Over the past two decades, people have earned a lot through the internet. You have many living examples of such people, if you are using Facebook you must have heard of its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and if you have used Amazon you must know about its CEO, Jeff Bezos. How did these people get money and become rich? What made them earn? Is it real? You might have come across these questions in your mind at least once in your lifetime. Well, as you know everything has its pros and cons; likewise, the blog and internet have the same, what these people just did was they used the pros of these to grow their idea and reach their goals. It is not something that can be done or achieved in a day or week; this needs patience, time, effort, skills, knowledge, and many more such qualities to be so.
There are many ways to earn online one such we are gonna discuss here is Blogging.
So what is blogging? What is a blog? Can we earn through blogging?
Please take 5 mins of your time to read this article; after that, I don’t want to hear your regrets. Because you missed this, and you will never find it again.
What is a Blog?
People, nowadays, when they encounter a bit of doubt or need a desperate solution, are making their way to search it on the internet. And where do you think the information that we get on the internet comes from? Yes, the information that we are getting on the internet comes from the blogs written by several bloggers across the world.
A blog is a website published on the World Wide Web (WWW) consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).
The blogs should be unique and contain genuine information.
A typical blog combines text, digital images, links to other blogs, web pages, and media related to its topic.
Blogging and Money
Skilled writers, efficient speakers, and talented artists show their hidden skills and talents through their words and art to the world.
And what do you think makes their income? Through their skill, the bloggers are earning. They are making their income out of blogging.
How Much Money Can Bloggers Make?
It’s pretty easy to make some extra money per month blogging in your first year. And then in the coming years, you can significantly increase your revenue.
There are reports that the average blogger salary is increasing per year; however, this is just based on several anonymously submitted salaries.
Many bloggers are earning lakhs per year for working about 10-30 hours a week. Blogger’s earnings mostly depend on how good he is at blogging and the content he is presenting.
Indian blogger earnings vary from INR7,500 to INR7,40,000 a month. On average, an Indian blogger earns approximately INR22,000 to INR30,000 a month. A few bloggers with 5 to 10 years of experience are earning from INR3,70,000 to INR7,40,000 a month.
And don’t think we’re making you think wrong! Because there are people who are treated as celebrity bloggers of India.
Here’s a list for you:
Amit Agarwal – Runs a technology-related blog known as Labnol, his income is about USD60,000.
Shradha Sharma – She has a blog called YourStory, she has one of the highest blogger earnings and earns about USD30,000 from her blog.
Malini Agrawal – She has one of the highest blogger earnings of about USD 30,000 from her blog called MissMalini.
Faisal Farooqui – His blog is known as Mouthshut. He is one of the bloggers with the highest-earning with earnings of about USD 50,000 per month.
Ashish Sinha – He has another highest earning around USD 18,000, his blog is called NextBigWhat.
You might have got a doubt that, How do these People Make Money?
Well most of them followed the steps, laws of blogging, and they used many available ways of earning through blogs like Affiliate marketing, Advertising, Freelancing, eCommerce, and many more.
Now let’s go to the interesting and main part of this article and know how to start a blog or site and earn through it.
How to Start a Blog that Makes Money?
Starting and maintaining a blog is not a piece of cake. It takes effort, time, investment (little), energy, skills, knowledge.
Many people have earned through blogging. Most of the youth are earning thousands to lakhs of money using different blogging platforms.
Few steps need to be followed to have a good and attractive blog that draws in an audience and hopefully can make you earn.
There is not anything to be worried about because they are simple and are manageable without any coding knowledge, and at the same time these are a little complicated, but no worries, after reading this article, you will get a good idea about blogging.
Steps Involved In Making a Blog and Earn Income
Step 1: Have an Idea for Your Blog.
Step 2: Have a Domain Name.
Step 3: Get a Hosting Service.
Step 4: Select a Platform.
Step 5: Have an Attractive Theme.
Step 6: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly.
Step 7: Time for Google Analytics.
Step 8: Setup Google Webmaster Tool.
Step 9: Learn SEO.
Step 10: Posting Regular Content.
Step 11: Set up Your Email List.
Step 12: Build an Audience.
Step 13: Get Social.
Step 14: Monetize Your Content.
Step 1: Have an Idea for Your Blog
Selecting your blog’s type or topic determines the rest of the website’s future.
Type is nothing but what you’re going to be writing about and hopefully making money through it.
There are practically many audiences out there for any topic, and there are some topics that perform better than others. You need to find a topic that has a good audience and performs better.
To find the perfect blog type (niche), you’ll need to look over both your and people’s interests.
