by Case Lane

This post is part of the Real Stories Behind Making Money Online Series

In the beginning, it was the Internet curious’s first introduction to creating online – starting a blog.  Today, it remains the most dominate creative platform – more than 600 million blogs – more than ten times the number of YouTube channels and podcast shows combined.

That fact should make one point obvious…blogs are, arguably, the easiest online platform for launching your online business. 

But how many of those 600 million blogs are making money for the blogger?

Blogs operate in a crowded marketplace where you have to be prepared to promote and market your message. So if you’re shy about telling people about your thoughts or creativity, blogging may not be for you.

Blogging as Your Online Business

While starting an online business is an extraordinary opportunity for you to establish a foundation for your own professional satisfaction, financial security, and lifestyle freedom, to get started you have to select an online platform that fits your interests, skills and budget.

Blogging remains an incredible force for delivering a message, creating a community, and earning advertising revenue.  But does the platform have all the elements you want and need for an online business venture?

If your online platform of choice is to create a blog, you need to be aware of the joys and limitations of the effort. 

In this article, I explain the real story behind blogging to make money online.

Blogging is for Writers

Blogs are websites, almost always supported by advertising, that writers fill with content aimed at their target audience.

At its core, blogging is the written word.  For creators, blogging means consistently writing articles online around a specific theme or subject. The word blog comes from ‘web log…weblog’ a phrase used to describe the act of journaling or recording (logging) information online.

To create a blog to start an online business, you must create written content…or have it created for you.

Blogging is for writers, and blogs are for readers. People who want to get their information in written words.

Types of Blogs for Making Money Online

With 600 million options, breaking blogs down into specific categories may be an overreach, but in general there are three popular types of blogs – information, commentary and product-specific.

Information Blogs

The most popular blogs offer information, such as How-Tos and guides.  They provide step-by-step processes, and insight into products, services and issues. For many readers, these types of blogs are consistently delivering information they want to learn more about or research.

A blogger who provides information is creating a go-to platform for a topic or idea. Once enough interested readers learn about the blog’s existence, it can jump to the top of search rankings for the topic, and become a popular site.

If you are planning to create an information blog, the key is to be a great resource. You do the research your readers want to avoid, and you put the information together in easily digestible articles.

In this case, you do not have to be a great writer. You just have to make sure you are delivering information that a particular audience is seeking.

Because you already know the information readers are searching for, these types of blogs are the fastest and easiest blogs to create. Spend time researching the topic, then re-organize, re-write, and aggregate the data you find into new articles that address the topic for your target audience.

This approach also allows you to outsource the work. If writing is not your strength, or you have no time to do the research, you can use a freelancer site like Fiverr to find someone who can put together the information based on your ideas.

For example, you may find a subject where most of the existing blogs are aimed at college students, and you decide to do one aimed at the parents of college students. It can be similar information, but re-written for the parents consumption, and interests.

Also, if you can write well (or outsource) in a language other than English, there is extraordinary opportunity available to write about popular blog subjects in other global languages.

As the Internet continues to grow and spread around the world, you may find your ability to deliver information in a language used where online usage is on the rise, provides you with an opening where other bloggers cannot compete.

Commentary Blogs

Another successful blog theme is commentary – the original web log. Some famous bloggers are known only for their comments and observations about society and the world. These blogs can have millions of readers who enjoy the writer’s viewpoint, and learn from their perspective.

If you are writing a commentary blog, then you do have to be a good writer because the blog is directly from you, and your ideas have to resonate with the reader.  These types of blog literally hang on the word of the blogger. If the writing is bad, the blog is a non-starter.

That said, the definition of ‘bad’ is relevant to the audience you are targeting. If you want to write a slang-filled, emoji-driven commentary blog aimed at high school students, then you may have a niche. But you still have to make the content valuable to that audience.  It has to be ‘good’ to them.

Commentary blogs are the most difficult to launch because everyone has an opinion these days. But if you have a way of looking at the world that is unique, and underserved, you may be able to take a commentary blog to an audience that wants to learn more from you.

