Blogging still can be one of the best traffic and income sources. It’s also a superb way to build an audience.
This is not something that will make you a lot of money overnight, but personally speaking, it’s one of the best ways to create a reliable online income source and it can also be a leveraged asset.
Blogging allows you to a certain kind of work once and it will work for you even in your sleep. Some of my blog posts generate leads and sales on a daily basis. Once written – works all the time.
It’s still one of the most underrated methods of creating a passive income.
On the contrary to social media – I love social media and I think it’s a great way to build your business BUT you don’t own it. You can get banned anytime and get your account deleted leaving you without anything. Not even a friend list or their emails.
A blog is an asset that you own entirely. You have 100% control. It will generate traffic and sales of your products and offers for years to come if you decide to put in some work.
Everyone should own a blog both for their personal brand and their own online business.
How To Start A Blog And Make Money
I will share with you the best ways to start making money with a blog. You can decide which methods resonate with you and which you would like to try out.
I won’t tell you in this post how to create a blog step-by-step because I already created one that you can find here:
-> How To Start A Blog Step-By-Step <-
If you’d rather let someone set up your blog for you then you can send me an email to [email protected] and I’ll send you the requirements. You will also receive extra bonuses to kick-start your blogging adventure.
Before I’ll tell you about money making there’s one important thing…
Blogging Is About Visitors – Never You!
A grave mistake is to try to monetize your blog from day one. Most people set up a blog, throw a bunch of ugly banners all over the pages and wishing they get some affiliate commissions. They also focus all their content on selling.
That’s a horrible strategy and a waste of your time.
Two things that really matter when building a successful blog:
- Audience (to get traffic to your blog)
- Generating leads (to build an email list)
If you don’t have an audience – you can’t sell anything. And in order to sell – people need to trust you.
How To Gain Trust?
The most important side of having a successful blog is attracting people who are interested in a specific niche. In order to achieve that you need to create high-quality content which your potential customer will appreciate.
What do most people do? They write only how much their product is awesome and why people should buy it. Basically, they just want to make a sale.
However, it’s crucial to follow the famous Pareto Principle. 80% of your efforts should go towards creating valuable content that attracts potential customers and only 20% of that content should be sales.
Your content should be focused on SOLVING PROBLEMS.
Solving problems that your potential customer is struggling and doesn’t have the slightest idea how to overcome the problem.
After creating lots of high-quality content packed with value – selling becomes effortless.
If you’ll try to pitch your reader in every blog post or page it will become super difficult to convince them to purchase anything.
Your content has to attract so much that they will want to subscribe to your email list for more information. Super attractive content will be more shareable across all social media. When people will want to share your content your reach will increase drastically and will bring more traffic to your blog.
More traffic means more sales if there’s enough value to be found.
You should also show empathy for your reader. Let them feel like you understand them and be able to solve their existing problems.
Focus on becoming a brilliant problem solver and your blog will grow. Only then making money will become a natural part of the whole process.
You have to impact a million people in order to make millions.
Create 1,000 TRUE Fans!
Most novice bloggers have this one big misconception…
They wrongly think that they have to be an expert or they need to have tremendous amounts of traffic send to their blogs. This is very far from the trust.
What you want to do is to create a tribe of one thousand true fans who know, like and trust you.
By creating a tribe of 1,000 true fans it will ensure a nice, full-time income. True fans follow you everywhere, buy everything and share positive information with their friends about your blog/page/courses/products.
iPhones and Macs from Apple are a perfect example. Every time they release a new product there is a certain percentage of people who immediately make orders. They even sleep outside the stores to be first in line when the shop opens early in the morning.
I’m aware that you’re not Apple and the focus of this post is different than becoming a billion dollar company. Our focus is to make your first $100,000 by blogging, right?
To make things look simple you only need to find 1,000 true fans who love what you’re doing and offer them a $100 product. It can be your own product and it also can be an affiliate offer.
The best part of having true fans is that they will keep buying and using your products (or the ones you’ve recommended) for months and years to come if you treat them well. I have offered products and services that some people are using since few years.
The most important lesson for you to understand is that you need only a few people to know, like and trust you so you can make a full-time online income. Straight from your home.
I hope that you see the enormous possibilities if you’re willing to put in the work. The Internet is pretty big, isn’t it?
Now, if you really comprehend that the key to making money online with a blog is to build a loyal audience (at least 1000 fans) we can move to the next lesson which are ways to monetize your blog.
But before I’ll tell you how to get people to your blog I’ll cover how to make money with it.
Making a sale is not the most important thing in making money online – it’s about collecting the person’s email address.
“Wait… Why?”
It’s pretty simple. People usually don’t buy things the first time they see you or your website because they don’t know you, like you or trust you enough.
When people come to your blog and don’t make a purchase they most probably will never come back.
When you build your email list with an auto-responder you can continue to follow up them and build a relationship and trust by sending them valuable tips, strategies and inspiration.
Once you manage to build a strong relationship with your subscribers you will be able to make a lot more money than just with a one-time offer.