You need to select the topic related to your talents or knowledge or career or skills, and you must love that topic cause if you don’t love the topic, you won’t be able to write about it day after day.
Pro tip: Write down 10 – 20 topics you’re interested in. It’ll help you keep your ideas focused and can help you make the final decision.
You need to find out what others are interested in. Otherwise, your blog might not attract a lot of people.
What topics are people interested in?
Here are a few popular categories that might work:
Personal finance, Online business, Fitness, Real estate, Careers, Test preparation, Science, and Technology.
Pro tip: You can use tools like Soovle, Ahrefs, and UberSuggest, to see how often people search for a specific category or niche.
Step 2: Have a Domain Name
It’s now time to choose your blog’s name.
Here are a few rules to keep in mind when choosing a domain name:
Keep it short (no more than 14 characters).
Easy to spell and pronounce (just keep it simple).
Avoid numbers and hyphens (it’s difficult to type out when you add hyphens).
Choose a .com, .net, or .org (these are easy for people to remember).
Pro tip: Having a good, simple, attractive, and easy domain name is preferable.
Step 3: Get a Hosting Service
What is hosting?
Every single website needs a web host, and this is where your website ‘lives.’
People who visit your website will do so through this server.
So as you can imagine how important it is.
There are many hosting providers like Hostinger, Bluehost, Godaddy.
Pro tip: For your first blog, you want a host that is popular, trusted, reliable, and reasonably priced.
Step 4: Select a Platform
Your website needs a content management system (CMS).
While WordPress is considered the most popular platform for blogging, there are others out there, such as Tumblr, Blogger, Wix, and Medium.
WordPress powers 30% of All websites.
Pro tip: Because of how popular WordPress is, most hosting services offer a one-click install for WordPress, and it’s super easy.
Step 5: Have an Attractive Theme
Having a good theme can attract more people. It’s just like getting dressed up.
There are different themes available for different types of blogs or sites; it’s upon you now which type of content is yours and which goes well and is handy with your blog.
Many sites offer themes at a very affordable price, and you need not know the coding stuff; it’s just that easy.
Pro tip: You can always try the free versions of any theme you need and later buy the theme you are satisfied with.
Step 6: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
As you know, most people nowadays use mobiles for surfing the web as it is very handy, easy, and takes less time.
Most platforms provide a mobile-friendly view for your site with just a single click, while there are many where you need to install an AMP plugin (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which is an initiative by Google to speed up mobile accessibility. AMP helps to thin down a webpage to its basic structural components with scaled-back JavaScript and minified CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) code.
Pro tip: It is important to make your site mobile-friendly cause 94% of searches are done using mobile.
Step 7: Time for Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a free analytical tool from Google, and it allows you to do things like:
Calculate how many people are visiting the website,
See what blog posts and pages are receiving the most visits, and
Find the demographic info of your visitors.
All you just need to do is sign up for a Google Analytics account and install it on your blog. There are thousands of videos on YouTube from where you can learn how to do it with ease.
Pro tip: Google Analytics is a great way to keep track of your results while placing links on social media so that you can easily determine where your traffic is coming from.
Step 8: Setup Google Webmaster Tool
Setting up a Google webmaster tool will allow you to submit an XML sitemap and track keyword impressions along with click-through rates. Anyone who is serious about building a blog to make money should use the Google webmaster tool.
It is a useful tool for growing your site or blog through constant analysis of your efforts.
Pro tip: This is very helpful to see what keywords are ranking and anything that would impact their ability to rank.
Step 9: Learn SEO
One should understand the fundamental principles of search engine optimization (SEO) so that they can pay attention to the key aspects that will impact the ability of a site to rank on search engines like Google.
Pro tip: You should always increase your knowledge and expand your skills as learning SEO is a long journey.
Step 10: Posting Regular Content
If you are serious about succeeding with your site or blog, you need to build useful content. It’s important to regularly publish your content; it’s a skill that develops over time with practice.
Pro tip: At first, start posting at least once a week.
Step 11: Set up Your Email List
One of the best ways to make money from your blog is through email marketing. But before you get there, you need to sign up for an email marketing platform like MailChimp, InfusionSoft, or any other platforms that exist out there.
Pro tip: Create an email list, and when publishing a blog post, just pinch your list.
Step 12: Build an Audience
Building an audience or fans is very important.
Pro tip: As long as you keep at it, you will get there. Typically, it takes a few years.
Step 13: Get Social
To help you along the road towards success, you have to get social. You can use marketing strategies on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms out there.
