How to Earn Money Blogging for Beginners

Trying to earn cash as a blogger can be a frustrating and difficult venture especially if you’re not well prepared. Here are some tips to guide you on the right topics for a blog, how to set up a blog and how to earn your first four-figures.

Creating and running a blog as a source of living can be very challenging. At the biggening, most people don’t know what a blog is or how they can use blogs to earn a living.

Most people already have jobs and are only looking for ways to make more money. They don’t want to continue working a 9 to 5 job, and the weekends that are meant for resting are very short. Some of the great things about working a regular job is having regular paychecks, steady health insurance and socializing with your coworkers.

Other than that, most people don’t enjoy their 9 to 5 jobs. What this means is;

You won’t have to deal with office politics
Being unappreciated and seem like your contributions don’t matter
Needing to get permission whenever you need some time off work
Not being in control of your income

A great solution to such situations would be to start a business. But, starting a blog wouldn’t be the first thing that comes into anyone’s mind at first. However, once you start your blog and work hard towards building it up, you’ll eventually end up owning a six-figure business.

Our Blogging Story

At the beginning, Ben (my business partner) and I weren’t planning on starting a blog. We just fell into blogging by chance. The business began in 2014. We originally began the business as an investment membership site. We were getting paid to give detailed analysis on the stock market and certain insights on the right places for people to invest their money in.

Unfortunately, our idea didn’t work out exactly as we’d planned. In fact, we only managed to make $29.00 in the first 18 months we worked. Since the original plan wasn’t going well, we needed to come up with a plan B.

This is how we came to learn about blogging. It came to our attention that a lot of people were earning thousands, and even more every month from just blogging. Although the first idea failed miserably, none of us was ready to go back to working a 9 to 5 job we had previously left. So, we decided to give blogging a chance.

At the begging, things were moving pretty slowly with our blogging venture, but instead of giving up, we conducted some research, learned from other bloggers and tried out different strategies until we eventually figured things out.

Note: The graph above is an old one. Our websites are currently making at least $100,000 monthly. However, the graph outlines a perfect picture of what we experienced during the first several years being in business.

That minor experience with success gave us the push we required to continue working hard. After that, we managed to increase our monthly income without failing.

If we had referred to a guide similar to this one when we initially began the business, we probable would have managed to skip the first few years of turmoil, confusion and stress and reached our current success within a short time.

When we first ventured into blogging, we didn’t know how we could earn money from it. Fortunately, we experienced a couple of hurdles and made some mistakes so that you wouldn’t have to. Before we get into all the details on how you can monetize a blog, here some things you need to be aware about…

4 Ways of Earning Money Through Blogging

There are several easy and fast ways that you can use to earn money from blogging, but there are others that require a lot of effort and time to build.

There are numerous monetization options available for bloggers, and you can even choose to use more than one of them. It would actually be a good idea to have several different revenue streams. This way, you’ll have something to bounce back on incase of an emergency without having to worry about being broke.

However, it is advisable to concentrate on one or two of them at first. Secure one source of income before you can explore the another one.

When it comes to blogging, there are more than one “right” way(s) to make money from. The kind of income generating streams you opt for are determined by the blog’s topic and your audience. Let’s explore a couple of the most effective and popularly used of earning money from blogs.

1. Advertising

Most of the people that consider blogging do so as an easy and secure way to make some money. Though blogging isn’t the most rewarding income generating ventures, it’s one of the best and easiest methods to begin. There are different methods of earning money through advertising on your blog.

Display Ads

I bet you’ve seen those car and clothes adds when you visit a website or was browsing for something on Amazon.

They are known as display ads. Every time someone clicks on one of the ads, the site gets some sort of commission, and that’s why it is referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. For example, Erin Lives Whole by Erin rely on display adds as a means of making money for her recipes.

However, we don’t really recommend relying on display ads as your main source of earning money on your blog because of the following reasons:

It doesn’t make a great user experience. If you’ve visited different websites, you must have experienced one of two sites that have pop up ads after every two seconds while you’re on the page.
They are dependent of how much traffic your page gets. Ads require a page to have a good amount of traffic so that they are able to make enough money from display ads.
It prevents people from visiting your website. You’ll make $0.80 each time someone clicks on an add that’s on your site. But other sites are now using the same method to make money.