When you’re a trusted person in the eyes of your subscribers you can continue to recommend your own products, affiliate services to continue to help them grow on their own journey.
By collecting emails from your audience you will be able to convert more of them into actual buyers and recurring customers over time.
This is the way to create a stable source of income month after month, year after year with a blog.
There are people on my email list who decided to make a purchase after a few months. They were just reading my content, my emails and eventually they bought something or joined an opportunity when the time was right for them.
There were also people who bought services worth $1,000+. That would never happen without building trust and odds of selling high ticket offers are super low if someone doesn’t know you beforehand.
If I would have focused all my efforts and content on selling people in the first minute I’m 100% sure I would only lose time and thousands of dollars.
Most people don’t buy right away. Always focus on getting an email rather than selling something fast.
An example on list-building with a blog:
1) You offer some kind of value in exchange for the email. It can be a free video course, ebook, free email lessons.
Here’s an example of a free training I offer someone to receive their email address.
2) Once they leave their email address they will receive a free video training delivered straight to their inbox. Instantly and on a daily basis.
The process looks like this. I get traffic from my blog/Facebook/Instagram. I’m offering something valuable for free. I deliver the gift over the next couple of days. After that I eventually sales and I can also continue to build the relationship with my readers.
Apply this extra step and you will make 10x more money than just sending a link to a product/service in a blog post or somewhere on Facebook/other social media.
This might seem overwhelming if you’re new, but I strongly believe that anyone who is dead serious about building a full-time online income can learn how to do the things I do.
Now when you understood how important is to build an email list – I want to show you the different ways you can use to make money online.
3 Best Ways To Earn Money Blogging
Affiliate Marketing
This is one of the easiest and safest ways to make money online.
Affiliate marketing, in other words, is the process of promoting someone else’s products and/or services. Upon registration you receive a unique affiliate link that’s registered to you and when somebody uses your link – you earn a commission. Mostly it’s a certain percentage of the sale you made through that link.
This is also the best way to get started if you’re a fresh person in the online earning niche and don’t have any products or services of your own.
Affiliate products can be found in almost every industry.
If you concentrate on creating valuable content to attract your audience and build up your email list you can easily monetize your blog this way. Using affiliate products, that is.
It’s a superb way to learn how to market online and earn money while doing it. I started my make money online journey from a completely different side (as a total newbie & in the end I was scammed… =) ).
Affiliate marketing is my #1 recommendation
I’ve learnt that after a few years of experience and results. For anyone new who hasn’t got any previous experience, technical skills or marketing skills – affiliate marketing is the best choice to start with.
The most crucial thing is to actually promote products you truly believe in and believe your customer will get value and improve his/her life or business.
At the end of the day, it takes ONLY ONE BAD product recommendation to burn your relationship, trust and personal brand with your audience… And it takes A LOT of time to rebuild everything IF even that’s possible.
Personally, I’m promoting products and services I’m using myself and I know they will be useful for my customers.
The best products to promote are recurring products or high ticket ones.
While promoting recurring services all you have to do is to sell the product once and you’ll keep getting paid every month. As long as that customer is using the product.
Promoting high ticket products of $1,000+ is also one of my favourite possibilities because it doesn’t take a lot of sales to hit the $100,000 a year mark.
But if you’re just getting started just stick to affiliate marketing and once you understand how to drive traffic and build an audience then you might want to move onto the second method.
Selling Your Own Products And/Or Services
When you get to the point when you feel as you’ve gained some experience and knowledge I suggest creating your own products and sell them – it’s more profitable.
Having your own products you could recruit affiliates who will promote your very own products.
Most successful marketers promoted only others’ products at first and focused only on creating content to help their audience.
As time goes on it’s great to create information products to solve problems which other people struggle with. It can be a series of videos when you’re breaking down a particular chunk of knowledge or services to help people with the technical aspects of a business.
You can create both digital or psychical products depending on the niche you’re in.
Once you get more confident and get to know better your industry it’s always worth the extra effort to create own products – you get 100% of the money!
The best part is that if you really want to help your audience, they will have requests of what could you create for them.
There is always a demand for knowledge or tutorials. Even if you won’t make any plans on creating your own info products, some of your fans will ask you for your own products or coaching services.
Coaching & Consulting
The best solution to create your own products is to offer coaching.
Once I started getting better results and sharing what I’m doing with my online business, people started reaching out to me asking could I help them or work with them personally.
If you can genuinely help other people then coaching can turn into a highly profitable service.
Having experience in your niche while other people are desperately searching for a mentor or course means you’re sitting on a potential gold mine.
You can make easily six figures a year from coaching and having only a handful of clients.
If you’re looking to create your own stuff, I strongly suggest starting with doing coaching. You can work 1 on 1 with your customers and figure out what they need help with.
You can easily learn how to create information products and figure out what are their struggles when working 1 on 1.
Coaching is not only profitable but also gives you an enormous amount of feedback on your style of teaching. After that, you can understand your target customer before creating any info-product and having to launch it to thousands of people.
