​​How to Make Money Blogging: Clear Pathway and 5 Easy Skills You Need

Making money through blogging is like the ultimate dream, where you can escape the grind of a 9-to-5 job and have the freedom to work from anywhere. Sharing your passions with the world is also a major perk for sure.

Guess what? Equipping yourself with the proper knowledge and a killer strategy can make this your reality even in 2023. There’s no easy way to say it, but this won’t be a piece of cake.

Ready for the secret sauce of how to make money blogging? Fasten your seat, because we’ve got the insider scoop right here! This is a comprehensive guide to mastering the blogging world and carving out your own successful niche. Get ready to uncover the secrets and go on an exciting adventure to blogging success!

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Why choose to blog for money

Blogging can be an excellent business model that will help you earn a lot of money. You can easily make a full-time income once you set up your blog following a proper strategy and creating value for your audience.

If you love writing, blogging is a no-brainer. But remember, it’s more than just writing—it’s a skill set you need to develop for running a successful blog.

Even if writing isn’t your biggest passion, you can still shine in the blogging world. With practice, anyone can master the art of creating valuable and easy-to-understand content.

Here’s the best part: blogging requires minimal investment. You can start from scratch without spending a dime. However, careful planning is key. If you’re willing to invest, you can buy professional tools and even hire experts to support your journey.

And here goes the harsh truth: if you want instant results and are not interested in learning new skills, or facing challenges, it’s not for you.

How do you make money as a blogger

You may wonder how bloggers make money. Making a blogging website is not the only way to earn for bloggers. You can also write for other blog owners and get paid for blogging. For that, you can keep an eye on the marketplace like ProBlogger, UpWork, Fiverr, Freelancer, and so on. Blog owners can earn money in many ways, such as through ad networks, affiliate marketing, paid promotion, selling their own products, and so many other ways. We will discuss more about earning and how to make money blogging later in the article.

​​How to make money blogging (in 8 steps)

Suppose someone starts a blog today and starts publishing content for three months. At the same time, you start studying different niches, looking for business opportunities, and learning in-depth blogging tactics for three months. In that case, you would be leaps and bounds ahead.

The path to successful blogging may differ from person to person, depending on their interests and chosen niches. That’s where this part is important because it’ll help you choose the right path to become a successful blogger.

Learning the basics

Once you decide to start blogging, you need to understand how it works. You have to learn some basic things before you can begin. Such as keyword research, SEO, how to write engaging content, how to publish your blog and where to post them, and other fundamentals.

Luckily, there are a ton of free tutorials available on platforms like YouTube and Google. They offer comprehensive guidance on these topics, making it easier than ever to learn the ropes. But not everything you see from Google can be helpful for your situation. You’ve to figure it out for yourself.

So, our suggestion will be to learn the essentials first and then if you need to level up your blogging game you can enroll in some special paid courses. Remember this is not mandatory, many people make a fortune without spending a dime on online courses.

Here we include some of the initial lessons beginners should learn first.

• What is blogging, and how does it work
• How to choose a niche for your website
• Keyword research for blogging
• On page SEO
• How to make a website (if you want to DIY)
• How to write SEO-friendly content
• How to Publish a Content
• How to make a content strategy
• How to use the search console and google analytics
• How to prepare your website for the ad network.

Learning those lessons will help you get a great start on your blogging career.

Picking the right niche

Today the world of blogging is quite saturated, but there are still thousands of great niches you can choose to reach your goal. The best niche for you is often the topic you like the most, such as, if you love pets, you can start a pet blog. This is how you can stay interested in your job and have a better chance of success. 

But there is a trick. you can not pick a board niche. You should choose a smaller niche with less competition and promising business opportunities.

Such as, instead of making a dog website, you can make a dog grooming-related website with less competition and better business opportunities. For example, if you provide professional dog grooming tips to your audience, there will be business opportunities like suggesting to the audience a dog grooming service that sponsored you. You can also recommend dog grooming products to your audience and earn affiliate income. 

Here are some signs of identifying a good niche.

• Low competition: The niche should not have dozens of established websites with the same business strategies as you. It is easier to compete with a few websites.
• Good audience: Blogging is all about getting the right audience, so always look for a niche with a good audience but needs more websites to serve them.
• Business opportunities: Niches related to more expensive services are better for earning money. If your content helps a business get customers, they will commission you. 

So, naturally, a travel agency or health insurance company would pay you more than a pet food company. Remember that the niches with more money also have more competition.

Health and fitness, technology, travel, cooking, and natural state blogs earn the most money. Choosing a valuable niche over the one you would love to work on is worth it.

Make a standard website

Making a standard-looking decent website is not rocket science. When making a blog, you need to buy a domain name, which is the address of your blog, like pintarest.com. And hosting, which is the storage where your website is kept.

With some patience, you can make a website by following tutorials. But to avoid taking the hustle and making it perfect, you can hire professionals from the freelance marketplace. Creating a WordPress website does not require coding, a degree, or special knowledge. It is pretty easy if you follow some decent tutorials. 

