How Can I Make Money With a Blog?
If currently your foremost question is 'how can I make money with a blog?' you need to reaad this post, because I'll tell you what you need to know.
It is a common question asked and while it may not easily be answered in a straight "do this" type of post, so I'll break it down into its component parts to make it more readable and easier to understand.
That's because there are many deciding factors as to whether you will be in a position to make money from a blog or not.
So let's, instead, look at some of the criteria necessary for a blog to have a chance at making money for its owner.
Your Blog's Niche
What niche does the blog occupy?
This is very important because some niches are way more competitive than others. If you are writing a blog about credit cards, for instance, then while you have chosen a niche where there are big bucks to be made, chances are you are not going to see any of it because the competition is way ahead of you.
However, if you're blog is about how to build wooden boats, then your competition will be a lot less difficult to outshine. The trade off is that in this niche your potential earnings will be considerably less than for credit cards.
At the end of the scale, I heard about a guy who found a niche with exactly zero competition and he got a blog to the number one spot in Google's index, but he didn't make a dime from it. What was his niche? Greenland cuisine. Enough said about that.
Your Blog's Traffic
How much traffic can you attract (and where does it come from)?
This is another important factor you have to consider. Without traffic to your blog, you will not be able to convert you blog into a money maker. That's because a blog with some great ads and occupying a low competition niche will earn nothing if no one goes to visit. But there is traffic and there is traffic and not all traffic is made equal.
What kind of traffic are you attracting?
There are two main categories of traffic that we are concerned with here. The first is social traffic which you can attract to your blog by virtue of sites like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok etc.
There are tons of social sites that you can leverage to easily attract a ton of traffic to your blog. But that traffic will not necessarily convert into dollars.
That's because a high percentage of that traffic are either people looking to connect socially or they're other bloggers just like you.
Other bloggers all know what ads are and all have their own affiliate ids with Clickbank, CJ, Amazon etc so they're not going to give you commission on something they want to buy when they can use their own affiliate link and keep the commission for themselves.
Equally, they rarely click adsense ads, because they also serve adsense on their blogs and they are already trained not to click on their own ads, so why would they want to click on yours?
The same goes for people outside of the Internet marketing industry who are busy on social media being social. They're not looking to buy things!
Organic Search Traffic
That brings us to the other kind of traffic – targeted search traffic.
This is the traffic that shows up from clicking a link in the search engines index. For that to happen, your blog must occupy a prominent position in the search engine results page (SERPs) and preferably that of Google, as they are by far the biggest search engine in terms of traffic generated.
To achieve that, you need to know some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques, many of which you can pick up for free here: SEO to Make Money Online. Incidentally, when you've read that post, there is a newer one on the same site that deals with how to make money with adsense.
Ok, I have the right niche and I have the right kind of traffic and enough of it. Now, how can I turn that into dollars?
If you have the most important aspect of online marketing sewn up (traffic) you are 90% the way to making a lot of money. For that, you need to sell them things!
I go into more detail on the subject of converting visitors into buyers in other posts on this blog, such as ways to make money online via affiliate marketing, PPC campaigns like Adsense, selling physical products via an ecommerce store or even creating and selling your own digital products.
Summary
Well, I think I've written enough for this post, so I've saved that subject for a whole collection of posts.
The reason for that is that it'll take some explaining and it's better to break things into smaller, more digestible pieces rather than try to tell it all in one go.
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Posted on April 4, 2009 in Making Money Online | 0 Comments