Google AdSense is the simplest PPC method that any site can use at the beginning. However, if you’re looking to earn some good money through ads, your site needs to have enough traffic. By the time your page gets the required amount of traffic, you’ll have to rely on companies that do ad management such as AdThrive (with at least 100,000 pageviews per month) or Mediavine (which requires at least 25,000 impressions per month in order to join).

Generally, the use of display ads on blogs isn’t the ideal way to make money. There are a couple of different ways that are much better and guaranteed for your blog to earn money without turning people away from your site.

Note that, this isn’t the only kind of advertising that’s available.

Giveaways and Reviews

Another way you can use your blog for advertising is by doing reviews for products and services on behalf of large companies, or running a giveaway.

Most times, a company will seek the services of a blogger to write a review about them or their products. In turn, they’ll then let you keep the product you’re reviewing without any charges. When it comes to giveaways, a company may give you two products, one for you to keep and the other for the winner’s prize.

If you’re looking for a way to get free things, this is the best option. However, if you’d like to make some money from advertising, you can opt for other ways to use your blog.

2. Affiliate Marketing

This is one of the most reliable methods of making money on websites. It also happens to be our favorite one.

Affiliate networks comprise of numerous products and services that can all be promoted in a single place. On the other hand, if you’d like to make more money, make sure that you’re working directly with company you’re going to be promoting especially if they are familiar with affiliate marketing.

Jen Wang, a fashion blogger and writer of the Extra Petite article places affiliate links for clothing goods which she references in different areas of the post.

Affiliate marketing enables you to create content and make money from it for a long time depending on how many people find it useful. You’ll need to update the content on a regular basis ensuring that your articles are still relevant. This is also a reliable of using your blog to make some money especially if you just began blogging as way of earning a living.

3. Digital Products

Another great way of earning some money through your blog is by using digital products. Instead of selling products and services for someone else, you can come up with something by yourself and sell it to your readers.

There are a variety of things you can decide to sell in terms of digital products, but we’re only going to discuss about the ones we’re familiar with and are ranked as the top three.

Workbooks and Ebooks

The first thing that we ever invented was an eBook. This happened while we were still on our first business of selling investment information online (this was before we discovered blogging), and as we’ve mentioned before, the business wasn’t a success.

However, some bloggers in the market are cashing out a lot of money thanks to the sales they’re getting from eBooks and workbooks.

One of the bloggers is the writer of The Busy Budgeter, Rosemarie Groner. She has a Budget Boot Camp Workbook that is available at $27, as well as several other worksheets and workbooks.

The difference between eBooks and workbooks is brought about by how much activity and involvement is seen from the reader’s side. eBooks mainly comprise of text with at least one or two exercises included in them. Workbooks assist readers to perform or accomplish certain things by guiding them through the entire process.

For example, in Rosemaries’s workbook for budgeting, she guides her audience on the right way to make a budget and organize their finances. eBooks and workbooks the be best digital products to start using because they are quite easy to create compared to the next digital product we’ll discuss about.

Online Courses

This is one of the most popular monetization processes that has been in the market in the past two years. Most bloggers are using this method to earn a reliable amount of money online through selling premium courses.

The owners of Create and Go, Alex and Lauren, earn at least $50,000 every month by selling online courses and digital products.

However, this method requires more time compared to other digital products, but the kind of profit margins you’ll get are way higher than the others.

Membership Sites

Membership sites are just paid online communities. The site gets paid monthly subscription fees so that people can have access to premium content. This could comprise of workbooks and printables, weekly classes, tutorials, videos or any other service that you can provide. It can be viewed as a mix of teaching and community.

Meera Kothand, with the help of her ADDICTED Business Academy provides community groups that are strictly for members only, a live and pre-recorded monthly training and one-on-one personalized coaching.

You can use memberships as a way of monetizing your blog or website, especially if you’re new at blogging. The best way to begin is with minimal digital products and affiliate marketing.

4. Services

Although providing services is the fastest way for you to earn some money with your blog, however, the method is not very scalable. Your blog will act as you portfolio when pitching products and services to clients, this enables you to earn cash both by working for other people and building your own revenue streams.