Product-Specific Blogs

Another type of blog is a mini-website aimed specifically at marketing a product by providing content-rich articles related to the product’s purpose.

The site will have ten to fifteen articles all leading to the same conclusion – the reader should get the product.

These blogs are advertising and affiliate marketing vehicles designed as information blogs, but the content is legitimate (assuming you are not a scammer).

This is a blog where the idea is to deliver information, but it’s not general information, it’s tailored to the product and all issues related to the product.

For example, if you are marketing a new vacuum cleaner, you could have articles about the perils of dust, carpet maintenance, keeping your family healthy, the exercise benefits of doing household chores, and so on.

These types of blogs are one-and-done.  You write the core articles, set-up the webpages, and drive traffic to the site.

Once again, you do not need to be a creative writer, you are aggregating topic-specific information for an audience that is looking for the insight. Your articles must be valuable and useful to them, especially if it is new or misunderstood information. 

This is also an opportunity to outsource the writing, but you have to be creative about the topics related to the product. You are looking for products that cross over a variety of different issues, and give you sufficient content to create a legitimate site.

Who Should Start a Blog?

Regardless of your type of blog, you want the content to stay consistent and reliable.  So the hard truth about blogging is that you have to keep posting relevant content.  You have to find enough content to maintain interest for a growing audience.  That is a challenge that many aspiring entrepreneurs do not conquer.

If you:

• Like to write
• Come up with good ideas
• Are not afraid to promote your own writing to strangers
• Have a good subject area or topic
• Have money each month to spend on maintaining your website until you can grow your advertising revenue
• Are prepared to be consistently and reliably posting to your website

…then you are likely ready to move forward with starting a blog.

But blogging can be tedious, especially if you are lukewarm about your subject, and since it’s the most crowded online platform, you have to be creative to stand-out and be counted.

How to Start a Blog

As mentioned earlier, blogs are the easiest online business to start, but one that requires maintenance and has up-front costs to do it right.

The basic approach is:

• Get a domain name
• Set-up a webpage
• Start writing and posting content

Domain Name

Free Domain name

If you decide to use free website hosting, you will also likely receive a free ‘hosting’ domain, which typically includes the name of the website provider in your domain name.

This is a domain name you do not own, and one that may be long and cumbersome to use when speaking or posting about your new blog.

But for some, a free domain may be a necessary option for getting started without any upfront costs, but if you have a few dollars ready, and you are serious about your blog, you should start with a custom domain name.

Custom Domain name

The domain name is the name of your website. For many bloggers, it can be their ownname.com, for others it’s the subject they are discussing. You just have to decide.

Domains can cost as little as $3 a month to start.  You can buy the domain from a stand-alone site, or purchase it when you set-up your webpage on a hosting site.

Carefully check the renewal terms for your domain name. Sometimes you can get the domain for a low introductory price, but it renews at ten times that rate, a year later.

Although a great domain name is valuable, like all actions in starting an online business, it is better to move forward than to worry about picking the perfect domain. 

If you’re not sure, go with your own name or a made-up-name and move on. You have no online business until your site is live, so getting launched should be your focus.

Website

Free or Paid

Before you create your website, you must decide if you want to use free or paid blog hosting services.

Your blog is hosted on a website, which is hosted on a server managed by a website hosting provider.

‘Free’ means you sign-up and begin writing and posting content without paying any upfront fees.  The ‘catch’ with free is there may be limitations on whether or not you can advertise on the platform.  Since you are starting the blog to make money, this would be a limitation, but not an obstruction to making money.

But, If you are not sure if blogging is right for you, start with free services, and switch to paid when you are certain you want to move forward with the platform.

If you know you want to be a blogger and start with paid hosting, you have more flexibility to do what you want with the blog.

Your Own Website

Once you select your paid provider, they typically provide basic services aimed at getting you set-up.  There are many blogging apps, but the most popular is WordPress, and you can quickly set-up a basic WordPress site through your provider.

