Ways To Make Money Blogging:

{2022 Guide For Beginners}

Every beginner wants to know “how to make money blogging?”

There are a number of ways that bloggers use to make💷money.

Freelancing, Display Ads, and Affiliate Marketing are just a few.

This guide breaks down exactly how you can get started making money blogging online.

In This Post You’ll Learn:

• The top ways bloggers make money.

• The easiest way to make money blogging.

• How to start making money as a blogger.

• Search Engine Optimization.

• How to promote your blog.

Starting a blog is one of the easiest and most lucrative ways to make money online.

However, not many people have success with their blogs.

Some people struggle to make money from it, some quit because it’s taking too long, while others may have realized that it’s not what they want.

Perhaps because they were under the misguided notion that starting a blog or an online business is a get-rich-quick scheme, only to realize that it takes consistent work and patience.

The truth is, that anyone can start a blog, but blogging is not for everyone. Blogging requires consistent writing and some people aren’t really into that.

Now don’t be discouraged if you’re one of those persons whom writing isn’t for. You can start a dropshipping or e-commerce store instead.

If you have a blog or you’re interested in starting one you should know that there are several ways bloggers make money from their blogs.

There is one key thing you need to understand.

To make money blogging you have to SELL something.

All bloggers sell either products or services or a combination of both.

All bloggers sell products or services either for themselves or other individuals/companies.

Most bloggers sell for both themselves as well as other companies.

They use a number of different methods to sell these products and services.

So, in this post, I’ll tell you the ways in which you can make money from your blog as well as the easiest way for a beginner to make money.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this guide are affiliate links and I will get a small commission if you use them and complete a purchase. This is at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support.

Ways To Make Money Blogging

You may have heard many stories of bloggers making thousands of dollars per month and think that’s pretty cool or that they’re lying.

Perhaps it’s some of those stories that got you interested in blogging.

Well, it’s true some bloggers do make thousands each month but it takes work and time to get to that, needless to say, blogging is not for the faint of heart.

If you’ve got the time and you’re up for the work, there are several ways to generate online revenue by blogging.

If you want to make money from your blog, you will have to use one or more of the different types of online business models above.

But first, you have to dump the idea of using a free website to build your blog if you want to build a profitable and successful business.

Second, get rid of the perfectionist mentality.

As a beginner, you’ll waste a lot of time trying to get every detail perfect, but the shocking truth is, you won’t because perfection died on the cross with Jesus.

Third, you have to start developing a marketer’s mindset.

A marketer’s mindset is one that can look at anything or situation and figure out a way to make money from it.

Now, let’s dive into what I like to call

Entry-Level Freelancing

Freelancing is when you sell your services for money.

Any skill can be freelanced, you just need to find the right audience.

Entry-level freelancing is when you have a skill but has no field or very little experience. No one knows about your services or your potential.

I call it entry-level freelancing because it’s a new blogger’s starting point.

This is a great way to improve and develop your skills. With each client, you will get better and better.

With these freelancing services, the pay isn’t high. However, they are reasonable enough to cover a few bills.

Some entry-level freelancing professions are:

It’s easy to start freelancing your skills.

If you have a blog or website, just create a service page, listing the services you offer and how they can help your clients’ businesses.

You can list how much you charge or just provide a way for them to contact you to get more details.

Once you’ve created your service page, add it to your blog’s menu where everyone can see it.

Freelancing your skill is the easiest way to make money blogging if you have no traffic.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is when you advertise products or services for other people.

It does require that you have traffic going to your site in order for you to make money from it.

Once you have a good amount of website visitors you can apply to individual affiliate programs or join an affiliate network.

Once you’ve been accepted, you’ll be given a unique affiliate link that you would add to any relevant content you create and post.

Whenever your visitors click any of your affiliate links and make a purchase you’ll get a commission.

Commissions are different per program and affiliate.

You can use affiliate marketing to make money in any online business or on any platform, as long as you have traffic.

Try to recommend quality products and products you trust.

Lifestyle and informational (how-to) products are the best type of affiliate products to promote.

Always be transparent about your relationship with the product, in other words, let your readers know that you will earn a commission from it when they purchase.

Doing this helps your readers to trust you and in turn builds your credibility.

Every blog that I’ve seen uses affiliate marketing to make money.