Digital Marketing

If you haven’t realized it already, blogging comprises of a lot more than publishing and writing articles. Once you’re familiar enough with bogging, you can now start learning about content marketing, social media strategies, SEO, design among other things.

Most of these things can be categorized as digital marketing, and they’re very valuable to other kinds of businesses.

Millennial Money Man’s Bobby Hoyt says he discovered this immediately after he began blogging. He wasn’t earning any money from his blog at the time, that’s how he decided to look for other ways to make some extra money. He then decided to reach out to different businesses and offer his services using the tools he learned when he was blogging (social media strategy, Facebook ads, writing online content and much more).

He was able to transform the idea into the perfect side hustle that enabled him to continue growing his online businesses and building the blog. He’s currently a full-time blogger and earns some extra cash using courses that educate other bloggers on the best ways to earn cash on Facebook through running ads on behalf of other companies.

Virtual Assistant

Online entrepreneurs prefer using the services of virtual assistants. A virtual assistants tasks vary from handling administrative work for business owners to email marketing to design. Using a virtual assistant is an affordable to get some tasks in your business taken care of.

The kind of task you’ll be given depends on your skills and how experienced you are. For instance, if you’re grammar and spelling is impeccable, you are more qualified to proofread articles before they are posted on people’s websites.

The blogger of mom and lifestyle, Jenny Weg managed to monetize her blog at once and began earning $2,000 every month for providing virtual assistant sevices.

Freelance Writing

Freelance writing is among the simplest and popularly used services that first time bloggers offer. Since blogging entails writing content for a website, you can use the skill to earn some money by writing for someone else.

This is also a good way to get your name out there as well as to practice and improve on your writing skills. You’ll also be able to build authority especially if you’re writing for websites that are in the same niche as you.

Don’t assume that “freelancing” means that you’ll be working for pennies. A lot of bloggers earns as much as a six figure salary yearly just from freelance writing.

How to Earn Cash Blogging: A Guide to Your First 1,000

Since you’re now familiar with the numerous ways that you can monetize your blog, we can now discuss about strategy. If you follow all the steps mentioned above without failure, you’re sure of making enough money from your blog in just a few months.

Having said that, your first $1,000 that comes from your blog is most likely going to be the most challenging money you’ll ever make in general. However, once you manage to make $1,000, things will become easier for you.

You’ll be amazed with how quickly your blog is going to grow and how positively your life will change after you manage to overcome the main hurdle of profitability. Don’t give up easily if you want to succeed in your venture.

If you’re looking for something that will save you from working a 9-to-5 job and still be able to enough income for your home, one way to accomplish this is by blogging. The following are the precise steps that have to be done in order to earn $1,000 from blogging, even for first-time boggers.

Step 1: Choose a Blog Niche

This is likely the main mental roadblock that you’ll find out there: people are mistaken by thinking that they have to find a topic that is 100% unique that other people haven’t thought and written about before. Even worse is thinking that you only need to write about something that you’re passionate about.

Food for thought: We’re not “passionate” about the topics we post on our blogs (blogging/business and personal finance). Although we don’t mind both topics, it doesn’t mean that we have a primal calling that makes us write about them. I really don’t mind writing about both topics, and this is all the motivation to get me going.

Don’t be mistaken, there are already numerous other blogs in the market that also write about these topics. The internet is a pretty large place, but you can be rest assured that there’s enough room for everybody.

So, what topic can you write about?

If you’re looking for a means to earn money from you blog, take all the decisions you make like they are serious business decisions. When you’re trying to come up with a niche for your blog, you’ll need to use some common sense:

The following are the things you need to be put into consideration:

Pick a topic that you’re interested in. This way you’ll enjoy writing your blog and prevents you from losing interest within a short time.
Look for a topic that other people are also interested in. For example, if you’re going to write about Himalayan basket weaving for men, your blog won’t get as many readers as you’d like. This means that you won’t be making enough money from your blog. Look for a topic that both you and your readers will be interested in. My main blog revolves around giving advice about money. Since I’m a finance nerd and luckily, a lot of people on the internet are looking for information about this topic.
You really DON’T need to be an expert on the topic you pick. You only need to have a bit more information about the topic of choice than what your readers know.

