To make your first $100 and it’s the best way to start your blogging journey. Once you make some cash through your blogging efforts, it always motivates you to go ahead (to build a profitable blog) in one or two years.

However, in this post, I am going to talk about something more than just depending on Google Adsense and waiting endlessly to cash your first check from them. Haven’t you noticed that a lot of bloggers get their first check after several months? Some even get theirs after a few years.

1. Use long tail keywords to start a niche site

To stand any chance of making it alongside the big boys, you should never try to write articles based on head term keywords that they are already ranking for on Google’s first page. Instead, look for long tail keywords of such keywords that are less competitive and write on them.

For example, if you search for “blog”, you will see that “blog host” and “blog hosting” have global monthly searches of 49,500 and 40,500 respectively. They both have monthly local searches of 18,100 each (with high competition). But “make your blog” has global monthly search of 74,000 and local search of 33,100, and the competition is medium.

So you can write on keywords like’10 ways to make your blog stand out from the rest’, ‘How to make your blog attract advertisers’, ‘How to make your blog an affiliate haven’, etc. You can easily make Google first page with those headlines and yet withstand the competition.

2. Start An Email List

You can build an a blog that makes $100 a day passively from advertising and Amazon Associates that does not have an email list. But an email list is still that last pro step that turns a blog into a business.

Having an email list allows you to send new content, promotions and to continually market your products to.

The cool thing about an email list is that you can set it and forget it too.

With an email list what you’ll want to do is sit your butt down and write a bunch of emails that will go out to anyone who subscribes to your list. Make it so people get 2–3 email from you per week.

Make it at least three months long. Send your audience content updates, links to your products and blog posts where you promote products as an affiliate. Promotions in your niche, whatever.

Don’t be super aggressive with promotions of course. No one likes being sold to. You need to craft emails people want to read, email that provide value and occasionally make an offer.

That offer could be to watch a YouTube video, checkout a review blog post you wrote or a discount coupon code on a product or service you’re offering

How do you get email subscribers?

To collect emails you simply sign up to an email list provider and then they give you the tools to embed forms on your blog. The providers we like are:

Mailer Lite – Best affordable option

Convert Kit – Best if you have or will have products

Have an email opt-in form and put it at the bottom of every blog post, in the sidebar if your design is using one and sprinkled within blog posts in an organic way.

Use pop-up forms if you really want to get aggressive but again, it provides poor user experience and may impact your SEO.

The form should have some sort of lead magnet, a book, free course or coupon code. Something. “Get updates” does not really cut it anymore.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I like to think of SEO as a competition. In this competition, your article competes against all of the other articles on the same topic. Google’s search algorithm determines the winner.

While writing a blog post, you want to optimize to rank as high in the search results for your selected keywords as possible. While we don’t know exactly how Google’s algorithm ranks content, we do know a few of the main factors that they take into consideration.

Site speed– Fast sites rank higher. To test your blog’s speed, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. To help speed up your site, makes sure that your images are optimized for size to speed page load times. You should also use a cache plugin and CDN.

Optimized content– The search algorithm looks for keywords and phrases to learn what your article is about and to rank it. To help you with this, I recommend you use a SEO plugin like Yoast. Avoid stuffing your article with keywords where they aren’t necessary. This doesn’t work anymore.
Domain age- Older domains tend to rank higher.

Mobile friendliness- These days, Google looks at ‘mobile-first’ when ranking sites. This means, your mobile site is more important than your desktop site. You’ll rank higher if you have a quality and responsive mobile site. To increase mobile speed, consider making an AMP version of your site. For help optimizing your site for mobile,

Domain authority- If a site has high ranking articles on a particular topic, a similar article may rank higher because you have authority on the topic.

Backlinks- If a post has links coming from high-quality sites all over the web, it will rank higher.

Comments- If an article has a lot of comments, it may rank higher.

Social shares- If an article has a lot of shares and clicks from social media, it may rank higher.

Organic traffic from search engines is the largest source of traffic for most bloggers. You gain this traffic through SEO. Make this a priority while creating content and building your site. About 80% of my traffic is organic.

4. Monetizing the Blog

After reaching about 1000-3000 visits per month, it’s time to start thinking about monetizing. At this point, the best ways to monetize your blog are affiliate marketing and running ads. The great thing about these is that they scale up with your blog. By that, I mean that as your traffic increases, so will your income.

After getting ads and affiliate links up and running, you can work on building and selling your own product. Between these three sources of revenue, you should be earning $100 per month when you build your traffic up to around 8000-10,000 visitors per month.

Running Ads on Your Blog

Ads are kind of controversial. Many bloggers claim that they are distracting and annoying to visitors. I disagree. Properly placed and sized ads don’t bother the user. They also add legitimacy to the site by making it look more like a business rather than a hobby. If you’re not running ads, that’s fine, but you’re leaving money on the table.

When setting up ads, placement and size is everything. Place 2-4 ads per page maximum. I recommend one toward the top of the page, one after 3-4 paragraphs, and one in the sidebar. If you wish, you could also place one at the end of the article.

Avoid using pop-up ads. They are annoying and may drive your visitors away, increasing your bounce rate. Running too many ads will cause your site will slow down.

Ad Network Recommendation: Adsense

This is Google’s ad network. Adsense is one of the easiest ad networks for new bloggers to join. They don’t have a specific traffic requirement. As long as you have a decent looking site with original content that meets the Adsense eligibility requirements, you can join. You’ll also need a privacy policy, about, and contact page on your blog.

For whatever reason, a lot of bloggers poo poo Adsense. They claim that the earnings are too low to bother with. I disagree. If you’re blogging in a profitable niche with properly optimized ads, Adsense earnings are decent. A page RPM (revenue per thousand visits) of $3-$5 is obtainable. This means, with 10,000 visits per month, you could potentially earn half of your monthly goal with Adsense alone.

At this time, I still use Adsense. The ads are customizable and perform well. Adsense pays after you earn $100. In the near future, I may experiment with different ad networks. For now, I’m happy with Adsense

5. Guest Posting

If your blog has maintained a good DA then you can even charge for paid guest posts on your blog. You will promote a new blogger on your blog. Schedule the new guest posts to your social media accounts and email list.

Or, if you have strong network connections with other bloggers then you can start offering guest posting services. Either way, guest posting will help to widen your reach to new bloggers, and other businesses. This will give exposure to other services, you offer, on your blog.

Google is a great place to start in the search for guest posting opportunities. You can use any of the following keyword searches to find blogs that accept guest posts. 

Thank you for your Valuable Time 💫