How to Make money online for free while Blogging? Blogging is one of my favorite strategies to make money online for beginners. There are so many college grads I know that used to wait tables or do other service jobs. Since those jobs are fewer and farther in between, many have turned to make money online from home. Before I get rolling into all the details you need to know about blogging, just know that it contains the best of both worlds, active and passive income methods.
Blogging is an active method that can turn into a passive income.
I mean that once you do the initial work, you can reap the rewards for months, even years to come.
In this article, You are going to learn our top 10 favorite methods to earn money online thru blogging, and I’ve also included a bonus module about traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of any business. I’ll review three must do methods for driving traffic to any blog or offer. With the right traffic to the right material or offer, you can begin to make money right away with your content. Turning traffic into fans is an art in itself. Growing a community of like-minded individuals is a gift and a skill to be honed.
How to bring a good user experience to a blog?
For many blog readers, if your blog delivers on their needs, they stay and read on. User experience is the goal. That experience stands at the intersection of what a brand claims to do versus the goal or intention of the searcher.
The key is to do some initial research and write information about what people are searching for. Most of the resources you need are free.
Doing the keyword research for the site is critical to bringing the right type of visitors. Single keywords get a general-interest audience, whereas long-tail keywords are much more specific search terms. The downside of long-tail keywords is that often times the search volume is just not there. Be prepared to give a full treatment to the questions and pain points around the main keyword. What, how-to, and why are the most frequented search phrases and are associated with long-tail keywords. If you’re writing a blog, you better be prepared to answer the what, how, and why.
Starting a blogging business venture is actually one of the very best ways to make money online today. You’ll want to focus on Branding, Quality, then Promotion.
Branding is how your site looks, the flow and organization of information, custom logos.
Quality, you’ll want to produce relevant content that answers any and all user challenges within that topic or niche. Quality also has to do with the type of mediums you’re using to convey information on the site. Video has an over 40% higher click-thru rate than the written word. You’ll need to be creative and compete on different levels with websites already in the space. Examples include Design, Visuals, Charts, infographics, screenshots, and video. Load speed is always a ranking factor and affects quality as well.
Promotion is the final item on the agenda but should be at the forefront of the website architecture. The way your site is structured should have Promotion in mind. For the most part, you could get paid every time someone clicks on the ads on your site, whether you’re actually making a sale or not.
Here are our top 10 favorite methods To Earn Money Thru Blogging:
1. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Make Money with Affiliate marketing through ads on your site and affiliate links via Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates. Display Google AdSense on WordPress. Over 40% of websites worldwide are WordPress sites. To add Google AdSense, it’s as simple as adding a widget to a sidebar on any page on your site.
You can sell advertising on your website via four different ad networks: Ezoic, AdSense, Market Vine, and AdNet. 20-30,000 visitors/month usually equates to $1000/month just by selling advertising. Around 10% of blog sites are making $1000-$10000/month. If you sell affiliate products, you open up another stream of income.
This can be done with traditional advertising methods such as Google AdSense or Amazon affiliates network. There are tons of affiliate networks. Some are pay per click, some represent physical, and some include digital products.
You can simply sign up for an affiliate program and start selling products related to your niche. Remember, it’s a competitive market place. Think of ways to offer more value if you are representing or selling products. Record how-to videos, conduct product demos and reviews. These are all helpful and valued. Leave the hype at the door and only carefully and methodically go over the different features, including the benefits and shortcomings. Once the consumer has the picture, let them make their own decision. If it’s a product you use in your daily business, demonstrate its use and benefits. Don’t forget to talk about costs as well as the potential return on investment.
2. Make a Question and Answer website
Make a Question and Answer website, restrict technical information to paid members only. Provide a free service, a paid service, and professionals only escalated service and matching fees. In that way, you demonstrate generosity and give value to the Free service. That generosity just naturally leads users into the paid service as they commit time and energies toward that subject.
3. Membership site
The third income type site we’re going to look at is a membership site. This involves maintaining and updating a website regularly. Each membership site, similar to the Question and Answer site, could earn you a monthly passive income with monthly or annual fees.
On a membership site, video tutorials and classes have higher perceived value, so be sure you include those with any paid site. Offer other resources associated with the niche that provide you affiliate commissions. Offer affiliate products or ads on a rotating carousel, so visitors see different product offers on other pages with lots of variety.
According to the newest data, 4.4 million blog posts are posted every day, so it’s clear many people are trying to make money online as bloggers. A full 95% of visitors to your website will never return again. This will vary depending on your industry. If you want a quick gut check of your website rates, simply open up your Google Analytics profile. Look specifically at the ratio between new and returning visitors.
One way to combat this lack of loyalty is by establishing a membership site. Consider giving rewards or bonuses for signing up and engaging. Offer additional rewards for referrals. Do live social media events bringing valuable information that is niche-specific. Membership sites encourage community building and sharing.
4. Sell digital products on your site
Sell digital products on your site, ePublishing/eBooks, and Online Courses or SAAS Products, also known as Software as a Solution product.
