If you want to work freely as a writer, but you hate looking for jobs in the online freelancing marketplaces, then blogging is your cup of tea. If you want to make money from a blog, treat it as a business. When you take blogging as a profession, it is wise to start with some investment depending on your financial capacity, vision, content marketing plan, etc. The investment behind your blog may start as low as $10 (domain price). Unlike freelancing, money blogging requires a viable blog business plan.
First, make a budget for your blog. The blog financials must include essential costs like logo design, domain and hosting charge, cost of blog-theme and plug-ins, monthly internet fee, etc. Your blog budget should also include branding/advertisement costs depending on your marketing strategies – online and/or offline. Next, decide how much can you invest in terms of money and time. Finally, calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your money blog.
Read Digital Marketing in Bangladesh.
Picture Courtesy: Blogging Wizard
How to Create a Blog for Earning
Creating a blog doesn’t require huge technical skills. If you have little/zero programming knowledge, still you can build a money blog. In this section, we are going to discuss how to create a blog for earning money, even if you are a non-technical person.
Read Best Job Searching Websites in Bangladesh
Choose a Profitable Niche
The first step to create a blog is choosing a potential niche for making good money. However, if you prioritize the monetization fact before your passion or skills, you may end up with a lack of interest soon. It is always recommended by the experts to pick a niche you are comfortable with. For instance, if you have a passion for gardening, you can start a blog on the Gardening Tool niche. If you like your niche, blogging would feel like entertainment instead of stress.
Level Up Writing skills
Certainly, native writers are ‘Pro’ in writing blogs. But as a non-native writer, you still have the opportunity to write quality blog posts, if you can level up your writing skills. The best way to upgrade your current level of writing skills is to read and write. The more you practice, the more you can learn the language and express your thoughts in terms of words in a more powerful way.
In addition to this, you need to increase your level of knowledge regarding your niche to write informative blog-posts for the readers. For this quest, you must read niche related books and quality blog posts to continue research online/offline.
You can also take free/paid courses online/offline, where instructors can offer you guidelines on effective techniques for creative writing. If you have enough budgets for content under your Blog Business Plan, you can hire a pool of quality writers, who will write for your blog as per your requirement.
Create the Blog
You can create a blog within a few minutes with zero programming skills and without spending a penny. Can you believe it? Yes, several platforms, like blogger.com or wordpress.com offer you this golden opportunity to create a blog free of cost. You can open a blog within a few minutes without any technical skills. However, free blogging platforms have some limitations like limited hosting space, a limited number of themes, lack of plug-ins, etc.
To create a blog you can choose a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, or Drupal. These popular CMS platforms offer a bunch of free themes and plugins. You can install any of these themes and plugins in your blog spending without a penny. However, free themes and plugins come with limitations. So it would be wise to install a paid theme on your money blog depending on your niche. You can purchase an appropriate theme from reputed market places like themeforest.net. You can also hire a designer to make a customized money blog complying with your specific needs.
Figure out the Viable Source of Traffic
Web Traffic is the visitor/audience to your blog. Your blog will earn money when an audience clicks on any ad. In other words, visitors are the goldmine to whom you are going to sell your product/service. It won’t be overwhelming to say that traffic serves as the blood flow for any blog.
To make money, you have to attract visitors to your blog. You need to discern from which sources you can pull out the audience. When your blog gets traffic from any search engine like Google, it is called organic traffic. It is totally free of cost.
On the other hand, if you run paid campaigns or paid advertisements in Google or social media to pull traffic to your blog, it falls under paid traffic source. The cost of posting Ads/campaigns in Google/Facebook depends upon the competition of that specific keyword/phrase for which you want to pull traffic from Google/Facebook. Therefore, depending on your Blog Business Plan, you can choose organic and/or paid sources.
Rank the Blog in Google SERP
When an individual puts a query (keyword) on the search box of any search engine, the search engine result pages (SERP) presents a number of relevant results based on its algorithm. If your blog-post gets a position in the first page of a search engine for any specific keyword (query), it can pull huge traffic organically. As Google is the number one search engine today, you need to work for making your blog-posts visible on the Google SERP.
You have to apply SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Techniques for the blog as well as blog-posts to get ranking in the Google SERP. You can either learn SEO expert or hire an SEO expert for doing SEO for your blog.
Build Your Email List
Besides organic and paid methods, there are some other sources to bring readers to your blog. For instance, you can ask visitors to your blog to subscribe through email. When you can build the email list successfully, send emails to the subscribers regarding your latest post, products, and/or services. You can learn email marketing techniques. You can also use free/paid software for email marketing. If your Blog Budget Plan allows, hire an email marketing expert, who can do this job professionally.