Some affiliate marketing monetization strategies are:

Affiliate marketing is the most profitable way to make money blogging once you have traffic.

Display Advertising

Display advertising is when you place ads on your site. This is a great way to generate income from your blog.

The easiest way to do this is to apply to an ad network such as Google Adsense, Mediavine, Adthrive, etc.

When you use an ad network to display advertisements on your site, they handle everything for you (ad placement, relevant ads, payment, and advertisers).

However, you can also find companies (direct advertisements) in your niche and ask them if they’d be interested in advertising on your website.

You can earn ad income either from cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM).

With CPC you earn money every time someone clicks an ad on your site.

Whereas with CPM you earn money for every 1000 impressions/views without clicking.

This method does require you to have a good amount of traffic for it to be profitable.

Most ad networks require that your site has a certain amount of impressions before they’ll approve it.

Display advertising is one of the most effective ways to make money blogging without doing any extra work once you have traffic.

Sponsored Posts

When your blog starts increasing in traffic you’ll find that some companies will contact you and offer to pay you to create posts promoting their products or services to your audience.

Depending on the niche you’re in you may even be offered free products to test and review.

Optionally, once you’ve gained a good amount of traffic you can reach out to companies or individuals that you’d like to promote.

If you want to get their attention fast, tell them how your site will benefit their business and the number of monthly visitors your site gets.

Whichever companies you decide to promote make sure they’re relevant to your niche, and always disclose to your audience that it’s sponsored content.

Sponsored posts are easy and profitable ways to make money blogging, but it requires a lot of traffic.

High-End Freelancing

You can create guides and training courses to teach companies and individuals how to do certain things or change and improve their business, team, and self.

High-end freelancing jobs include:

Coaching and Consulting

Coaching and consulting are great ways to increase your online revenue. With this model, you’re selling advice and strategies on how to improve a business.

You can provide company-based or one on one consulting services.

You can communicate with members via video (skype, zoom, etc.), live chat, email, and phone calls.

As you can see there are various ways for you to engage with your clients.

So if you’ve got something valuable to share via coaching or consulting, do it. It’s a great way to earn extra income online.

Speaking & Influencer Gigs

A popular blog attracts businesses.

If you have a blog that has high monthly traffic you can become an influencer for companies.

The best part about this model is that you won’t have to look for these opportunities, they’ll come to you and pay you a lot of money.

You can even get speaking gigs that’ll allow you to travel to different states and countries to speak at conferences.

Even if you’re not getting paid to speak at conferences/events, it will still benefit you. You’ll be able to promote your brand and meet other bloggers that you can collaborate with in the future.

Memberships/Subscriptions

Membership sites are a great way to generate recurring revenue online, this makes it a perfect avenue to make money as a blogger.

You can charge your readers a monthly fee to access premium content on your site. However, you’ll have to constantly update and create new content for your audience.

Subscriptions are yet another amazing way of making money online. The methods discussed above can all be used as subscriptions.

You just have to create a membership site and charge a regular fee for members to get access to your products and/or services.

You can charge a small fee for basic access and then a higher fee for access to more advanced services or products.

Courses and Ebooks

Creating digital products such as ebooks, PDFs, audiobooks, videos, graphics, etc. is an easy way to earn money online.

The best part is, once you create them, they can bring you a constant cash flow for a very long time.

Training materials can be delivered in a number of different formats, such as ebooks, videos, and audio.

When course materials are delivered in such formats members of the course can go over the material as many times as they want. They will be able to work at their own pace without feeling pressured or overwhelmed.

Developing training courses takes a great deal of time, effort, and resources, but the stream of online revenue that can be generated makes it all worthwhile.

Online Stores

Selling physical and digital products is another great way to make money from your blog.

You can build an e-commerce/dropshipping store and sell products. You can sell many different products like Amazon or Walmart; you can niche down and sell something specific like pet supplies or baby clothing, etc.

For an online store, you will need a payment processor to accept payments.

With e-commerce stores, you may have to deal with packaging, shipping, handling, taxes, and duties; unless you set up a dropshipping business instead.

With a dropshipping business, you’d basically be the middleman. You set up the website, list the products, and accept the payments but another company deals with packaging, shipping, and handling.

The drawback here is that the profit margin would be smaller. However, with the right product and quantity of customers, you can generate a good amount of cash.