A. ePublishing/eBooks – Selling information in digital books.
Publishing EBooks
eBooks are the hottest digital product online. Sales in 2020 are projected to reach nearly $29 billion.
Source: Statista
B. Online Courses – Selling information and protected content.
Self-Paced E-Learning/Online Courses Market Growth
projects near $7Billion in annual growth over the next few years.
If you desire to build a strong personal brand, selling info products as courses could work for you. The global eLearning market was worth an impressive $107 billion in 2015. By 2025, however, Research and Markets believe that it will reach a staggering total market value of $325 billion.
C. SaaS Products – Selling Software as a solution product.
Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) Market Growth
SaaS market global growth is expected to exceed $132 billion in 2020 (69%). Source: Forbes
Like every other digital product, you don’t have to deal with inventory and shipping with SaaS. Another good part is that you have more control over your product’s price. The downside is that it’s resource-intensive. You’ll need to maintain a staff, both customer service and technical, first in the development phase, then in the product maintenance phase.
You’ve got an unlimited warehouse on the internet for product storage as one of the many benefits of selling digital products as opposed to selling physical products. Why Sell Digital Products Over Physical products?
High-profit margins, No shipping cost or restrictions, no
inventory or storage space and lower costs overall.
5. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts.
Once you get used to producing content, the process is the same, only the subject matter changes. Especially with influencers, raving fans gobble up any content they produce. Once your writing or any media is followed in mass, you can sell your writing services while bringing value to your tribe. We recommend avoiding Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, spend your energies on Pinterest, Linked In, and Google Plus. Our main reason is that you can control the traffic you have access to. Even with future changes to algorithms, you’re not going to get shut out from your hard-earned audience.
6. Get Paid to Write Reviews.
Very similar to Sponsored blog posts, My partner Nagendran and I started in digital marketing this way. We had to sharpen our skills, and because of the quick way to grow an audience, we chose video product reviews on YouTube.
We produced over 150 videos and drew an audience of over 250,000 views and over 2000 loyal followers, all in 7 months.
Nagu & Kevin
As well, the affiliate sales of digital products was a nice side effect of all that work. I’m convinced it’s the repetition and the systematic ways we produced the work that leads to our success. Nagendran, though he’s an engineer, is not even a native English speaker, and he did great.
Some combination of video and written reviews posted or linked back to your website will generate exposure to 10.4 billion daily viewers. You might say, Wow. However, it’s true, there are 5.4 billion daily searches on Google, and over 5 billion YouTube videos are consumed daily. Our background and success on YouTube open the door to higher traffic to our website with just the mention of it during interviews or discussions on related topics. Right now, we are focusing on our make money online website and blog. In a few weeks, we’ll work on a completely different niche, but in the same systematic way.
7. Earn Money Online by Flipping Websites.
Pick a Topic That Interests You. Begin with the end in mind. Select a topic for your website, set up the site, pick a monetization strategy. Brainstorm content ideas, grow your community as well as your email list.
With the right preparation, you can find a high potential online business for as low as $10K to $15K and sell it off for 20x to 40x its monthly profits in around a year.
Nagu and I take a different approach. With as little as $100, you can find a domain who’s name has a high search potential. We build out the site until it’s making $500-$1000/month, then sell it for 3 times the annual income, so $30k is a nice target price and affordable for a new business owner. Not a bad rate of return for when it ends up as 3-4 months of work and 7-8 months to mature, tweak and tune.
Some website developers build sites specifically to turn around and sell them after a year of content building and driving traffic. Sites sell for 2-3 times the income they bring in a year. The strategy is to use the money to finance teams to repeat the process many times over. When you sell a site, you also sell the domain, the content, as well as the source revenue. Remember, with the web site’s functionality, always begin with the end in mind. The whole idea behind the website is to eventually flip it.
8. Get Public Speaking Gigs as an Influencer.
Begin by doing smaller speaking events, such as podcasts, webinars, and smaller conferences. Bloggers beginning to get traction 2-5k views per month may try to supplement their content writing with Public speaking engagements. Ombudsmen clubs help Newbie speakers practice. There is a small monthly fee to join. I can tell you from personal experience, it was helpful with everything from an elevator sales pitch to being comfortable speaking to crowds of hundreds of people. Public seminars are another form of public speaking, extended sessions sometimes that help you get comfortable in front of a crowd. Seminar organizers and speakers get paid and gain brand recognition due to crowd exposure.
If you pursue this course, beginning speakers can lay the foundations of the brand and public awareness and gain momentum selling a book or product. If you read my article on sales funnels, the sky is the limit. If not, you owe it to yourself to check out my article on sales funnels here:
You might earn $500 – $2500 for a talk that has the same preparation as writing a normal 2500-3500 word blog post. If done correctly, a well-produced sales funnel representing the launch of a first book or new product might earn $5,000–$10,000. For those with several books or products, with the help of affiliate sales, and other forms of “social proof” might draw $10,000–$20,000. How would you like to do that three or four times per year?