A feed, popular post, related posts, category, contact page, and about page are essential for a blog. You don’t need anything fancy. Just keep your website simple and easy to understand. 

Once you complete the basic pages, you will have to add the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages. Make things simple at the beginning, start simple, and work for betterment. Here are the characteristics of a standard website-

• The website looks professional and faultless.
• Contains natural color
• Easy to read and crisp fonts
• Easy to navigate
• No wild animation
• Fast loading.

Make a content strategy

Content strategy is a well-structured plan to create, publish and manage content. Deep research and analytic consideration are required to make a good content strategy. Here are some tips.

• Research all the keywords in your niche and find out the low-competition keywords. You can use Ahrefs, Semrush, MOZ, or other keyword research tools. Hiring a keyword planner expert on the project is worth it, but you can do it yourself after investing some time in tutorial videos and an engaging blog (no pun intended).
• The primary goal should be gaining visitors. But don’t focus on the visitors alone. You also need to create some value for them. It can be helping them to make a decision, solve their problem, or feed their curiosity. 
• Identify the successful competitors of your niche. Analyze what keywords they are targeting and what strategy they are following. Follow their path initially, but try to provide more value than them. 
• If your competitor answers a question, you can answer that and add a different perspective. Add tables, graphs, or infographics to make your content stand out. If you are constant enough in doing this, you can beat larger blogs in your niche.
• Plan achievable goals. Target something that you can achieve in one or two months. It can be a 12-content series or covering every part of a small topic.
• Your content strategy should align with a business plan. Plan in a certain way so you can suggest a related product to the people, launch a course after completing a series of projects, or even start providing paid consultation about your niche

Follow the strategy and be consistent

Now you have a standard blog and a strategy to work on, so the next thing you should do is work on the plan consistently. Make a regular schedule to write and publish posts. Start slowly, and take time to understand your niche. Target 2 articles in the first week, 3-4 when you gather some experience. 

Do not write and publish altogether. Post every other day. If you create more posts, you can also post daily, but quality matters the most. One piece of great content is better than ten in the blogging world.

Follow the SEO factors and publishing rules strictly. Make sure to fix the readability, word complexity, and SEO parameters while publishing. Take time to find links that benefit the audience. You can use some free tools for like Rank Math and Yoast SEO for your blogging site. 

Time, effort, and the will to provide the best content on the internet will make your look very professional. This will help you get loyal followers, customers and help you create an impactful brand in your niche.

Learn to maintain your blog

Maintaining your blog is a regular part of your blogging journey. Even when you have a successful blogging business that runs itself well, you must do the maintenance steps. Here are some of the maintenance steps you should take.

Track the performance: When you constantly work on your blog, checking your performance will help you understand your progress, take steps according to it, and inspire you to work. Google search console and Google Analytics are the primary tools to track your progress. Paid tools like Semrush or Ahrefs provide more detailed information like backlink profiles, Keyword details, top pages, ranking, and stuff like that on your blog. Keeping track of them will also help you find potential issues or visitor drops on your website. You can quickly take action to fix that.

Proofread: When you don’t have any work, you can work on your older content to make them more tuned and SEO optimized. Remember that over-optimizing your content will do more harm than good. Also, if something shows good performance, don’t touch it.

Stay updated: Having a blog is a responsibility too. Nowadays, one of our primary information sources is the internet or blog. Thousands of people will read and get influenced by your content. So, it’s your responsibility to provide the most accurate information to them and stay updated about your niche to look for updated information. This allows you to spot outdated information about your place and edit them when needed. Also, keep your eye on the blogging community, Google updates, etc. Those are essential to adapt to the blogging world.

How does a blog make money

You may wonder, how do you make money as a blogger? There are a bunch of ways to earn money from your blog. All you need is the right audience and the right approach.

Once you have a good audience, you can present a service or recommendation they need and earn from that. But make sure you must not overdo it or do it in a way that does not negatively impact your audience.

Such as, if you suggest a relevant product in an appropriate place where your audience will be benefited, that’s a great way to earn affiliate income. But if you stuff your content with unnecessary, bad products, it will look unprofessional and greedy.

Let’s find out the different ways to income from your blog.

Ad network

Ad networks like Google AdSense and Adsera show ads in your website’s blank spaces and provide you with some revenue. It is one of the consistent ways of earning money from your blog. How much you earn from ads depends on how interested your audience is in the ads. More impression and click will help you make more money.

But you must follow some standard guidelines to get those ad networks’ approval. If you follow the discussion above in your blog, you will not be far behind in achieving their standard.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is another way to earn from your blog. If someone clicks on the affiliate link you provide as a suggestion and buys that, you will get a commission from the purchase. 

This is a common way to earn, but your blog must not look like you are blogging just to sell the affiliate product. The product should be part of the content that also adds value.

Make a subscription program

You can provide some extra service to your paid subscribers. You can offer them a free consultation, a weekly newsletter, access to your community forum, mentorship, or anything valuable for your subscribers. 

Sell online or offline products.

Once you created a brand in your niche, you can sell online products like an e-book written by you—or offline products such as branded T-shirts or your niche-related quality products.