Come up with a question about whether or not that specific niche is great for generating income. Visit our Facebook group and post your question where you’ll receive very useful feedback.

Step 2: Set up your blog (if it’s nor already set up)

Before you can make money from your blog, you need to have one first. If your blog is already set up, then you don’t need this step.

If you don’t have a blog set up, the first thing you need to do is to conduct some research. You’ll eventually need to stop researching and set up the blog. This step is mainly about this.

Consider WordPress as the home for your blog. Since it’s the easiest to operate (and also the most powerful) CMS (Content Management System) out there. WordPress makes things easier for regular people in terms of running and building websites with the exception of a web developer.

Using WordPress doesn’t require you to have any coding knowledge before using it. You can select what your blog needs from the two main choices: “Free WordPress” on WordPress or “Self-Hosted.”

If you’re looking for an option that will help you make money without difficulty, go for the Self-hosted option. You’ll be required to pay for own web hosting, but this option will also provide you with enough flexibility when it comes to monetization, usability and site design.

Hosting is quite affordable, especially if you opt for HostGator’s coupon code (when checking out, use the code MILLIONABLE). Depending on the kind of hosting plan you’re using, you’ll only have to pay a few dollars per month.

There are several key variances between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

If you’re using the free WordPress version, you won’t have a lot of freedom when you need to change things on your site. Also, if you’re using the free version, WordPress automatically become the owners of your site (this means you really don’t own your site). The free WordPress version also makes a website appear unprofessional. For example, instead of ending with .com, you’ll be left with something like “mysite.wordpress.com”.

There isn’t even a single successful blogger (when considering income) who uses the free WordPress version. Self-hosting is the right option for someone looking to earn some money from blogging. For more detailed information look at our free guide on the right way to begin blogging with WordPress.

Step 3: Come up with helpful Content

By now, you should have already set up your blog and are sure of the niche you’re comfortably going to write about. Once your blog is et up, you can start writing some interesting blog posts.

If your main goal is to make some money from the blog, you’ll have to be more strategic on the kind of content you want to write about and how it can be written.

The following is a general framework that can be used when planning for your content, at least at the beginning. Your main goal should be writing articles that other people can relate to and would be interested in. You wouldn’t want to end up writing articles that no one will read.

Its pretty simple. How effective is this strategy? There already other people earning money blogging about the same topic you chose. The topic can also help you make more money than you’ve ever made before.

This means that they managed to crack the code, and you won’t lose anything by trying to match their success. Try to be creative, don’t just copy exactly what they are doing.

Create Purposeful Content

Each of the content ideas you come up with should have a cause:

Build your authority
Earn some cash through affiliate sales
Ensure that your Facebook group is growing
Get readers to sign up for your daily email blasts

This should apply to all the content you create. Let your readers know what is expected of them after they finish reading your blog.

Practice Makes Perfect

It takes a lot of practice to find the right kind of content that you’d like to use on your blog. You’ll even find yourself writing a couple of articles which you will end up deleting, but that’s okay. Most bloggers experience this (trust me).

Note that the number of articles you write depends on how much you practiced. This will also make it easy for you to familiarize yourself with your audience, ensuring that you have a better understanding of the kind of content they want to read.

Structuring Your Blog Post to Get People to Read Them

Use this as your mantra; “I am NOT going to use any walls of text”.

Avoid using any walls of text in your content because they will end up killing your bog posts. You can’t write your blog using the same methods you were taught about writing while still in school. Long pages, paragraphs and pages with solid and many more are actually going to bore your readers to death.

This is what I mean:

Don’t use long paragraphs. What about structure? Are you writing your blog posts in a similar way as essays are written?

The trick is to break the articles down into small sizes. You can use the template below to guide you:

Make sure you’ve written enough content that will fill up your blog, and then you can proceed to the next step.

Step 4: Choose a Single Social Media Network

When we (Ben and I) initially began blogging, we made sure we had representation everywhere, at all times. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Quora, Linked, Quibb, StumbleUpon, you name it, we made sure we were everywhere.

Guess what? We didn’t have enough traffic for a long while. Things weren’t really good for us. We were stuck at the same spot even after all that struggle. And the worst part was no money was coming in.

