen.

Thank you for your Valuable Time 💫