Provide consulting service

When you have a successful blog in a niche, people will love to get a consultation from you. You can offer your audience a paid consultation service.

Sponsored post

When you have a running blog in a niche, many businesses will be willing to sponsor you to recommend them. This can be an extra way to income from your blog. But always try to avoid recommending unworthy services to your audience. It will be harmful to your brand and reputation.

Ways to promote your blog

First, a promotion project will only work if your content has value and quality. So maintain that first. You can significantly boost your blog’s visitors and performance with sensible promotion. Here are the ways to promote a blog.

SEO First

SEO is your best friend when it comes to promoting your blog search engines. It allows to Google or other search engines to navigate your blog correctly and show them as their search results. If you add value to your content and do the SEO perfectly, you’ll get more exposure than you anticipated in the first place.

Guest posting

You can contact related blogs of your niche and ask them to write a guest post. Doing this will benefit you in two ways. First, it will help you get some audience in your blog and provide you with a backlink, an important ranking factor for search engines. A blog with more backlinks has more authority score and more priority to the search engines.

Social media marketing

Social media can play an essential role in promoting your blog. But for that, you will have to identify which social media your audience is using the most. Social accounts of your blog can also be a ranking factor. Share valuable and engaging information and guide your audience to your blog. 

For instance, you can share an infographic on Instagram and ask the audience to visit your blog to learn more. Reels and Tiktok are among the most effective tactics to share your blog with many people. Staying active on social media can be a reliable source of audience.

Other ways

There is an abundance of ways to attract traffic to your blog. Here is a list of tactics you can follow.

1. Paid promotion: Promote your blog in the search engine (Google ads) or pay content creators for advertising.
2. Email marketing: Collect emails from the people interested in your work. You can send them direct updates and the link to their desired content.
3. Organizing events: Organize events related to your niche, start a podcast, or provide discount coupons to the audience.
4. Comments in Quora: You can answer people’s questions in Quora and tell them to visit your blog to learn more.

Five skills you need for blogging without major investments

Some essential skills can help you manage most things alone while blogging. Even if you appoint experts, they are worth learning. Here is the list with a short explanation of why you need them and how to learn.

Writing

You may have heard- “Content is the king.” Writing skills are the most crucial factor that can make you a successful blogger. For blogging, you need to learn the kind of writing that can help your audience to understand information easily. You can read other successful bloggers for that. Follow how they are writing and come up with your style.

SEO

As I already said, SEO knowledge is vital for blogging. You do not need to master hundreds of techniques. Just learn the basics very well. Start with what are the ranking factors, dive deep into keyword research, and the basics of learning on-page and off-page SEO.

Those will be enough to start a blog. But you shouldn’t stop learning as the market is always updating.

Graphic Designing

Content is often not enough. You need interesting photos and infographics that will attract people’s attention. You do not need to be a master at it. If you can edit photos, add your logo, and make presentable infographics, that should be enough. And there are tons of tools online that you can easily create simple logos, features images, infographics, etc in no time.

Marketing

With proper marketing knowledge, it will be easier to progress in blogging. You will need marketing to promote your blog, develop a business idea, and identify earning opportunities. Think like the site as a product and you need proper marketing strategies to market your website. It can be anything from newsletter marketing to starting a YouTube channel to promote your website, from going on different social media to running free campaigns on your site. The thing is, you shouldn’t totally rely on Google to get the maximum online exposure. 

Networking

Connect with niche experts and build a good relationship with them. Attend events and podcasts, and collaborate with other bloggers. Those networking skills will help you become an important person in your niche and also help promote your blog.

Know the downsides too

Blogging seems like a perfect career; once you succeed, money keeps flowing to you, and then you can afford people to work for you—an ideal plan for people who want to be rich and have a lot of free time. 

But in reality, it can be pretty costly for most people. About 81% of people never earn any money from blogging, and only 5-6% can make a full-time income. Let’s find out the downsides of blogging.

• Time and effort: Blogging requires much time and effort, which may cause less social life and freedom at first.
• Long-term commitment: Keeping yourself motivated and working consistently is often hard. It can take months or even years to get significant results.
• The curse of creativity: Coming up with content ideas and the urge to write something inspiring can often be overwhelming.
• Multitasking: You will often have to juggle between SEO, writing, maintaining, and other work.
• Uncertainty: Earning from a blog can often be unpredictable, particularly during the early stages. Relying solely on blogging as a source of income may involve financial risks.

Final thoughts

Congratulations on making it this far! We truly hope that you’ve found the help you needed to unlock the secret door of how to make money blogging. Building a successful blog is no small feat,  and it takes a lot of work to create a great blog, but with the correct knowledge and determination, you’ll be well on your way to developing yourself and becoming the best blogger out there.

Remember, consistency is key. Stick to the guidance you’ve received, but don’t be afraid to explore new ideas and innovations. Keep learning, and adapt to the ever-changing landscape of blogging. The moment you think you know everything, your decline starts. 

Good luck! Countless opportunities are waiting for you. Just go out and make your mark!

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