Now that you know the different methods to use and make money from your blog, let’s talk about

How To Make Money Blogging

Everyone can start a blog and make money blogging but not everyone has what it takes to stick with it until the end.

There are steps to follow before you can start making money from your blog.

Step 1: Create a Website

You need to create a self-hosted website to start your own blog, that is if you don’t already have one.

However, before you start creating a website, you need to decide which industry/niche market you’re going to blog about.

To create a website you need to purchase a domain name and web hosting.

A few great options are:

Hostinger and Namecheap most affordable.

Hostgator and Bluehost top rated.

For other choices, read this guide.

Step 2: Determine Your Who and What

The fastest way to make money blogging is to determine

1. Who you’re going to sell to

2. What you’re going to sell

Who are you going to sell to?

Who is your target audience?

Is there a market for your niche? You need a niche with an audience that is willing to pay to have their problems solved.

You have to be clear about who you’re going to sell to.

Knowing and understanding your audience is one of the key factors to your success as a new blogger looking to earn a living online.

Developing a customer profile or buyer persona will help you better understand who your customers are and what they need.

What are you going to sell?

Are you going to sell products or services?

There are many different types of products and services that you can sell.

The top products and services that most bloggers use to make money are:

Services

• Coaching & Consulting
• Website Development
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Writing
• Proofreading
• Marketing

Products

• Courses
• Ebooks
• Images
• Electronics
• Templates

You can sell a combination of two or more products and services at the same time.

The next thing you need to determine is what price point better suits your audience.

Can your audience afford high-end products/services, or are they more on the low-end of the budget?

Step 3: Content is King

You need to produce quality content. By that, I mean content that is valuable, good, great, or exceptional; content that solves a reader’s problem.

To produce such content you have to understand search engine optimization (SEO) and the intent of the searcher.

You want to know what they’re searching for and what outcome they hope to get from their search.

Let’s take a look at the components needed to produce exceptional content that attracts searchers.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of optimizing a website and its contents for search engines and searchers.

Aspects of SEO are:

• Content/ On-Page SEO: this has to do with your written copy, title, URL, headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.), internal links, and outbound links.
• Off-Page SEO: this is mostly about links pointing to your site, social sharing, brand mention, credibility, and trust.
• Technical SEO: this has to do with speed, responsiveness, security, schema markups, and good coding.

Search engines use bots/crawlers to search the web for content, when they discover new content they index it. That means they store it among millions of other discovered pages.

However, not all contents are indexed, only the ones that they feel will provide the most value to the searcher based on their search intent.

Understanding a searcher’s intent requires keyword research.

1. Keywords And Searcher Intent

Keywords are words or phrases that a user types into browsers to search for information, products or services, etc.

The intent of a searcher can be identified based on the words or phrases they type into a search engine.

There are four types of searches:

1. Informational: This is when a searcher is basically just looking for information. Informational phrases include words such as ‘how to’, ‘what is, ‘where’ etc.
2. Transactional: This is when a searcher is almost ready to convert to a customer. Words like ‘best’, ‘buy’, ‘purchase’, ‘subscribe’, etc. are used.
3. Navigational: This is when searchers know exactly which site, company, or person they want to find, and type in the brand or person’s name. Examples of navigational searches are Amazon, Microsoft, and so on.
4. Commercial Investigation: With this type of search, a searcher has the intention of buying but needs more information. They’ll use phrases such as ‘review’, ‘which’, etc.

There are tools designed to help you with your keyword research process by providing you with search volume, keyword difficulty, etc.

These tools can also give you information on your competition.

Some great places for finding keywords are Google search suggestions, Answer the public, Yahoo answers, and Amazon, among many others.

The best tools for keyword research are:

• Ubersuggest
• Moz tool
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• Keywordtool.io

Once you understand the user’s intent, then you can produce quality content such as blog posts, products, and services to target those specific searchers.

2. On-Page Optimization

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing areas of your content so that it is easy to read and understand by both search engines and searchers.

Here Moz gives a visual representation of the elements of an optimized page.