That is how we finally decided to focus all our efforts on Pinterest, neither one of us had used the platform before until this point. The amazing thing about that decision is that Pinterest actually turned things for us.

Your new website won’t get higher ranking on Google overnight, but using Pinterest as an alternative will be the perfect secret weapon. New bloggers can use the platform as the best way to advertise themselves out there.

The Proper Way to Dominate Pinterest as You Grow Your Traffic

Most first-time bloggers should focus 100% exclusively on Pinterest if they’d like to get a more substantial stream of continuous traffic. This will be a really great way to spend your time especially since you’re just starting your blog.

We’ll take a sneak peak at the basics of how you can set up your account here. However, if you need a more detailed guide so that you can grow your traffic on Pinterest, then you should check out this course by Create and Go, Pinterest Traffic Avalanche.

Create a Business Account and Set Up “Rich Pins”

Ensure that you’re not using you personal Pinterest account to built up your website’s profile. Using a business account will gain you access to Pinterest Analytics, plus you’ll also be able to create “Rich Pins.” You can promote your pins by paying Pinterest via your business account, but this won’t be necessary. We tried this out by paying for promoted pins worth $50 before we discovered that we were able to make our pins popular without any help or the use of ads.

If you want your pins to stand out more, use Rich Pins because they add bold ink to the title you used to describe your pin with. It’s pretty easy to get rich pins (plus they’re completely free). All you need to do is confirm your website on Pinterest.

Create a “Best of” Board

When you have a business account, you can proceed to create a “Best Of” board. The board’s main purpose is to cater for pins which are linked to the content you have in your personal website. Don’t feature other people’s pins here. You can create several other boards to handle that.

When other people are perusing through your account trying to figure out whether they are going to follow you or not. They’ll use the board as a way of knowing the kind of content you’ll be posting on your Pinterest page. Ensure that the board description has enough key words which people may search for.

The main goal is for your board to have 50 or more pins. If what you have isn’t enough to fill out your profile, you can opt to…

Create Numerous Pins for Every Blog Post

This step is important for various reasons. First and foremost, ensure that all your pins have A/B testing.

“You can have the greatest content out there, but if it doesn’t entice people to click on your pin, you’d have just wasted some valuable time.”

Try out various image backgrounds, different CTA (call to action), or even a couple of key words in the description.

A great advantage of creating numerous pins is it being easy for readers to find the total pin count attached to your “Best Of” board. It also makes it easier to register for group boards, especially since the main goal is to have a decent portfolio with pins that can be shared around.

For example, we create 2 to 3 different pins for every article we post. However, there are instances when we create close to 10 pins when we think the article deserves to get more attention from our readers.

Brand Your Pins to Stand Out

Most first-time bloggers don’t do a great job at the beginning when they’re making pins for their blogs. Don’t worry coz with time you’ll know how to do it well. A great way to get a grasp on how to make the best pins for your Pinterest account is by looking at other people’s feeds. For example:

The first thing you recognize when you see the pin is that it belongs to Pauline Cabrera, the owner of brandglowup.com. Without knowing it, I found myself subconsciously recognizing he pins which are purple-themed and are written using a crisp block font. Like you already know, these pins contain some great content, so don’t shy away from clicking on them and reading the content behind them.

This is how I realized the importance of branding in regards to creating pins, as long as the content you have is great. The main reason as to why I clicked on Pauline’s pin is because it really caught my eye unlike most of the other pins that were visible on my feed.

Pauline’s branding designs also came in handy when we started our BTOP (as we merged with Millionable) as it really helped us in terms of design and branding. The following are some of the pins we began with:

Some Key Points to Note In Regards to The Pins:

All the pins contain the same percentage of the main brand orange color.
Every pin includes both the .com address and a logo ensuring that there’s brand awareness/recognition.
Pins containing both block font and scripts have a better performance.
There’s no specific rigid format for every pin. We ensure that they are switched up on a regular basis, although the theme remains the same.
We use a white/light theme for all the background images. This is a great way of making the letters stand out.

If you’d like to gain more recognition on Pinterest, make sure that the branding you’re using is rock solid. Most people choose to use Photoshop or Canva for designing their pins, but we opt for a more old-fashioned method, PowerPoint. Go for what suits you better. Since is used PowerPoint for my school projects, I also decided to use it to design my pins.

