2016 has been a great year for me. I have to admit that even though running the risk that “I may be showing off“.
However, I started this blog to document my wins and failures and share them with you all with the hopes of inspiring you to start blogging, become successful at it and even make money with it.
There have been many, many failures (too many to count and list here in this post), but now that the mistakes are “starting to make sense”, I have finally nailed down how to get your blog to make you money (damn near every day).
- Do I make money with my blog every day? No.
- Do I make the same everyday? No
- Does my income go up and down? Yes
That is the price you pay for running your own business; you can work hard for your results and for your income, but you are not guaranteed it.
But, as you will see from this post and from the many other income reports by my students and the fellow bloggers I network with, it’s all worth it at the end of the day.
So, back to you.
Hopefully since you are here reading, you are genuinely interested in starting to make some money with blogging – good for you!
You may be a newbie or you may be an intermediate trying to find out how to make some extra cash, whatever category you fall into; this post should help you understand how to make money with your blog and your online business.
Let’s get into it:
You Need Traffic
Obviously before you start getting traffic, you are going to need a blog. Now I am assuming that you already have one here, but if you don’t, go create one for free here and then come back and read this post again.
However once you have your site up and ready with some content on it, then you need to shift your focus and start learning how to drive traffic to your blog.
How do you do this?
It’s not easy but luckily there are many, many ways and if you can think outside the box, you will find that the possibilities of driving traffic are abundant if you know where to look.
Here are some quick ways you can start driving traffic and slowly build-up your blog to be a profitable one:
Write Keyword Focused Content:
You can find out all about keywords and how to use them to get the quality traffic you want on this page.
Also, my suggestion is to make Google your friend, now this may be hard since Google can be a “mean human”, but if you think of SEO as a human entity, then you can learn how to make it love you.
Use Social Media
Social media is a blessing that we can use to drive traffic and the traffic from social media is something you can start getting immediately, like from today.
My tips for this would be to pick just one social media and dedicate the necessary time to master it.
It can be anyone you like, although I do suggest you go where your target audience hangs out the most, but if you learn how to master one; then you are way ahead of the your competition who probably just dabbles “here and there”.
My social media channel of choice is Pinterest due to the fact that it has proved to me that my the time spent on there is the most worth it.
You can see how I use Pinterest to drive over 20,000 in traffic here.
Explore The Many (Other) Traffic Sources
As I said, there are many ways to drive traffic, I won’t go into detail about each one of them here, but you can see this post that talks about the 130 ways to drive traffic.
You Need An Affiliate Offer (Or A Product)
Got a blog that is getting traffic? Great job! The hard part is over and now you can start monetising!
For this you are going to be needing either your own product, which I know it is not something that most of you have (I don’t either up till now) but luckily, we do have affiliate marketing as a way to sell other people’s products.
For this, I advise you download my free ebook “How To Win At Affiliate Marketing”. This is my story about how I went from $0, to my first $0.87c sale, to making a full time income online and everything in between.
You can download the book from this page.
You Need To Go For Recurring Sales
Now I do mention this in my book, but I have to mention it here since it is such a valuable tip.
Whenever you can, even if you have your own products that you want to sell, try to fit in a recurring fee to it that will allow you to make a sale once, but continue making money off that sale for months and even years to come.
As we said, you are not guaranteed an income with blogging, especially not a fixed income, but if you can tie in a few products within your catalogue that will get you repeat sales from the same customers, then you can safely assume that you will be making some consistent income.
If I stopped blogging and I stopped working on my business today and never touch it again, my blogs would still be making me money for months and even possibly even years to come.
The system is in place for it to make money for me, even if I am away. That is why the allure of making money online is so strong; because it gives you back your time.
If you are serious about wanting to learn this business and make money with your blog for months and years to come as well, then start applying a few of these tips, read some more content on my blog and get some training on how to do it (more on this later)
You Need To Plan For The Future
At first it is ok to just ‘wing it” as you go along. Of course you are just in the beginning phase so you do not know exactly whether you will “stick with it” (although I’m rooting for you to do) and you do not know if you will actually like working online.
However, once you start making some serious money and you know recognize yourself as as a business owner (even if you’re not a full time blogger yet), then it is the time to stop thinking week-to-week and instead start thinking year-to-year.
At this point in my career, I am just now at that stage and I am (at the time of writing this) planning my projects for 2017. I even have my goals ready for 2018 and 2019 too (just not the plan for them LOL).
If you want to get your blog to make you money constantly, then this is also something you are going to have to start doing.
Again; if you are just starting then do not worry about it, for now simply learn as much as you can, but once you do get there’ start planning for the future.
You Need To Test Things Out
Ok, let’s go a bit more practical here and look at something that you can do right now (even if you are just starting out) in order to help you reach your goals with your blog.
You need to test everything.
What do I mean by everything? I mean everything.
But for starters, test:
- What type of content works best.
- Which social platform brings in the most traffic.
- Which theme keep the reader on your site longer.
- How long does different people stay on your site.
- Who is your target audience vs who really is your audience.
There is a lot of things you need to test but the good thing is that you do not have to test them all at once (and you shouldn’t).
Take your time and test one little thing every once in awhile, even if it seems insignificant. I am surprised to see from my own experiments that even a simple bold vs non-bold links had significant click throughs between the two.
Of course, we do this to further optimise and perfect the blog, which will be your money making blog.
Test things out slowly, mark down the results and then test some more and keep adjusting. It may sound like a lot but believe me in 12 months you are going to have a complete different perspective.
You Need To Understand The Whole Process Of Making Money With A Blog
Ok, we can talk all day about how to get your blog to make you money, but the honest is answer is you will never know all it takes simply by reading my blog posts or any other blog post for that matter.
What you need to do is to jump in, quit thinking about it and just do it. I promise you; you will be learning way more in much quicker time if you simply go for it.
Now of course, we live in the age of the internet (thank goodness) so we have information and resources that will make the learning phases a little bit less terrifying and a bit more smooth.
That is why I’d like to invite you to join my blogging course over at Wealthy Affiliate. It’s the same system that I have used to learn how to make my money online and it is now where I get to pass on all that I have learned to my own students in there.
If you’d like to know more about WA and what you can learn from there, I suggest you take a look at my full Wealthy Affiliate review for more information.
In Closing
As always, thank you very much for reading and I hope this post has served you well and answered any questions you may have had.
If something is unclear, do not hesitate to get in touch with me here, in the comment section below or else on my Twitter.
Also, this week I am opening up the membership of my secret facebook group. It’s what I call the ‘A Blog On Blogging Roundtable” group where me, my students and other experts in this field hang out and bounce ideas around.
If you think you would benefit from such a thing, you can request membership on this page here.
Talk soon.
Chris Lee
