In today’s hyper digital world, Earn money from blog websites is a dream of many and millions of people are actually living this dream. Blogging and content creation is emerging as a powerful tool for the people who want to build an authority in any niche. With the rise of the Creator economy, these individuals can easily turn their passions and expertise to successful online avenues. With the right Mindset and proper consistency, a well- crafted blog can transform from hobby into a profitable online business.
By understanding some key points and principles, you can easily understand how to engage more Audiences through your content, in which learning about SEO optimization and social marketing plays an important role.
Whether you are a seasoned blogger continuously seeking monetary strategy or an enthusiastic content creator. This article will guide you to increase the knowledge and necessary tools to unlock the potential.
Understanding the Blogging Income Potential
Blogging has immense income potential depending upon many factors. With only content blogs, entrepreneurs are earning over 10,000$ a month. Though it took them years to build this business and a lot of learning and skills were involved in the process.
On a general level, 20% of the people who start a blog with a long term vision make over 1000$ a month. Income level depends on how many SEO optimised content they add, their Niche, and their monetization strategies.
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Most of the blogs over a time evolve into a serious business if they stay for long term. They develop their own products, build multiple social channels, sell subscription models and monetize in 10s of ways. Such a business makes over 50,000$ monthly, but that usually comes after 3-4 years of hard work.
Step by Step ways to Earn money from blog website
Step 1: Choosing a niche and target audience
You must select a Niche that is profitable and aligns with your expertise and interest. When you select the right Niche, you have immense opportunities to add content that is high in demand and not many people are talking about it. This drives a lot of audience to your website which can further be monetized.
Before finalising a Niche, Analyse the completion by doing market research and try to find the niche which is in high demand and low competition. Now understand the target audience and start adding content to cater their needs
Step2: Domain Name selection
Domain Name is your brand Identity. It not only adds to your business valuation but also helps you attract visitors and genuine traffic to your website. A great Domain Name is short, easy to remember, easy to memorise and contains high value keywords.
You would have to be very creative while finalising domain names, as once you have finalised and purchased a domain, you cannot change it later.
Step 3: Hosting Selection
There are a lot of hosting providers that provide different types of hosting plans. You must be educated and know your needs before selecting a hosting plan. In general there are three types of hosting.
Shared Hosting: Don’t select this plan. Your website performance and speed will be very limited and you will never see the fruits of blogging. It generally starts at 2-3$ per month for an annual plan
VPS Hosting: It’s a great plan to start your blogging business with. You can manage your blog for a very long time with this hosting. Generally costs 6-8$ per month.
Cloud Hosting: It’s the best hosting plan you can have for your blog. You can scale infinitely and you would never have to worry about server performance. Generally costs 10-12$ per Month.
Hosting charges increase as your traffic increases but at the same time your income also increases. In general hosting costs less than 10% of blog revenues depending upon monetization methods.
Step 4: Setting up a WordPress Blog
WordPress is an Open Source Content Management System. It is like google drive for websites. You can create any type of website with wordpress like blogging, ecommerce, social media etc. It has plugins and themes which gives you great customization options and features to manage your website.
Setting up WordPress site involves the following steps
WordPress installation and configuration
Installing wordpress application on your hosting server and mapping your domain Nameservers to the hosting site. You need to make sure to protect yourself from standard attacks like DDoS attack, SQL injection, XSS and other attacks while setting up.
Make sure you select appropriate Permalinks and other settings while configuring WordPress dashboard
Essential plugins and Customisation
Plugins help in extending WordPress functionality and features without writing a line of code. You would need to have basic features and essential securities before you start customising your website. These plugins will improve website performance, SEO and analytics, security, Spam protection, Social Sharing and Multiple language features. Plugins will also help you in backup and restoring your wordpress site in case of an attack.
Branding and designing your blog
If you are building your blog on wordpress then you have access to a lot of themes and other features like menu, posts to customise and design your website suitable for your needs.
Since WordPress is open source, you will find a lot of free resources online that will help you design and brand your website.
Start with a basic design and focus on content first. It’s the only way to establish the Niche Authority. Keep improving your website from time to time.
Step 5: Building traffic and Loyal Audience
Once you are set up with your website, the next crucial task is to add content to your website and build consistent traffic. Monetisation of the traffic will happen only when you are having great content and consistent traffic. This is the process of building your business and establishing an authority in your Niche. Let’s understand different parts of this process one by one.
Content creation strategies:
Content is a very important part of your website. Without content, your visitor would have no idea what you are offering to them. They won’t stay on your website for long, hence would leave you no room for monetization. Indeed without content, it would be very difficult to attract followers. Hence after setting up a website your first and foremost priority should be to add relevant SEO optimised content on your website.
So what kind of content can you add to your website?
Well before that you need to find relevant keywords in your Niche. Keywords are specific words or phrases that people use in search engines to find content, helping websites rank higher in search results. Before planning for content, you need to find high quality keywords and create content that targets those keywords.
You must add content regularly in order to get rankings on search engines. Once your website crosses 100+ SEO optimised articles, you will start receiving free organic traffic from Search Engines.
Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques:
SEO plays an important role in driving organic traffic from search engines to the website. SEO requires proper keyword research, optimised content, internal and external linking structure. You would also need to employ great backlinking and guest posting techniques for a greater search engine ranking.
Social media promotion and community building
You would need to convert your one time visitor into long term followers by consolidating into social media or community followership. It’s a great step toward building a long term passive income stream.
Create your brand Pages on few Social Media sites like facebook, instagram, linkedin, youtube, pinterest, Quora, reddit depending upon your Niche and expertise. Promote your content, products and other relevant stuff with your audience. This will not only get better search engines ranking but also increase traffic and followership on your pages.