Since WordPress provides flexible functionality for a website, for example, you can host an eCommerce store with your blogs, some bloggers find WordPress too complex for their plans, and are comfortable with a ‘blogging’ only app.

If you think you might want to do more with your blog – for example on my website for Ready Entrepreneur, along with the blog, I have my podcast embedded, links to online courses, and a store – and I am able to use plugins to extend the capabilities of the site from inserting landing pages from another app under the same domain, to capturing contact information. 

As always, if you are unsure, start with the most basic option and be prepared to build from there.

Third Party Website

Blogging platforms, like Medium.com are websites where bloggers can establish their reputation and build an audience. These sites allow anyone to open an account and posts blogs, for free.  Although these sites lead to a variety of subjects, they also attract a variety of readers who want to discover new voices, and learn more.

If you want to access the reader audience on these platforms, you can repurpose the blogs you create on your website. This allows you to gain both the traffic on the platform that is casually browsing, and the followers on your site who could one day become your dream customers. 

Writing, Posting and Distributing Your Content

Once you have set-up your domain and webpage or site account, it’s time to write and post content.

Refer back to the Types of Blogs section to pick the direction you want to take your content.

If you are looking for topic ideas, listen to your friends, colleagues and neighbors, check social media, Google trends, and news headlines, and remember how you became interested in the subject in the first place. You probably have stories, ideas and anecdotes from your own experiences that could make the content for a blog.

Take a look at the work other bloggers are doing.  Do not copy. Instead use other content as inspiration, and as a springboard for developing your own ideas. 

You can post blogs on your own schedule as little or as often as you wish.  But the more consistently you post, the more reliable you will appear to your readers.  If readers enjoy one article, and they see another one the following week, and the week after, they are more likely to remember you, and maybe even recommend your work to others.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process, both technical and creative, that you use to help search engines find your blog.  When you distribute your blog online, you should always make sure that you are search optimized, to drive organic traffic doing searches.

You will find many SEO apps and plugins online, and implementing SEO practices is not difficult. But being noticed is a challenge, you will have to do your own work to ensure people click on your blog.

Do Your Own Promotion

While search engines can organically find your blog, you will have to do your own distribution and promotion to drive traffic to your site.

Social Media

You can use social media to drive traffic to your blog by posting about the topic you wrote about and including the direct link to your blog in your posts.  Add images or videos to attract attention, and ignite curiosity about your content.

For bloggers, all of the big social media sites are helpful, except Instagram, which does not have links in regular content. So if your content is visual, and insta-perfect, this limitation will be a concern, but you have the work-around of using the other platforms. 

If your social media followers are mostly friends and family, include a Call-to-Action for them to share the post with their networks.

Track Your Traffic

If you have your own website, you can set-up analytics to track your visitors and the pages they frequent. This data will help you understand your most popular content, and perhaps give you additional content ideas, or more promotions you can do for specific content.

Track consistently to look for trends and opportunities to grow your blog’s popularity. For example, if you notice more traffic is coming from mobile, you can do a more mobile-friendly layout for those users.

How Blogs Make Money Online

The final part of your blog set-up is monetization…making money from the blog.

For the most part, your revenue opportunity comes from placing advertising on your blog pages.  You can have Google ads automatically on your pages, affiliate ads that you place yourself, or links to your own digital or physical products that you sell in your own store or on a third party platform.

Essentially, having a blog works like a broadcast television network that creates lots of content, and drives ‘eyeballs’ to the shows that advertisers are paying to be featured on.

Your opportunity in earning for your blog comes from driving as much traffic as possible to your site, and having a percentage of that traffic click on the ads, and in the case of affiliates, making a purchase.

Google Ad Sense

The fastest way to begin making money with a blog is to set up a free account with Google Ad Sense, and let the search engine automatically post ads on your blog pages.  Google’s advertising program pays you for clicks through to the sponsored ad pages.

You can control where the ads are placed, and to which pages, and you can ban content you don’t want associated with your work.

Google is set to match your blog content to related ads, but if subject matter is beyond the translation of Google’s A.I., you might find the ads do not match at all.