Join Group Boards

This is where you’ll realize that Pinterest can be interesting. If you’re not aware, how many followers you get on Pinterest isn’t an important factor. The thing that really matters is how much involvement your followers have.

Group boards are an important aspect here. A group board is actually a board found in another person’s profile which they allow other people access to, enabling them to post there. So, by becoming a member of a group board, you will be able to access other people’s followers without being charged anything.

Although group boards aren’t as effective as before, you’ll still be able to use them like powerful tools to help you get more traffic and reach to your website. This is more effective for people with 1,000 or lesser followers.

How can someone join one of these group boards? Your first step would be to create a list containing all the boards you want to join. This can best be achieved by going through different group boards belonging to several top account in the same niche as yours. Another option is to visit PinGroupie.com and look for suitable group boards that cover different topics.

You’re not going to be interested in every group broad that has many followers. However, referring to tools such as Tailwind will help you to discover each board’s engagement and quality score. If you notice that a board doesn’t have enough engagement from followers but has too much activity from pinners, don’t bother to contribute anything towards the board.

Every admin of a group board uses a different method that they’d like to apply on different boards. There are admins who prefer being emailed, while others expect you to send a DM, others are ok with a simple comment on a pin and those who don’t even give specific directions on how they can be contacted.

If you apply for different group boards at once, you’ll have to keep an eye on them. the best way to do this is by using a spreadsheet that looks the same like the one below (we had applied to over 100 group boards here but the photo only displays the top 56 boards on the list).

Once you begin keeping a spreadsheet, the next step is to start contacting the people on the list. It’s going to take some time to finish contacting everyone, and there are people who won’t get back to you or add you to their boards. Don’t be discouraged because that’s how things go sometimes. Cast your applications wide and don’t lose hope when you get rejected since it’s all part of the game.

Here is a simple outreach template that you can refer to. Keep in mind that board owners receive a large number of requests. Make sure that your application is unique and personalized (you’ll have better chance if you can throw in an offer something in exchange), the more chances you have of being added.

Set the Pins You Make on Autopilot

When you’re working on your website or blog, you won’t have a lot of time to spare for Pinterest. This is why it would be a good idea to use a Pinterest scheduler.

Manually adding every single pin to a group board can be pretty tiresome (it’s also not easy to find people to complete the task for you). Fortunately, there’s a software you can use to handle everything for you.

After using different types of scheduling programs, Tailwind happens to be our favorite by far. The advantage of using Tailwind is you’ll be notified about the group boards that will perform great for you. Such information will help you double down on the ones that are working (and avoid those that don’t work).
also, Tailwind includes a feature that’s similar to those of Pinterest group boards referred to as Tribes. A Tribe is just a group comprising of other bloggers within the same niche as you. You can all place content to your Tribe and pin content from your fellow Tribe members.

The best thing about joining a Tribe is that you can only join the paid version when you’re ready for it. There’s also a free trial for Tailwind, but you’ll eventually have to pay for the membership if you’d like your traffic to grow in the long run. I won’t lie, this is some of the best money we used on our blogging journey.

Reapply to The Group Boards That Didn’t Get Back to You

Just because some group boards rejected you before, it doesn’t mean that you should lose hope. There are a couple of reasons as to why you need to go back to the spreadsheet you made after every few months:

The admin might have not seen your email, DM etc.
They might have had a lot to do and forgot to add you.
You might not have had a great profile before, but it can be now be much better.

It doesn’t matter what happened the previous time, you shouldn’t shy away from reapplying for the group boards. After all, you won’t lose anything. However, use a different script from the oner you used before and don’t forget to be courteous and polite.

Step 5: Start Monetizing Your Blog

If you were wondering when we’d get back to actually discussing about how you can make money from your blog, here we go…

A simple but truthful fact: A lot of bloggers end up not making any money from blogging. This is because instead of going through the much-needed foundational work, they instead skip right to “making money”. Then afterwards when they begin monetizing their blogs and it appears not to be working for them, they give up.