9. Develop your email marketing skills.
Affiliate marketing involves you referring a client to a product. This can be done via email marketing. One of the most valuable assets an online business has is its list of contacts. The safest way to build a community is with an email list. Once you have a person’s email, there is nothing to stop you from contacting them. Your email list is so valuable that you must treat it carefully. Do not email too often or sound too spammy, or people will stop reading your messages or mark you as spam. But if you provide value to your email subscribers, you will soon see that every email will earn you several thousand dollars. You can sprinkle in applicable product offers with valuable information where you get a percentage of each sale. Suppose you have a website that already generates income. In that case, it makes sense to turn that into a full-time source of income by using the active versus passive methods discussed below.
10. Blogging as a service
Some of the most successful bloggers tend to be tech-savvy. If you are not one of them, don’t worry, you can hire out specific Upwork, Fiverr skills, or employ a virtual assistant for as little as $300/month, check out https://www.onlinejobs.ph/
I’m lucky in that my partner has a Masters Degree in computer sciences, so tech is a breeze. All I have to focus on is content, rich content. I follow the Gary V adage, I’m paraphrasing now… “More content is usually the answer to what is wrong with your website.”
Many websites use content writing services to get the word out about their products and services and specifically for blog content. Instead of paying for this type of service, writers can simply write content and sell it themselves, making a nice living from doing so. Anyone with a college-level education can be a content writer. The problem with sending out writing is what you get back lacks the consistency of tone.
If you farm out the writing, you get back a mishmash of articles, oftentimes only 75% finished. They need reorganization, and a fresh tone added. I’d rather us do it ourselves. Nagu, though an engineer, is an awesome writer and very prolific. I take a bit more time but am methodical and like to give any subject the full treatment. As well, I like to look at scholarly journals. I’ve got an English degree so I’m used to searching for and finding great journal references.
Web design and development. Bloggers who have web development skills have a leg up and are being sought after by companies ready to launch new products. Like content writing services, web designers also have to maintain their sites and build new ones. A person who has the skill for developing websites can make quite a tidy profit in just a few years.
If you can imagine yourself doing one of these top 10 methods for making money with a blog website, you are well on your way. You first need a vision of what direction you are going to take your website. To succeed and start making money with a Blog requires a period of sustained focus. With an existing site that already has traffic, you can start making money in a few months. With a new site, it takes 3-12 months to build up a critical mass of traffic.
What are the three key factors to generate traffic?
You don’t really make any sales, though, until you have traffic. Blogging as a means of making money usually involves these three key factors to generate traffic:
1. Building an audience for your site.
Pick your audience and communicate in a language that is specific to the interests within the niche. Include a lead capture page so you can collect visitor’s information. Have some free giveaway that is of value in exchange for visitors to contact information. This is called a lead magnet. Once you have the visitors’ knowledge, set up an email marketing campaign that is automated. You want your email marketing to systematically reach out to visitors and bring them value and other product offers regularly.
2. Create and publish unique, relevant content on a specific topic.
Do the research via keyword research. A keyword is a broad search term. An example of a general search keyword is Dog training. An example of a narrower, more specific long-tail keyword is Behavioral Conditioning for dogs. This is one type of dog training.
You’ll want to explore ways of monetizing that audience over time. Some useful methods of making money from the visitors to the site include advertising, affiliate sales, and education. Enthusiasts want more of the same topics. Be creative, give your audience, your tribe, more of what they want. Creating E-Books or advanced Video courses are other ways of increasing sales and brand authority at the same time. If you’re active on social media, Pinterest and LinkedIn are great ways to build both brand and source. Include Google Plus, so that algorithm changes don’t affect your traffic as much.
Once you have an audience and traffic to your site in the form of visitors, then you have an opportunity to make some money.
3. Build a list and start email marketing
You have each member’s contact information. Begin email marketing. Add a video clip inside your emails and enjoy an 80% high open-rate. Condition your audience that you’ll be communicating with them regularly and showing them offers or products you think they may find valuable. If you’re promoting on YouTube, one video per week is on average what content producers are doing. Always segment your audience if your marketing in multiple niches. Be sure to segment our product offers as well. Never offer cat lovers doggy squeezy toys, for example.
If you’re willing to stay focused, build an audience, create unique content that serves to inform, and then build relationships via email marketing, you can succeed at making money with a blog. How much money? Review the article above. Within our top ten list, there should be something that interests you and ignites your passion for going for it. I’ve also given you enough information on each of the top ten methods of making money from blogging that you have a clear picture of what it takes to succeed with each technique.
Conclusion
Most people go wrong when first trying to make money online with a blog website. If you have no plan, then simply take the time to build one. Create a vision for what you want the site to look like. Check out your competition and see what your up against. Perhaps use what they have created to inspire you. Be creative and open to competing on a different level. Ignore the naysayers. Be flexible, productive, and patient. These are invaluable qualities that everyone should know but are typically overlooked. I hope you have enjoyed our top 10 favorite ways to promote your blog site and start making money from it.
