How to Make Money from Blogging (The Complete Beginner Guide)

Ever thought about launching your own blog? Ever wondered what it takes, not only to start up that blog but also to successfully build it over time to make money from blogging or generate a passive income online?

Clearly, you’re not alone.

There are numerous reasons why people venture into blogging and making money online is one of them!

Millions of people try their hand at blogging, but so few actually ever generate a substantial income from all efforts made.

However, if you’re starting a blog for the purposes of making money, and you’re not actually passionate about writing in the first place, then you’re largely wasting your time.

The art of blogging isn’t simply scientific or rocket science.

Without a deep-seated passion for your craft, you’ll face a tide of frustration and upset.

Why?

While it’s relatively easy to set up a blog, it is important to generate substantial traffic and profit from your arduous efforts.

You need focus, persistence, and perseverance to build that massive audience you need to make money blogging. It takes time and it takes hard work earning real cash online.

Take it from me. As an online marketer who understands the rudiments of online business, I can bask in the warm glow of success.

However, I can’t sit around for too long enjoying the freedom and passive income that my business has created. Without constantly adding insatiable content, any website can die off.

So, what does it take to start a successful blog and actually make money online?

I suppose that depends on what you consider successful and what you consider making money.
If like millions of other potential bloggers out there, you’re looking to rake it in, you’ll have a long road ahead.

But if you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, and you can stay persistent over the years (and yes, I said years), then you can most certainly generate a substantial income online.

In fact, your blog is quite possibly one of the best hubs of passive income generation, and if done the right way, it can attract the right clients and customers no matter what industry or niche you might be in.

In today’s guide, I want to show you what it takes to start making money blogging in Nigeria or anywhere you might be in the world.

 

How to Make Money from Blogging (Step by Step Guide)

Okay, if I haven’t dissuaded you just yet, and you’re serious about launching the next Gistlover, Gistnaija or Linda Ikeji Blog or whatever other blogs you might think is wildly successful in your eyes, then here’s what you need to do in a step-by-step guide.

The more you prepare and plan, the more likely you’ll be to succeed in the long term.

SETTING UP YOUR BLOG

 

1. Pick a Topic

Get clear on what you’ll write about. Define a topic or niche, and design all your content around those things.

This will help you to not only laser-focus your writing but also to build digital products and services that compliment your content.

This allows you to attract customers in, enticing them with your highly-informative posts, then tempting them with a lead magnet before dropping them into your sales funnel (more on that shortly).

webpages.

In the beginning, this might not seem as important. But as you grow and your traffic increases to thousands of visitors per day, this will be critical. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights to test things before and after the installation.

It’s also important that you set up a CDN, which will speed up the global delivery of your content.

For example, your page might load relatively quickly in the South Africa, but what happens when someone in Nigeria tries to load your content?

CDNs replicate data across multiple repositories around the world and make content delivery ultra-fast.

This is important for the user’s experience because 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

W3 Total Cache integrates with Amazon’s AWS and MaxCDN, two very good options when it comes to CDNs.

6. Install the AMP plugin

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an initiative by Google to speed up mobile accessibility to a large degree of their content. The AMP specification, which you can read more about here, helps to thin down a webpage to its basic structural components with scaled-back JS and minified CSS code, makes for lightning-fast page speeds.

7. Install Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics so that you can keep track of your efforts while building out your blog. This is a great way to keep track of your results while using the URL campaign builder when dropping links in social media and other places so that you can effectively determine where your traffic is coming from.

PREPARING YOUR BLOG FOR SEO

 

8. Enable Permalinks

In WordPress, you should enable permalinks before getting things off the ground, which will give you nice canonical URLs that are SEO-friendly. Permalinks are located within the settings > permalinks section of your WordPress admin and select the post name option.

9. Setup Google’s Webmaster Tools

Anyone who’s serious about building a blog and making money, needs to leverage Google’s webmaster tools to see what keywords they’re ranking for and any messages that would impact their ability to rank.

