How to Start a Blog & Monetize in 2022 (Complete Guide)
Now is a great time to start blog and monetize it. Generate consistent revenues and build a business around it. It doesn't matter who you are or whether or not you have lots of startup capital. Learn how successful publishers monetize their blogs and how you can adapt their strategies to build wealth.
Reasons You Should Start a Blog
Businesses who blog have 400% more pages coming up in searches. (FORBES)
89,409 Google searches happen per second (SEMRUSH)
Blogging attracts 3X the qualified leads versus more traditional methods. (CMI)
90% of search traffic comes from your existing blog articles, not your new ones. (NEIL PATEL)
Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog articles each month
75% of people prefer reading articles under 1,000 words
Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say their most popular posts are long-form (2500+)
Publishing 2X week increases blog return on investment (ROI) by 57%
46% of people regularly take the advice of bloggers
34% of people say they've immediately bought something they didn't even know they needed after reading a blog about it. Wow!
But this isn't just about starting a blog and making money. How do bloggers make that money? And How do the start blogging their way to this kind of influence and outrageous profits? That's what this guide will show you --How to achieve monetization faster, more efficiently, and with less work.
What I'm not going to do is tell you there are 5 simple steps to monetizing a blog. There are more steps. But what you'll walk away with here is a solid understanding of blog monetization and how to do it yourself. Attract people. Grow and Audience. Gain Influence. Monetize that Audience.
Short on time? But want to learn the best way to start a blog and monetize it? Download this complete guide for easy offline reading anywhere. Take it with you and share it with your team.
In this Guide, You'll Learn:
10 Ways to Make More Money Blogging
Define Your Goals
Choose Your Niche
Research Your Audience
Choose Your Blog's Platform
Pick a Domain Name
Identify Endless Traffic-Driving Topics
Write a Blog Post
Optimize for Google Search (SEO)
Develop a Content Strategy
Install Analytics
Promote a Blog
Build an Audience
Monetize
20 Tips to Improve Your Blog
How to Make Money from a Blog (10 Ways)
To make money blogging, you have to have a plan to monetize your blog. And there are so many ways to do this. Your blog monetization channel depends on if you already have an existing product or service to promote. Or if you plan to monetize by having the blog take center stage.
However, in some Business models, you may want to tap into multiple blog monetization channels as long as those channels don't detract from your ability to meet your overall blogging goals.
If you're a lawn care services company, you could certainly choose to sign up for AdSense and put ads on your blog to make a little on the side. But this may turn off the leads you were trying to generate for your lawn care service, which is probably more valuable to you.
Let's look at 10 proven ways to generate consistent blog income.
1. Generate Leads
If you have an existing business, blogging is a top way to generate leads for your company, second only to video, especially if you're marketing business to business (B2B). Business decision-makers use blogs to understand their company's challenges and evaluate the possible solutions for those problems.
You can position your B2B blog as a helpful resource for these buyers. You'll use your blog to attract your target audience (business people who need what you sell) and guide them through the Buyer's Journey.
But even here, The way you use your blog to generate leads can vary.
You may direct readers to a contact form on your contact page. You may offer them a free download in exchange for their email address. Or you could provide a free audit, service, or trial for your product.
2. Sell Advertising Space | Use Google AdSense
Get paid to show ads for companies who are related to your niche. When someone clicks that ad, you get a few cents for each click. But this adds up once you have 10,000 or 50,000 people visiting your blog each day.
3. Sign Up for Affiliate Programs
Review and recommend affiliate products and get paid through their affiliate programs. Provide your honest reviews and sign up for their affiliate advertising program. Anytime someone clicks on that link, you share a percentage of the sale.
4. Sell Your Own Products and Services
Some businesses need to generate leads that they nurture to the point of a sale. Other products don't take much forethought. If you don't produce anything to sell yourself, you can make money with dropshipping. You build the audience. They send the products, manage returns, etc.
You can use your blog to promote these kinds of products or services directly.
5. Sell Digital Downloads
Maybe you have an eBook you want to promote. Blogging is a great way to give your audience just enough for free, so they want to buy the book.
Similarly, you might sell:
Templates
Infographics
Photos
Apps
Complete How-to Guide
Original Market Research
6. Launch a Profitable Online Course
Blogging can also be a great way to share your knowledge, so people want to sign up for your course.
7. Write Blogs for Someone Else
You can make a decent blogging income by blogging for others who are monetizing their blogs. If you plan to monetize this way, you'll also find this post helpful. You can just think about this guide in terms of your client's website instead of your own, and the skills you'll learn here will help them get the most out of their blog, which will increase your income.
If you're making money by selling your blogging skill to others, you can alternatively skip to section:
How to Write a Blog Post
8. Gate Certain Content
You can set your site up to offer some content for free. This content appears in search engines. Gated content typically does not,
But if you ungate a portion of the page it might. New York Times articles appear in search this way, even though most are gated.
What is Gated Content? Similar to a gated community, gated content is behind a login and/or paywall, you require visitors to log into your site to access your prime content. There may or may not be a nominal subscription fee like $3.99/mo. If you're a big-name news source, you can charge more obviously.
This content is hidden from search engines and generally inaccessible to the general public.
You can choose to have a free paywall as well. And you may be wondering how you make money if it's free. Simple.
First, every time this person logs in you can track how they interact with content. This can provide you with insights you wouldn't achieve if they freely accessed content.
Second, because they're now a member of your site, they're on your subscriber list, so you can increase the number of times they revisit your site to increase ad revenues.
This is one of the more stable ways to generate revenues because you have more power to increase visits through email.
9. Offer an Ad-Free Experience
You can also offer subscribers an ad-free experience. This would be similar to Hulu or YouTube offering you no ads if you pay a monthly fee. The fee paid fully off-sets any ad clicking they might have done.
You will hit the sweet spot on this fee when it's high enough that people see the value and come back, but low enough that they forget about it on their credit card statement. So they don't unenroll.
You can also offer levels. The first level free subscription has ads, paid level doesn't have ads.
10. Host Sponsored Blog Posts
Offer to publish blog posts written by businesses and influencers who want to tap into your audience to promote their followings. This serves a dual function. They pay you for the opportunity to publish. And they become a source of content for your audience.
They may also pay you to create the content and publish in on your site under their name (or yours as a content sponsor). This is similar to a YouTube Influencer creating a video sponsored by a brand they use.
But be sure to set down some ground rules. If you publish everything, you'll lose your audience's trust.
Now that we've looked at the many ways you can make money with a blog, I know you're ready to dive right in.
Want to help others Help others learn how to start a blog and monetize it? Don't forget to link to this page from your website.
Define Your Goals
With the above monetization channels in mind, it's time to decide what you want your blog to do for you. It needs a primary goal. This will drive your overall strategy. But you'll also define and track some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
These are the things you regularly measure so you can compare performance month to money (oops: I mean month) and year to year to grow your blogging success.
Let's say your goal is to generate $100,000/year from your blog within three years.
What KPIs do you need to track to tell you you're on your way?
For your website:
Daily traffic
Repeat visitors
Search rankings
Time spent on the page
Time spent on the site
Number of pages viewed
Monthly revenues
You'll set other goals for social like:
Net Follower Increase
Views