How to Earn Money Through Blogging

How to earn money through blogging has to be one of the first thoughts that run through our mind after we’re done setting up a website. Who wouldn’t want to make money blogging if its a relatively simple thing, right?

What will you do? You probably stumbled upon these most obvious possibilities on how to earn money through blogging:

1. Lead Generation

2. Affiliate Marketing

3. Product Creation (ebooks for instance)

4. Selling advertising space on your blog

5. Drop-shipping Store

6. Creating websites

7. Taking online surveys

8. Blogging about a topic in which you have expertise (Monetize with Adsense)

9. Creating YouTube videos

10. Product reviews

So, you do a little research. You feel affiliate marketing has a low effort/high return. You find a few products you think you like, maybe understand their value, and feel comfortable signing up as an affiliate. You write up product descriptions, post images, and build links out to the product.

After writing several articles about your blog’s key topic and investing allot of sweat and time building something called backlinks, you begin to feel this is hard work. All this reading of books and articles on how to earn money through blogging is taking much more time than you ever expected.

But that’s not all. You read that you should keep track of visitors to your site so you can gauge your success at meeting your readers needs (thats what its about, right?). So you installed a program or plugin to provide you statistics on the what, who, where, and how often of your visitors.

And it said you had ten whopping visitors…oh, and one of them was you because you didn’t exclude yourself from the calculation.

Is this right? This thing must be broken! All the advice on how to earn money through blogging missed this!

Looking through your books and articles and now websites, too, that talk about how to earn money through blogging, you take a second read through the subject of traffic.

“Traffic is the life blood of Internet marketing. Without traffic there can be no transactions on your site and therefore no money…” Yadda, yadda, yadda it really gets to be a mantra after a while. Almost every book I have read on how to earn money through blogging harps on this mantra but doesnt explain it well.  As a side bar, go to this article to better understand the traffic/money relationship

So, now you are trying to wrap your head around the concept of internet traffic, a concept that seemed fairly straight forward earlier: open site, advertise, write, and visitors come. But it aint so, is it?

Why does traffic not come?

If you are a new web presence, the answer is easy: nobody knows who you are. Until they do, no amount of affiliate links, backlinks, and blogging is really going to make a significant difference.

Sure, you may make a few bucks here and there, but not what you are worth and sure as hell not worth all the time and energy you put into the site. Now its all about traffic and not so much about how to earn money through blogging, right.

OK. I need traffic. How do I get it and in enough numbers to make it worth my while?

In the most simple terms, a change in thinking and attitude is needed. You need a strategy that incorporates the following things:

1. Personal Productivity and Philosophy

You must be in this for the long run. No matter what you have read or what some half-baked genius has told you about how to earn money through blogging, no facet of Internet Marketing is a get-rich-quick scheme. You must expect to work for what you get and it may take years to make your brand. That’s probably not what you want to hear. Still, you heard it hear first and its the straight dope.

If your personal work ethic and philosophy is to provide a quality product, you will do well. And the rewards can be substantial. But even working hard and lookng after your brand is not enough. You must promote, both yourself and your site(s).

Get your face, your words, and your brand (You’ll hear me talk allot about branding. More of that later) in front of the people you want as traffic. But what is promotion? Its relationships not only with your customers but with your peers as well. You become known by your writing, the craft and tenor of your words. You become known by using all the social media tools at your command.

I’ll talk more about promotion in another article that’s coming soon. Promotion is critical in how to earn money through blogging.

2. Quality Content

I mentioned above that you will be known by your words. In the universe of blogging, the fruits of your mind are what make you stand-out. This will be the foundation of your brand. Sure, you’ll be known for your website, interviews that you’ve given, and by the products you support. But your thoughts are the coin with which you gain a lasting voice in the blogging community.

So, when you write, whether you write on your blog, an op-ed piece for some online rag, or a guest post on another site. Stick to what you know, put yourself out there, be the expert and over-deliver on your product every time. You’ve heard the real estate law: Location, Location, Location? Well, for a bloggers its Quality, Quality, Quality.

3. Relevant Markets

The hallmarks of a successful site and brand are the dedication of the owner, the general high quality of the website, AND the relevance of the markets that advertise and associate with your site. Packaged together it impacts every facet of what you are trying to accomplish from page rank to making a buck. That isn’t often sited when people casually talk about how to earn money through blogging, or other Internet marketing schemes for that matter

Simply put, if my site is about making better blogs I wouldn’t have affiliate links and advertising for foreign exchange calculators or innovative dog collars. You’d probably hurt your self laughing if you had seen the truly bizarre product collection around the Net. Be productive, be an expert, and be relevant in everything you do.

I’d like to recommend a course to improve your understanding. Take a look at Problogger.net’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog .  Im going to write-up a more candid appraisal of this program in an up-coming article. I think it provides some of the best advice on how to earn money through blogging that I have seen anywhere.

Everybody needs a hand when first getting started in blogging.  It is a pay course but I think its worth it and it builds greatly upon what we have talked about above.

Oh, just so you know, I’m not an affiliate of the above program. I just think its worth your time!

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