Can someone make money through blogging? Yes, but is it an easy task to accomplish? Definitely not. Its not easy to start making money from a blog. Like we mentioned before, your first $1,000 from the internet won’t come as easily, it will probably be the hardest income you’ll ever earn. But once this is over, you’ll start getting a steady income. Once you start making $1K each month, within a short time you’ll find yourself earning $2K, then $4K, then $10K, then $50K and soon you’ll be making over $100K. We experienced this without any difficulty.

Before you can achieve any of the above, you at least should have concluded the following steps;

Become a member of our Facebook group which is completely free.
Started your own blog.
Came up with a suitable topic that other people are also interested in.
Write at least 5 to 10 high ranking posts.
Ensure that your site has a minimum of 5,000 visitors every month. If you haven’t managed to get the required traffic, revisit Pinterest.
Create an active presence on different social media sites.

If your blog doesn’t have enough traffic, you won’t earn anything from your blog. The next part of this section assumes that all the above have been accomplished. If you’d like to be successful, make sure that you have a solid foundation.

The best method to use as a new blogger so that you can start making money

Just like I mentioned before, majority of the income we have today comes from affiliate marketing. This is basically using advertising which is commission-based on your blog. This is one of the most effective and our favorite method of earning money on our blog. We also recommend that new bloggers start implementing this immediately.

Your blog will basically generate money from every signups/sales/lead, but just at a minimal fee. Most commissions range between $1 to $100. Also, this method works great when the things you’re promoting are directly related to your content. For instance, the affiliates we promote on our Millionable account are basically meant to help our followers to earn and save some money.

I bet you’re wondering why we highly advocate new bloggers should use affiliate marketing instead of inventing your own product or even using an alternative monetizing method. This is because it’s the ideal way for you to learn about selling things online.

Also, inventing personalized products takes a lot of time, and then having to promote them requires even more effort and time. If you’re a new blogger, it would be a great idea to promote an already existing and successful product and earn some sort of commission for the sales you make.

New bloggers are more likely to earn more money through affiliate marketing. Since you don’t have enough time to create and promote your own products, this is the way to go.

The best wat to get affiliate products that you can promote on your blog

Hopefully, you now have found several products that you like and would like to promote. If you don’t have any, you can seek advise from the leaders in the same niche as yours. They might already be handling some kind of affiliate marketing via their blogs (and if they’re more advanced, they also sell their personal products).

Check out their most popular posts. What did you find them promoting in those posts? Chances are, if a popular blogger has a certain product featuring in their blog, they are definitely earning a lot of money from it.

It can be a good idea for you to feature the same product on your blog, especially if you’re already familiar with it. Selling authentic products on your blog goes a long way to help a blogger make a lot of affiliate sales.

Don’t waste any time, promote the products you like most

Create a list of at least 5 to 10 affiliate products that fall in the same niche as yours and are already being promoted by other people. If you like and believe in the products, you can proceed to do affiliate marketing on your blog.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are just different websites which connect bloggers to companies that rely on affiliate marketing for advertising. Joining such networks ensures that you have instant access that you can use to every other affiliate member in the same network.

Below are some of the major networks that you can join:

There are various different networks, however, these are the most popular ones and will cater for most of your requirement.

If you find a company that you’d like to promote but doesn’t appear on any other site, you can simply send them an email. Find out whether they have an affiliate program in place.

Find out which of your posts have the most traffic

This is how you’ll begin putting affiliate links throughout your blog. You’ll definitely have to go to your previous posts and edit them.

Go through the articles one more time and try spotting the areas that you can benefit from. Once you get them, place an affiliate link. Remember, it’s important as authentic as possible, don’t force things.

Revisit all your old articles and look for instances where you can add affiliate links. This won’t be accomplished quickly, it requires a lot of time, but keep an eye on for additional ways to improve your old posts.

Strategize your future content

Take your blog as a business. The most important thing to remember is your readers should always come first. The content you give to your readers should always be valuable, even if they don’t look at the affiliate links you put.

If you don’t want to lose readers ensure that your blog doesn’t comprise of an affiliate spam fest. When you write articles, consider the kind of content your readers are looking for and will appreciate. If your content is a how-to/informational post (similar to ours), then it shouldn’t have numerous affiliate links since it won’t match the right user intent.