Pro tip: You can link up with other like-minded bloggers who are interested in online marketing and get engaged with them on different social media platforms.
Step 14: Monetize Your Content
Here comes the actual thing; Monetizing is the process of turning a non-revenue generating item into cash.
Do not expect to get rich overnight. Do not look for the fast buck; if you want to succeed and achieve your goals, take action, and stay persistent.
Immutable Laws for Monetization
There are some laws before you are going for blog monetization, and these laws are immutable. If you pay attention to these, you will succeed over time. Ignoring them will make it nearly impossible for you to drive any respectable amount of traffic and monetize your blog.
The core laws are Focus, Quality, Value, and Engagement.
1. Focus
You should focus on a specific niche or topic that you write about repeatedly. People want to visit a blog and keep revisiting it because it fills a need, and that happens by staying focused and on a single topic.
2. Quality
Generally, people think that blogging is all about pushing out an extreme amount of content. But your content needs have quality. It needs to be thorough and well-written.
3. Value
Every blog needs to deliver value. Take the time to provide good value. Value is a must to income in any industry, but especially in blogging.
4. Engagement
Your blog should make people spend a lot of time reading articles or watching videos or messaging on a forum. The more people engage with your content, the more likely they will be to purchase something from you.
Without engagement, there is very little chance of monetization.
Ways of Monetizing a Blog
To put it simply, how can you make money using a blog?
There are dozens of ways to monetize a blog, and we are going to discuss a few core methods that may help you earn a healthy income from your efforts.
Here we will discuss:
- Affiliate Marketing,
- Advertisements,
- Sell Ebooks,
- Sell Courses,
- Sell Digital Products,
- eCommerce,
- Sponsorships, and
- Memberships.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a popular method for monetizing a blog, and this method is predominantly useful when you are at the start and not having your products or services to sell.
You have to develop content that will be in harmony with whatever affiliate offers you are planning to have.
It is just like you recommend products that are helpful to that audience.
Pro tip: For example, if you are running a health blog, you can simply sell affiliate health or diet supplements. Here, the content is already attracting people interested in health, and selling these types of products helps you create an income.
2. Advertisements
Most people might think adding some ads will be a great way to make lots of money with their blogs. But the point to remember is unless you have 10,000+ visitors per day or more, then only the income will be consistent and marginal.
The real income flow does not start until you cross about 1 Lakh visitors per day.
Pro tip: Many Advertising platforms will pay you for placing their ads on your blog. One such is Google AdSense; however, qualifying for AdSense is a tough challenge nowadays.
You can also place advertisements of your own by contacting the local business that requires publicity and more sales.
3. Sell Ebooks
Relatively quick for making money from your blog.
You can develop an ebook that’s related to the content of your site.
Pro tip: If you’re teaching a skill that many people struggle with, it’s likely that the ebook will produce a healthy profit.
4. Sell Courses
Digital courses are another way you can earn from blogging. You can develop intuitive and helpful courses that add a tremendous amount of value
Pro tip: Courses work great when it comes to some technical skills like digital marketing, web development, and graphic design.
5. Sell Digital Products
Creating and selling a digital product is a great way to earn profit from your blog.
You can easily sell any type of digital information product on your blog as long as it is related to your content.
Pro tip: Digital products can be downloadable guides, a combination of videos, resources, PDFs, software components, and others.
6. eCommerce
It is just like having an online course on your blog. By selling a physical product to the people in your community especially if you are starting an eCommerce store to sell your products that are related to your blog.
Pro tip: This will work better with shipping and order fulfillment services. eCommerce has become one of the best industries these days, and it is the best way to earn online using blogs.
7. Sponsorships
Sponsorships are a great way to make money from blogs, you can create sponsored posts as long as you label them as sponsored, but you need significant traffic.
You have to be careful with sponsorships. Simply put, it’s not worth it, so be as transparent as possible.
Pro tip: You can go to your nearby local or small business and convince them to have an advertisement over the site by showing the audience you reach and how they can be benefited from this.
8. Memberships
Build yourself a community and create a membership for various stuff. Create forums or create a membership to provide exclusive content for members. Charge a membership and your blog is getting you money.
Pro tip: Many people need kinds of stuff like gifts, coupons, other such things, you provide them all such by charging a nominal membership charge.
Conclusion
It’s easy starting a blog; creating one that will be successful and makes you earn money requires hard work, dedication, and passion.
Blogs have become more affordable and accessible today than they have ever been before.
If you wanna start a blog, just remember that you are speaking to humans, so Be you. Be adventurous. Be honest and transparent.
