Starting a blog these days is not hard, but making consistence income from your blogging effort is what matters. Millions of blogs are created on the blogosphere each month, but only a few live to become truly an income source for bloggers. Knowing what a blog is and why you are not making money online is important.
Starting a blog is one aspect, and doing what is right and profitable is another. Most bloggers seem to go for the money rather than building valuable contents. In this article, we will focus on how to precisely start, build and make money from your blog.
What exactly is a blog?
A blog is an online diary which could be in the form of word content, video content or pictorial content in chronological form, with the newest being at the top. Video blogs are called Vlog.
What can I blog about?
Bloggers can blog about anything that is educating, entertaining or informative. Bloggers are those who blog or who write the content of a blog. You could blog about politics as a political blogger, food as a food blogger, health as a health blogger, finance as a financial blogger, news as a news blogger, crime as a crime blogger etc. There are also narrowed down niche blogging, where a blogger could pick a very narrowed niche like acne, retirement, making money, sex and relationship, dating, bread baking and recipes, cheap travel, student loans etc as a topic..
Why should I blog?
The goal of professional and that of passionate bloggers is not to make money. But first, you should blog to add value to your target readers or audience. And then money comes as a compensation to crown or reward your efforts.
How to start your blog.
To start blogging, don't rush online without getting the fundamentals sorted out first. Never make the mistake of trying to get money for nothing as no such thing will work or last. You must lay foundation for your blog. Successful blogging requires the right art and science.
There are several platforms you can use in setting up your blog. You can setup a free blog using blogger, typead, wordpress etc. With this, you could setup a free domain that is unprofessional and blog or buy a domain name and mask it with your blogger to make it professional with google hosting your domain for free. This is called Google domain.
However, if you are going to run a very professional blog, you will need a hosting account or space and a professional domain name that fits your niche.
Where to buy hosting and domain.
There are very reliable platforms that you can host your WordPress site for your professional blogging.
First, you sign up with bluehost.
Bluehost not only offer cheap monthly hosting, but also provides the open source blogging platform for yo to easily setup of your blog using WordPress. With bluehost, you could start a monthly WordPress hosting account with just signing up for $3.4 per month
Once your domain and hosting account and blog is set up and running, it is time to add content to your blog.
Never make the mistake of copying content from other blog and pasting as your content as Google will not only penalise your blog, but your blog could be sued for plagiarism and stolen contents. This is why you must blog on only what you are passionate about as well as knowing or learning how to write contents for your blog.
Note also that you could also hire content writers from various freelance platforms and/or have guest bloggers who could write for you and have back links from your blog to theirs.
Ways to make money from your blog.
Most newbie bloggers try to focus on making money from their blogs rather than setting it up the right way. Rightly, there are no fixed time frame for you to monetize your blog, but you must first focus on having quality content and a good follower in order to make real and sustainable income from your blog.
Millionaire bloggers and blogs like tuts, kismetrics, earlytorise started passionately and fuse-in monetization very later. This model works wonder.
There are actually two methodology to earn money online with your blog. You can either make Money passively or non-passively.
Non passive income involves making money from a one off effort while passive income is an income you make while sleeping. In order word, you make money continuously from a single effort.
Following are ways to make money from your blog in no order of priority.
Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing involves your blogging around a niche with very valuable information or content for your readers and signing up as an affiliate with an affiliate company to promote a useful product related to your blog. For example, if your blog is all about financial management, you could sign up as an affiliate with Shareasale Affiliate website and start promoting a financial management software. You will make a percentage from the sale of any product purchased as an action through your affiliate link from your blog. You could sign up and promote products from affiliates including eBay, ckickbank, amazon associates, shareasale etc.
Turn your content into a course.
If your blog has a great content and followers, you can over time turn your valuable content into a course where your readers could pay to have it as a weekly or whatever duration course you want them to successfully get to pay you to access the course.
You could make your course as a series of email messages or a one-off download.
I personally run a distance course with my blog here on Micro Bread bakery setup and practical baking. However, I use WhatsApp and Facebook to run my coaching. Regina.com uses this model too.
Create and sell ebooks.
Ebooks are one of the best ways of making money with blogs. Your eBook need not be 1000 pages. People are looking for self-help instructions on how to solve their problems and if you have any solution, you could setup your blog around it and create products in the form of ebooks for your readers to download in order to solve their problems.
I have created ebooks that ranges from 40 pages to 300 pages. The great thing about ebook is that you create it once and make passive income from it through your blog. Your could write on ideas like How to detect Facebook and WhatsApp fake friends, how to destroy fear before fear destroy you, making money with twitter, how to permanently cure sunburn, make your teeth white again etc.
I do know you may want to concern your mind on platforms to sell your eBook and how to get paid. You can sell your ebooks on Amazon Kindle, Ckickbank, Smarshwords etc
Use your blog for Workshops and seminar speaking business.
Your blog is your platform. Just as successful bloggers like John Asaraf, Joe Vitale and Les Brown will use their blog to promote their speaking business, I use my blog to promote my Bread Baking Workshops.
If you own a website, you'll need to integrate a blog into it and use it to promote your speaking business. If you have a successful blog, your readers would be interested in meeting you in person in the form of workshop to learn your expertise from you or through online webinars and podcasts. This could be on how to setup blogs and make money with it. Dr. Sunny Obazu Ojeagbase, Publisher of Success Digest and Complete Sports News uses this model.
Use Blog to sell your offline products.
Slot Nigeria Limited, a tech company in Nigeria uses this model. They use their blog to promote and sell their phones and other tech products. From Ghana, USA, Canada, Singapore to India, South Africa etc all banks in these and other countries are using their websites to sell their banking products through information and education.
If you already own a physical product, you could create more marketing channel by creating and using your blog.
Run sponsored post on your blog.
While this is not too ethical, some bloggers especially newspapers and ezines uses this model to bring in one-off income. However, care must be taken for blog owners not to compromise quality and suitable content for money as this could put away readers.
Sell advert space.
You could sell advertising spaces such as banner adverts and/or links on your blog. Google AdSense also could be used here to make money, but I personally don't use AdSense as it takes away traffic from your website for per click peanut. However, there are blogs that make six figure dollar monthly incomes.
Be careful also if you are selling banner ad space on your blog as you will only sell adverts related to your blog niche.
Starting a blog is simple, but making the real and sustainable income is what matters.
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