This will also allow you to submit an XML sitemap and track keyword impressions along with click-through rates.
This is one of the most useful tools for growing your site or blog through constant analysis of your efforts.

10. Learn SEO the Right Way

Although you shouldn’t start a blog with the intention of optimizing it to oblivion, you most certainly should understand the fundamental principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that you pay attention to the key aspects that will impact your ability to rank on search engines like Google.

Begin with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines mentioned above, and digest and implement that information. Learning SEO is a long and drawn out journey. You should always be increasing your knowledge and expanding your skill set.

Should in case you need somewhere to learn and master the science of SEO, then click here to contact us to learn how you can leverage our world-class digital marketing training to jump-start your SEO skill.

11. Regularly Build Useful Content

If you’re serious about succeeding with your blog, you need to build useful anchor content. It needs to be engaging, keyword-centric, insightful, unique and well written.

Don’t write your content for search engines. Rather, write your content for humans while also paying homage to search engines and what they want.
Simply put, it’s a skill that develops over time with practice. It’s also important to regularly publish your content on a weekly basis.

any keyword if it’s done the right way. There’s most certainly an art to this as well as a technical outline and to doing it the right way.
Don’t try to spam or overstuff keywords in an effort to market your content by any means.

Content marketing can be done with articles on sites like Medium.com or Scribd.com, it can be done by answering questions on Reddit or Quora, and it can be done with videos on YouTube or Vimeo, along with a variety of other means.

The point is that all of the content has to be useful, period. Don’t try to do the least amount of work for the greatest return. You need to do the exact opposite if you want to succeed.

MONETIZE YOUR BLOG

18. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service to your audience using special tracking links, and then get a referral commission for every time someone buys after clicking your link. (Click here to learn how to start affiliate marketing)

19. Display Google AdSense on Your Blog or Website

Google Adsense is an easy way to make money from your blog.
All you need to do is add a script from Google to your website and start displaying ads. You will get paid for every time a user clicks on the ad.
These are called CPC ads.

20. Use a WordPress Advertising Plugin to Sell Ads Directly

Directly selling banner ad space on your website can be more lucrative. Instead of having to rely on an intermediary who takes a cut of the money, you negotiate the price and terms on your own.

21. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts

Some bloggers aren’t interested in displaying ads to their audience and wonder how to monetize a blog without ads.

With ad networks, you lose some control over the content displayed on your site. Some readers will get annoyed or offended by ads, and more and more people are using ad blockers.

An alternative way to monetize a blog is through sponsorships.

A sponsorship works just like it does in sports, TV shows, or other industries. Basically, a company pays you to represent their product, talk about it, and promote it to your readers.

To get started, it’s a good idea to put together a one-page media kit that details your traffic stats, social media following, audience demographics, and any other data that will make your site more appealing to advertisers.
Then, you can approach companies to negotiate a sponsorship deal.

22. Get Paid to Write Reviews

Similar to sponsored posts, you can also make money by writing paid reviews on your site.

This is a slightly different monetization method than a review site with affiliate links, as mentioned above.
Instead, you get to try out products related to your niche for free, and even get paid for writing a review.

In conclusion:

Let’s face it, starting and running a blog can get costly. Don’t expect to get rich overnight.
However, you can take certain measures to monetize some of your content along the way.

Be sure that you remain topical with your content and that your lead magnets help to drop people into a sales funnel that will eventually sell your high-ticket items.

However, aside from that, you can always opt to generate small amounts of cash flow by doing other things such as creating articles that will lead people to courses or audiobooks that you’ve developed, or building out video tutorials that will ultimately sell some big package or system that will help to teach people whatever it is that you’re really good it.

There are numerous ways to monetize your content and make money blogging, but don’t try to take shortcuts along the way. Don’t look for the fast-buck if you’re serious about your long-term results.
Take action and stay persistent if you want to succeed and achieve your goals.

 

 

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