Want to Know How to Start a Blog and Make Money? Here's How

Even though we are living in a world full of video content and blogs are already saturated, there are still many ways to make blogging as your lucrative source of money. With a couple of methods like creating space for digital ads, earning commissions from programs you affiliate yourself with, or product sales of your own brand, you can earn thousands of dollars a month.

The potential revenue from blogging is basically unlimited, you can earn up to thousands of dollars even millions. But of course, not every blogger can do that, because the income you can get from blogging is based on two factors: your niche and your strategies of monetization. If you want to be successful in the blogging world, here's how to start a blog and make money.

Choose Your Niche

A niche is a topic that you will be writing about. Obviously you want to make and manage a blog of something that you like or you are passionate about, but unfortunately not all the things that you like are could be not profitable. So if you can, try to choose a niche that can be both interesting for you and also profitable.

For example, if you like cooking and have quite good skills, it could be a really good niche. Try to focus on cooking and recipes, then little by little the readers will build an association with your blog. By focusing on one thing on your blog, people will know what they expect to find every time they visit your blog, this will improve the chance that your blog will be their first place to go when they're looking for a recipe or advice about cooking.

Before thinking about monetization, you need to focus on your expertise and your blog's quality in order to stand out among thousands of other blogs out there. After choosing your niche, try to also find and build a persona you want to be every time you post something in your blog, a persona that would engage the visitors. Once that happens, you will start to get followers, and then you can think about monetization.

To choose a good niche you should consider three main criteria. First, it's something you know a lot about or good at. The higher the quality of your contents are, the more followers you can attract to your blog. With this, not only running a blog will be enjoyable since it's about something that you like and passionate about, it could really help with the monetization later.

After that, pick a niche that doesn't have many competitors. It'll be so hard to drive organic traffic into your blog if there are so many blogs with the same niche, especially well-established blogs with well-established brands that usually have big budgets for marketing. Try to do a Google search about your niche, and if there are so many blogs or brands on the first page, maybe think about other niches you can choose.

The third main criteria in choosing a good niche is to make sure that niche has a clear prospect of monetization in the future. Try to do some research to find out about this, are there many affiliate programs that are selling products in that field? Are there companies in that niche that will pay to advertise their products on other blogs? These two will tell you how good your prospect of monetization is.

Make an Email List

The next step on how to start a blog and make money is to build an email list. To start to make money from your blog, you need loyal followers and loyal readers who will value your recommendations. When someone wants to hear from your blog, they will give permission for you to reach their emails every time you have new content.

Use a pop-up box to try to get your blog's visitors into giving their email address. To do this, try to give whoever gives their email address some incentives like free checklists, lists of recommended products or resources, and some of your content packaged PDF like free recipes if your niche is about cooking.

Once these visitors sign up, don't take it for granted, and try to keep nurturing that relationship by always creating good content that is engaging, educational and entertaining. Once your signed up followers feel that they can trust you with your content, they will be ready to buy the products that you recommend. When your blog is getting bigger, you can also charge your email list for special and exclusive access.

Advertising Placements

A lot of companies are willing to pay popular bloggers to place their advertisement on their blog. When your blog is big enough for you to do this, don't ever refuse this opportunity. You can wait for companies to reach out to you, but you can also reach out first to the companies. Find companies that are related to your niche, and try to get them interested in put their advertisement on your blog.

To do this you need to have a lot of time and patience because this approach is time-consuming and quite hard. Also, you need to have strong negotiating and promoting skills to get those companies interested in your blog. Even though it's hard, once you succeed, you will get a steady amount of money every week, month or year, depending on the terms you agreed with the companies.

If you're not sure with your promoting and negotiating skills, you can also choose the hands-off approach by using internet platforms like Raptive, Mediavine, or of course, Google AdSense. These platforms will handle the advertisers billing once they claim a space on your blog page. You can simply embed the code on your blog, and then get paid for showing advertisements.