You can also create a community on telegram, whatsapp or discord to keep your audience engaged. You can also share content and other engaging stuff on community platforms to keep users updated with your brand.
Step6: Monetization your traffic
Monetizing your traffic is a combination of knowledge and art. You need to be smart enough to realise your traffic demographics and other stats and decide what monetization will suit the best for your audience. Let’s first look at all possible monetization methods.
Display advertising
Display advertising means that you are renting out spaces in your website for ads. It could be a homepage banner, sidebar ad or ads in your posts. There are many ways in which you can display ads and get paid for it. Here are a few of them
Google AdSense
Google Adsense is a very popular ad network which pays you for displaying ads on your website. It is very easy to integrate google adsense in wordpress as there is a direct plugin for it. Google bots read your website content and display contextual ads and pay you on cost per click or revenue per mille (1000) impressions.
Before applying for google adsense, your website must have some content and traffic. Getting approved for google adsense is itself a success as it is a direct gateway to income.
digiHero recommends that you must have at least 50 SEO optimised articles and at least 100 unique pageviews a day before applying for google adsense.
Once you get approved you must try to increase earning by optimising placements and targeting etc.
Sponsored content and native advertising:
You can also partner with brands who would love to advertise on your website. It could be a banner ads or content ad or any other ad you negotiate for. Sponsored advertising is generally difficult to find but it is highly rewarding. It is the biggest source of ad revenues for top blogs.
You need to build Niche authority, constantly pitch sponsors and create engaging content in order to attract sponsored posts. Transparency is an important aspect to remember.
Private ad networks
Private ad networks are platforms that connect advertisers with publishers. They offer more control and potentially higher revenue compared to traditional ad networks like Google AdSense. Mediavine, Adthrive are a few examples of private ad networks.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where businesses reward affiliates for driving traffic or sales through their promotional efforts. Bloggers naturally recommend products and services through linking and earn a commission based on the sales they generate.
Affiliate is a very popular source of income for blogs. Almost all big players including amazon, udemy, and others offer affiliate programs for content creators and publishers.
To get successful with affiliate marketing you need to take care of the following things
Choosing the right affiliate programs
Relevance: First of all, any affiliate program you select, it must be relevant to your content. It helps in bringing more audience interest
Commission structure: Evaluate the commission rates and payment structures (CPS,CPL,CPA)
Reputation: Always choose the programs from reputable companies to ensure timely payments which results in quality products.
Support and resources: Prefer those programs which offer marketing materials including support and training.
Effective affiliate marketing strategies:
Content integration: Your content should be naturally integrated through affiliated links such as products.
Email and community platform: Recommend content containing affiliated links to your different subscribers through email campaigns or community platforms.
SEO(Search Engine Optimization) : Optimise your content in the way that attracts organic traffic to your affiliate link for search engines.
Social media promotion: leverage your social media platforms. So, you can promote content containing affiliate products.
Disclosure and compliance requirements
FTC Guidelines: Disclose affiliate relationships to comply with Federal Trade commission guidelines.
Transparency: You should be honest about your affiliate links which help to create and maintain trust with your real audience.
Placement: Disclosure should be in visible areas. Can be at the beginning of the blog or can also be near affiliate links.
Partnerships
You can enter into partnerships with brands that align with your content. Acquiring great partnership is a skill game and it becomes simple as you get more and more Niche authority. If you become popular, you will be approached by many brands for collaboration. Here is how you can increase your partnership game.
Identifying relevant brands and influencers:
Brand alignment: Make choose brands that increase more value of your blogs and also increase the audience interest and engagement.
Engagement: collaborate and partnership with the influencers who have high engagement rates with more loyal following.
Research: To identify potential partners, use tools like BuzzSumo or any other social media platforms.
Negotiating sponsored content deals
Pricing: Determine your pricing based on the traffic of your blog, audience engagement and the niche.
Deliverables: outline the content which is deliverable, deadlines and promotional requirements.
Contract: use contract to protect both outline terms and interest.
Maintaining transparency and credibility
Disclosure: Always disclose sponsored content to your audience.
Authenticity: Ensure that sponsored content is authentic and adds value to your readers.
Consistency: Maintain the same quality and tone in sponsored posts as in regular content.
Selling products
You can sell a wide variety of products, be it digital or tangible. Digital products include ebooks and online courses, membership and subscription models or webinar and online events.
Tangible products can be anything depending upon your niche. You must partner with a delivery firm before offering tangible products. You can also sell products through amazon or any third party ecommerce businesses.
Scaling and Growing Your Blogging Business
To scale your business effectively, prepare for significant income by adopting a mindset capable of managing growth. For that you need to implement the following things.
Diversifying revenue streams:
Multiple Income Sources: Implement various monetization strategies to reduce reliance on a single income stream.
Experimentation: Test different revenue options to see what works best for your blog and audience.
Building a team and Outsourcing:
Hiring: Bring on team members or freelancers to handle tasks like content creation, marketing, or technical support.
Delegation: Delegate tasks to focus on strategic growth and core activities.
Long-term strategies for sustainable growth:
Content Quality: Continuously produce high-quality, valuable content for your audience.
Audience Engagement: Foster a strong community by engaging with your readers and responding to feedback.
Analytics: Regularly review performance metrics to refine strategies and improve results.Innovation: Stay updated with industry trends and innovate to keep your blog relevant and competitive.
In the digital age, blogging presents a multitude of opportunities for earning money online. By combining passion, expertise, and strategic monetization methods, bloggers can transform their websites into thriving online businesses. Embrace the potential of blogging, stay committed, and continuously adapt to the ever-changing landscape to unlock financial success and freedom in the dynamic world of online entrepreneurship.