Starting and monetizing a blog has never been easier than it is today.

Not too long ago, creating a website would’ve cost you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to set up and maintain. Monetizing a website was just as difficult. PayPal was in its infancy, Stripe didn’t exist and email marketing was nowhere near as flexible as it is now.

1. Become a Freelance Blogger in Your Niche

One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to become a freelance writer for more prominent blogs in your niche.

Think about it, you probably started your blog because you have experience/knowledge in that area, so why not use that to your advantage?

Businesses are looking for people that can create content to fuel their marketing so who better to create that content than someone that has knowledge in that niche

According to data from Glassdoor, the average freelancer in the United States makes about $40k a year. Keep in mind that this figure is influenced by your experience level and the niche you write in.

2. Immutable laws of blogging.

Before I jump into the various ways you can actually monetize a blog, whether you just started that blog or you’ve had it for some time now, I wanted to cover the five immutable laws of blogging. If you pay attention to these laws, you’ll succeed over time. Ignore them, and you’ll find it nearly impossible to drive any respectable amount of traffic and ultimately monetize your blog

Focus

Blogs need focus. You need to have a specific industry, niche or topic that you write about repeatedly. Try not to go all over the map. You’ll find that veering off on tangents will make you lose your core audience. People want to visit a blog — and keep revisiting it — because it fills a need or a void. That happens by staying focused and on-topic.

Quality

People think that blogging is about pushing out an enormous amount of content. But it doesn’t work if it’s thin content. Your content needs to be quality content. It needs to be thorough, well-written and cite its sources. If a study is referenced, it needs to be linked to. Don’t skimp on quality if you’re serious about monetizing your blog

Value

Your blog needs to deliver value. What can you teach other people about? What are you an expert at? Take the time to deliver value. Create thorough tutorials and informative posts that interweave things like videos and other media to truly help people understand or figure something out. Value is a precursor to income in any industry, but especially in blogging.

Engagement

How engaging is your content? Does your blog incite people to spend a lot of time reading articles, watching videos or messaging on a forum, for example? The more people engage with your content, the more likely they’ll be to purchase something from you. Without engagement, there’s very little chance of monetization.

Authority

How much authority do you have? How well-known are you in your field? The more authority you have, the more likely you can monetize your blog quickly. For example, if you have a large social media following and you decide to launch a blog, you can drive traffic quickly. If you’re an expert at something else or a best-selling author, for example, you already have authority, all you need to do is leverage it.

3. Advertise on Your Blog with Google Adsense

Advertising is usually what first comes to mind when you’re thinking about how to start a blog for profit.

An easy way to monetize a blog with ads is by using Google Adsense. Google Adsense is an ad network run by Google that displays advertisements on websites. When a visitor clicks on an ad on your site, you make money.

The ads that will be shown on your blog are targeted to the site content and the audience.

4. Accept Sponsored Blog Posts

Want to get paid for writing a blog post? If the answer is yes, then accept sponsored blog posts!

A sponsored blog post is a popular blog monetization strategy. In a nutshell, a company pays you to create content about its products on your blog. They may even write the post themselves, so all you have to do is publish it.

It’s similar to how influencers accept sponsorships to promote a product on Instagram or YouTube.

If you have a great-looking blog with quality content, a consistent blogging schedule, and engaged readers, many companies are willing to pay big bucks for you to promote their products or services.

5. Getting Traffic to Your Blog

Now that you have a niche, you need to write content. I recommend 3 articles per week for the first 6 months. This velocity of content is enough to get you on Google’s map, earn some domain authority, and generate enough traffic to make sales. All of that ladders up to a good SEO strategy.

But the hardest part is getting started.

These are the most important 3 parts of SEO — which should be more than enough to get you to your first $10,000 month!

6. Keyword Research

The biggest mistake many bloggers make in the beginning is writing about everything. Being scattershot is okay every now and again — sometimes those posts are the most fun and fulfilling to write — but it’s best to be targeted. This means doing keyword research.

Not all keywords are created equal. The surest way to succeed in growing traffic and monetizing your blog is to find keywords that are highly searched, but uncompetitive.

There’s no reason to waste your time writing tons of great content on a topic that’s never searched! And it would be equally dumb to try and rank for “Walmart” or “Michael Jordan memorabilia.”