Once you set-up with Ad Sense, continuing monitoring the placement of ads to make sure they are where you expect to see them.

Affiliate Ads

Affiliate advertising is when you align with a third party to promote their product or service, and earn a flat rate or percentage for purchases made by other people through your links.

With many affiliate programs, you can sign-up for free on sites like Swagbucks, and place their advertising images with your affiliate link directly on your page.  As more people sign-up, you earn a ‘bounty’ for bringing in new affiliates.

If you join the Amazon Affiliates program, you can also earn a ‘bounty’ for sign-ups to continuity programs like Amazon Prime.

Or you can promote products, including almost everything on Amazon.com, and earn whenever someone purchases a product through your link.  As mentioned in the content section, you can even have an entire blog that is linked to affiliate products.

Because there are affiliate programs for almost every product you can think of, you should be able to find products that align with your blog content.

To keep your blog orderly, you want to have ads that support your product, and do not make your site look just like an advertising vehicle for sponsored products, or worse, a scam.

Links to Your Own Products

If you sell your own physical or digital products, you can use a blog to drive people to your products. 

Write blogs that align with your product, then promote your product links directly in the blog or in the sidebars of your website.

This is often done with reviews (which you do not write for your own product, but you can post what others write), the review is linked back to the product.

But the real success in using this process is to write the definitive article about the value of your product, and then drive people through the links to your purchase pages.

Extension Products

Advertising is the direct way that blogs make money, but if you have a successful blog you can repurpose it to make money on other online platforms like podcasts and YouTube.

If your blogging positions you as an authority on a subject, you can also create courses, sell coaching, write books, or do speeches or other activities that are related to your blogging content, but are not directly revenue created from the blog.

All of these opportunities come with time, once you make your blog successful.

But when you are starting out, and you have no traffic to your blog, you will have no money from your blog, that’s the reality. 

That’s why you must think carefully about how much you are willing to spend up-front, and how much time you will place in promoting your blog.

If your SEO is working, or your topic is unique and sought after, it’s possible for organic traffic to discover your blog, click on your ads, and you make money.  But in general, if you are too shy promote your own work, you will not have a chance to earn from your blog. 

What Makes Blogs Successful

A successful blog has great content.  But that’s only the beginning.

The most popular blogs are delivering a form of comfort to readers. Whether it’s in the form of information or provocative statements or how-tos, a reader is satisfied after reading a great blog.  And they’ll keep coming back for more if they feel the content is consistent and always appealing.

To get your blog into a success position, which means it starts paying you, build on the positive comments and reviews you receive. 

Try to discover what appealed most to those readers, and why.  You don’t have to start trying to tailor every blog to a raving fan, but it helps if you have an understanding as to why a specific blog post resonated with people.

From the beginning, blogging has been about the writing. While many blogs contain great visuals or videos, it’s the writing that brings people back time and again. If you want your blog to stand out and be noticed, that’s where to start.

But all the other activities must be completed also to make your blog a professional and reliable site for return readers.  And you must promote the blog to as many people as possible to get the traffic on your site that will make your business profitable.

Choose blogging as your online business platform if you’ve come this far and believe you have the ingredients to make it work.  But, ignore blogging if you plan to only do a superficial job of writing and promoting your site.

The real story behind starting a blog to make money is to make an effort marketing and promoting your blog to drive traffic to your site.  Because without the upfront effort in creating your own publicity, you are unlikely to make any money.  But with it, you give yourself a chance to stand-out among the 600 million and take your place in the online entrepreneur community.

Check out Case Lane’s blogs:

For aspiring entrepreneurs: https://www.readyentrepreneur.com/blog-posts/

For guest podcasting: https://podcastgueststar.com/

For fast, healthy eating: https://food.readyentrepreneur.com/blog/

For travel: https://travel.readyentrepreneur.com/

For Case Lane books: https://caselane.com/blog/

DISCLOSURE: links to Amazon.com, Bluehost and Case Lane’s books on Amazon.com are affiliate links that earn for eligible purchases at no additional cost to you.

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