Affiliate Marketing Program

Join a program of affiliate marketing is another way on how to start a blog and make money. Affiliate marketing is the campaign of recommending products from companies to the audience of your blog. When your audience purchases the products by using your recommendation link, you will get commission from the companies according to the contract you signed with them.

To make your audience willing to buy products that you recommend on your blog, you need a quite high level of bond and trust from your audience. To do this, make sure you nurture your relationship with your audience by always making content that is good, educating and entertaining, and also connect with them via the comment sections, and make content based on their suggestions to make them feel heard and seen.

Affiliate marketing programs are a very advantageous way of getting money from your blog since you don't have to make the products yourself. All you need to do is just plug your blog into an existing business of e-commerce, and be their salesperson. You don't have to deal with or worry about customer service, product marketing, or shipping products but you still get the money.

Offering Services

After you build your audience, the natural byproduct is making more and more people associate you with the topics you write on your blog. If you have skills you're willing to offer to your audience, you can also do this on your blog. This is a low commitment way of making money, but with a high revenue prospect.

To remind you, running a blog that offers a service-based business could be really time-consuming but also could be a really good and quick way to make money. Use your blog content to demonstrate your skills and expertise, and find high-paying clients or demand a higher rate. The example of services you can do this on your blog is consulting, freelance writing, classes or workshops, virtual assistance, or graphic design.

Sell Physical Products

Try to always monitor your followers and loyal readers since loyal readers and followers can easily turn into raving fans and will be eager to support you. You can help them do that and also generate revenue for you by selling them physical products that are related with your blog and the things you write about on it. You can sell them t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, stickers, phone cases, or posters.

This method will work extremely well for a small blogging business since you will only have to pay for manufacturing costs when one of your readers buys a product. There's no storage fees, high upfront costs, or excess inventory.

Sell Digital Products

Aside from physical products, you can also sell digital products for your loyal readers and followers. This is quite convenient compared to service-based blogs or selling physical products on your blog since you don't have to exchange your time with money like a service-based blog and you don't have to deal with manufacture costs or shipping like selling physical products.

Not only that, selling digital products is also way easier and more convenient since you only need to make it once, and then sell an infinite number of them. You can start by making a survey on your blog to know what kind of digital products that your readers and followers would like to get from you. Some of the things you can offer them are digital classes, printable contents, workbooks, and e-books.

Expand to YouTube

The next step on how to start a blog and make money is to expand to YouTube once your blog is big enough to do this. You must realize that not everything can be written on blog posts and some things will be better conveyed with a video, and using a really popular platform like YouTube is a thing to be considered seriously once you see the opportunity.

You can make videos of tutorials or teaching or cooking and post it on YouTube, while also giving the link to your blog post for the complete written how-to. Expanding to YouTube is quite important since some people prefer to watch videos rather than reading a long text. By doing this, you are getting more followers from YouTube while not abandoning your blog's loyal readers.

An active YouTube channel will greatly enhance your revenue. You can only monetize your YouTube channel after you have 1.000 subscribers and 4.000 watch hours. After that, YouTube will place some advertisements before or in the middle of your videos, and every time a viewer sees it, you will get paid.

Podcast

Speaking of expanding, YouTube is not the only way to expand, because more and more people are also getting interested in podcasts. Sometimes you don't have the time to watch a long video since you have to do stuff like working, doing house chores or driving. But with podcasts, you can do all of those things while listening to it.

You can make a podcast of you talking about the things you usually write on your blog, and once your audience is big enough, you can attract companies to be your sponsor. You can recommend their products to your listeners while doing your podcasts, and in exchange, you will get paid. This is a really good prospect since study shows that 70% of listeners will at least visit the brand's website or search it on Google once they hear it on a podcast.

You can capitalize on your audience's attention by producing your own podcast, creating interesting episodes while talking about your niche in an entertaining way, and syndicating your podcast to popular streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcast.

The only downside with podcasts is that it could be costly both in money and time. You need high quality equipment to start a podcast like a microphone or editing software, while it could take a while to gather people to listen and build an audience.

Those are the ways on how to start a blog and make money. The things to remember is running a blog are to always be patient, and consistent. Good luck!