Picture Courtesy: EyeSwift
How to Monetize Your Blog
When you have prepared your blog with enough content maintaining standard and quality, you can advance towards money blogging. There are several ways to make money from a blog. You can opt for one or more ways considering the niche of your blog.
Ad Network
The most popular way to make money from a blog is by applying Ad Networks. First, you need to submit your blog to a specific Ad Network. If your blog gets approval, then you have to insert Ad code following the specific instruction of the respective Ad network. After successful insertion of Ad code inside the blog, Ads would automatically appear within your blog-posts depending on the content topic, user interest, availability of offers/promotions, etc.
Ad Networks pay in different ways, like PPC (Pay Per Click), CPC (Cost Per Click), and PPV (Pay Per View). Now Google AdSense is the biggest Ad Network. However, approving a new blog for Google AdSense is getting tougher day by day due to several issues, like strict quality control, huge competition worldwide, etc. If you are a new blogger, you can try some other Ad Networks like Commission Junction, Infolinks, media.net, mediavine, AdThrive, Ezoic, Propeller Ads, Revenue Hits, etc.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is continuously getting popular among the money-bloggers to make handsome amount per month. You can write a review of a certain product and put the selling link inside your review article. The visitors can read the review and purchase that product by navigating through the link.
Nowadays, many famous e-commerce websites, like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc. are offering affiliate programs. You have to apply to an affiliate program and submit the required information regarding your blog. If your blog gets approved, you can insert affiliate links into your blog-posts.
Content Marketing for Own Business
Today most of the reputed companies maintain a blog to serve their customers. If you own a local business, you can start a blog on that niche. You can write posts to help the readers. If you can gain authority, the audience will trust you. Then you can advertise your own products to your audience. Using the blog you can sell products online or promote the physical locations of your stores to the audience.
Write Sponsored Reviews
If your blog can build authority for its niche and gain around 500 page views per day, you can write sponsored reviews. For writing such reviews the writer must have enough knowledge, skills as well a forte in writing. While writing sponsored product reviews, you must preserve your readers’ interest; otherwise, you may irritate your valuable subscribers.
Several websites, like Tomoson, Famebit, Revcontent, Izea Pay per post, etc. offer opportunities for paid reviews or sponsored content. If your blog has considerable traffic and page views, you can contact your niche related brands for writing sponsored reviews of their products/services on your blog and earn good money.
Sell Digital Products
Selling eBooks is another great source to make money from a blog. For instance, if you are a food blogger, you can sell eBooks regarding diet plans, weight loss tricks, etc. When you have enough skills/knowledge regarding your niche, you can start writing an eBook. However, if your Blog Business Plan permits, hire a writer/expert to write the eBook as per your requirement.
The pro-level bloggers who have considerable expertise in a specific niche can sell online courses. If you own a blog under the digital marketing niche, you can offer some online courses regarding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, etc. In your money blog, you can also sell other kinds of digital products like Apps, plugins, themes, music, etc.
Sell Services
Do you have any specific skills like graphic design, writing, programming, or photography? You can sell your skills through your money blog. You can also sell physical services like Home Shifting Aid, or Auto Repairing service, etc. You can find your clients from organic sources like Google SERP. You can also opt for paid ads in Google or Social Media to attract potential clients under your service area.
Sell Ad Space
If your blog gets enough traffic and page views per month, you can directly contact the advertisers for selling space of your blog for placing advertisements. For instance, if you own a blog in the bicycle niche, you can sell ad space to bicycle manufacturing companies. To attract advertisers, the design of your blog should be user-friendly, so that users can easily navigate into it.
Picture Courtesy: YourStory
Final Thoughts
Blogging is a passion for many. To some, it is a hobby. If you want to turn your passion for blogging into a profession, work for money blogging. Blogging is a multitasking job. As a blog owner, you have to play the role of CEO, manager, worker, and several other roles at the same time. To make a stable income from a blog you need to follow a systemic process. First pick a profitable niche regarding your interest, forte, or local business. Then you have to prepare a viable Blog Business Plan, including whether/how much you can invest, source of traffic, CMS platform, earning methods, etc.
To build the blog you can utilize free/paid themes and plugins, depending on your budget. When you have prepared the blog, choose the best suitable earning method for your blog. You can make money through AdSense, affiliate marketing, selling digital products like ebooks or online courses, etc. On the whole, to build your blog as a long-term earning source, increase the value of content, and make your blog a resource for your valuable readers.