For example, we have only featured a few affiliate links in this article. But I’m now going to include an informative course on affiliate marketing that I got from Michelle Schroder-Gardner who I currently affiliate for. She’s currently earning over $50,000 per month from affiliate marketing. When it comes to affiliate marketing, Michelle offers the best training course.

And the best part is the link was included right after you had all the valuable information about affiliate marketing. So, you won’t experience a lot of difficulty with it.

Select another monetizing method

We previously covered the different ways you can use to earn an income from blogging apart from affiliate marketing such as digital products, services, ads and much more.

Select an additional monetization method alongside affiliate marketing and grow them together. You can start with a service because it’s the quickest way for you to earn some money from your blog.

Another great passive monetizing method is to use display ads. However, don’t forget that you need a significant amount and steady traffic before you’re able to earn a lot of money from this venture. But this method is more passive option compared to the other services you can offer.

As soon as you begin making money from affiliate marketing, you can now drop some of the services you include and check out new revenue streams (like featuring some digital products or sponsored content), that’s of you don’t mind doing so.

FAQs

By now you have a general idea about how you can earn some money blogging. In summary, we can take a look at some questions that are asked over and over by new bloggers.

How much income can someone get from blogging?

The other question that is normally asked by new bloggers alongside this one is “How long will it take you to start earning money from blogging?”

It actually depends on things like:

If you don’t mind working hard,
If you’re not afraid of failure (because before you succeed, you’ll experience some failure) and
The kind of monetizing strategies you decide to use.

Although our blog is currently making over $100K every month, we had to work very hard before we were able to get there. However, we would have accomplished this within a short time if we had agreed to learn from other people with more experience instead of figuring things out for ourselves.

Bloggers earn different incomes depending on the strategies they apply. The good thing about blogging is that it doesn’t have any limitations. You can make money from your blog using different ways. This can be quite terrifying and incredibly deliberating at once.

Depending on how much you’d like to make each month, you can choose keep your regular job. This is the reason why most people opt for online businesses and blogging. The both provide them with much needed freedom.

You have the freedom to become your own boss, travel, work from where you want and not need to worry about your financial capability. This doesn’t mean that everything about blogging is all sunshine and rainbows. There’s more that’s involved when it comes to creating the perfect blog.

Which blogs earn more money?

Although different types of blogs can earn money, there’s a specific kind of blog niches which can be monetized without difficulty than others. Similar to other businesses, the topics that are more profitable are those that get most attention and money from readers. The other blogs that get a lot of traffic from readers are those that will help them to improve their lives in some way like:

Food and nutrition
Health and wellness
Fashion
Money making and business
Personal finance

There are various profitable blog niches available out there, but we won’t be able to mention all of them. The most important thing to consider when looking for the for a topic for your blog is what you you’re interested in/can write about that other people won’t mind paying for.

How can a new blogger make money blogging quickly?

The quickest way you can achieve any goal is by focusing on the areas that make the most impact. When it comes to blogging, especially for new bloggers, it means:

The content you write about should be high-quality and purposeful (you can grow or sell your email list)
Get a lot of traffic to your site
Providing a service or product which will help your readers to solve some problems (for yourself or another person especially when affiliate marketing is concerned)

The most reliable and fastest way for bloggers to make money is by offering services. We made our list with the assumption that your blog is a scalable, passive income. If this is the case, how you approach really matters and you should select at least three things to begin with. Focus mainly on the activities that will help you make some money.

Conclusion

There are numerous different ways you can use to make money blogging, and we’ve only cover some of them. We didn’t want to end up writing a very long article that people would avoid reading. What we’ve covered will enlighten you about all the things you need to know as a new blogger.

If you use all the ideas provided in this article, your blog will have a great foundation that can be used to make meaningful and consistent earnings. We’ve outlined almost 90% of the steps required to run a income-generating blog every month.

The concept behind blogging is perfectly summed up by Seth Godin:

With your keyboard, you will be able to connect to the world. You’ll have a platform where you can publish content that will bring people together, at different times for free. Your aim is to have a leveled playing field that provides you with the same opportunities as everyone else. This is it. Work accordingly.

It’s what everyone is counting on.

We’re all relying on you to do the work.