Biz Tips: How can one make money starting a blog?
GROWTH:
How can one make money starting a blog?
How can one make money starting a blog?
That’s a question I discovered on Quora some time ago. I decided to give an answer — and it ended up becoming quite popular with roughly 5 000 views.
Here it is:
You can sell advertising on your blog.
But you will make your blog less user friendly and slower to load, which in turn will damage your Google rankings and blog readership.
Nearly 50% of internet users tend to leave a site that takes more than 2 seconds to load.[1]
And if you place ads on a blog… a 2 second load time isn’t that unusual…
You risk hurting your brand by displaying shady ads for “captivating Russian ladies”, nail fungus medication and get-rich-quick schemes.
Because they can show up on your site, even if you use a respectable ad network like Google AdSense.
And the worst thing of all:
If you make money from ads… YOU are not really the winner.
You’re working hard to fill someone else’s pocket with money. You help someone else become richer by capitalizing on the audience YOU have spent time, sweat and blood to build.
Because let’s face it:
It wouldn’t make sense for them to buy advertising from you otherwise.
The same goes for affiliate marketing.
You hurt your brand by infesting the blog with affiliate links.
It will look spammy. Untrustworthy. Your readers will have a hard time knowing when to trust you, or when you’re just promoting something to earn a few bucks.
And I know how you feel. This sounds really negative, and you’re struggling to find out how else you can monetize your blog.
But there is a solution for you.
You can become the boss. You can cut out the middle man and take advantage of the audience your blog already has.
Because if you find something that your audience wants, and you start selling it yourself…
You can earn MUCH more money. And it’s all yours.
You are a blogger. Because of that, the easiest thing to sell is an information product. For example you can sell a paid email newsletter, an eBook or an online course.
Your audience is already in love with the blog posts you publish.
So when you start a paid newsletter, where readers pay a monthly fee to receive your exclusive newsletters in their inboxes, you know they already like your writing and crave more of it.
However, it’s not just a matter of creating a product and expecting people to pay for it.
People have to WANT it.
That’s why information products are the best type of product for bloggers to start out with. You’ve already validated the demand for your content and you’re just packaging it in a more digestible way.
But you still need to think about what value you provide to the reader.
- Maybe you make them laugh or feel better about themselves.
- Maybe you teach them to become stronger mentally, and more successful in business.
- Maybe you give them life advice or how-to-guides for knitting.
In some way, you need to make their lives slightly better than if your product didn’t exist.
Have a chat with your readers and ask them what issues they’re facing at the moment. If there is any particular type of content they want to see from you.
Search for blogs similar to yours on Google, and check if they sell any products that you can draw inspiration from.
You can also determine what topic to create an information product about, by checking the stats on your own blog.
Which posts are the most popular? Which ones have the most views and comments?
Do you get comments by readers who ask you the same thing, over and over again?
If you — or maybe another blog in the same niche as yours — had an insanely popular blog post some time ago, why not build upon it and make a book about it?
All this knowledge might help you find the ultimate product idea for your blog.
Once you’ve found out what product to create, you need to start an email list and grow it.
You can’t just start selling something and expect people to come to it by themselves. All you’d hear would be crickets.