Source: Moz

The elements on a page that you should optimize are:

• Title
• Meta Description
• URL
• Headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
• Internal Links
• Anchor Texts
• Images (filename, size, description, alt text)
• Content Readability

Content Readability Tips

• Use short sentences
• Keep your sentences simple enough for a primary reader
• Use bullet points and numbers
• Use italics and bold to emphasize
• Add videos and audios when possible and relevant
• Include visuals such as images or infographics
• Use relevant subheadings
• Use text, colors, and fonts that are easy to read and see

Producing easy-to-read and understandable content is a great way to drive traffic to your site, especially if it is valuable and solves the problem of the reader.

If writing content is not your thing, you can outsource it on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork to have freelancers write for you.

Need a freelancer? Check out my services here!

Now, let’s talk about how you’re going to get traffic to your blog.

Step 4: Promote Your Blog

You need traffic that converts and for that to happen you have to target the right audience.

Let me explain what I mean by traffic that converts.

Traffic that converts is when a visitor takes a specific action on your site/blog. Actions such as

• Subscribing to your email list
• Purchasing a product or service
• Reaching out to you for more information
• Returning to your site regularly

Getting customers/ leads is one of the biggest struggles new bloggers face.

The best way to get a visitor to covert is by using a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is something that you link to an opt-in/web form and give away in exchange for an email address.

To learn about lead magnets read this guide.

There are only two ways to get customers.

1. Get them organically: you can get customers organically using search engine optimization (SEO) and other link-building techniques.

2. Pay for them: you can run paid advertisements (search engine marketing/SEM) and drive traffic to your site.

With the two methods, one requires money and the other requires time, sweat, possibly some tears, patience, and hard work.

Organic traffic is free traffic that your site gets from the search engine results page (SERP); that is Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Getting Organic traffic depends on two things:

1. Writing Good SEO Content (which we already discussed).

2. Link Building Techniques.

We’ll now take a look at

Link Building

When you hear the term link building, it’s referring to backlinks.

Backlinks are inbound links. Inbound links are links pointing from other sites back to yours.

While you need other sites to link to yours, you don’t want just any site’s link. You need relevant and authoritative sites to link to you.

Authoritative sites are sites that have a high domain rank (DR), these are sites that Google trusts.

Them linking to you is like a vote for you, and because Google trusts them, Google will be more open to showing your content to its searchers.

Getting backlinks is not an easy task. There are two ways to get backlinks:

Earned links are links that point back to your site because your content is viewed as valuable.

1. Earn them

2. Buy them; which is pretty much self-explanatory.

Keep in mind that it is wrong in Google’s eyes and if you get caught, you will be penalized.

So,

What Are Earned Links And How To Get Them

With earned links, people naturally link to you because they enjoyed your content and found it helpful.

Earned links are the most valuable links.

You can get earned links by:

• Writing Great Content

• Doing Outreach

• Guest Posting

• Community Building

Outreach

Outreach is the process of identifying blogs relevant to yours and reaching out to them.

You’d let them know about your content and why it would interest their readers and benefit them, then suggest a link back to you.

Guest Posting

With guest posting, you write content for authoritative sites that is relevant to yours in exchange for a link back to you.

The key to guest posting is taking the time necessary to create extremely valuable content for the content hosts and their readers.

If the content is really good then the host will have no problem accepting it and sharing it on their site.

Don’t just think ‘I need them to link to me’, but rather focus on providing quality to them. Think about them first and what value you can bring to them.

Community Building

Community building is all about connecting with your readers and building a relationship with them.

Building a community for your blog is a great way to get links. Once you start a blog, you should immediately start building a community of loyal readers.

This gives your readers a chance to communicate with you and get to know you, give feedback, comments, etc. which will help them trust you and your brand.

There are lots of ways to build a community, some of which are:

• Social media networking: because people spend a lot of time on social media, it is an easy way to engage with your readers and share value with them.
• Responding to comments and feedback: if your blog is successful and you have a huge audience, chances are you will never be able to reply to all comments, but you must do your best to reply to as many as you can in the quickest time possible.
• Push notifications: when someone registers for push notifications, they are immediately notified whenever you publish new content.
• Email marketing: place opt-in forms that have a freebie/lead magnet on your website to get users’ email addresses. You can then use email to nurture your readers and build a relationship with them.

Once you’ve built a community you can make money blogging effortlessly.

The Wrap On How To Make Money Blogging

You can make money blogging online in 2022 and beyond, but only if you treat it like a business instead of something you do to pass time or when you feel like it.

You have to become a business owner and treat it like a business, even if you decide to start it as a side hustle.

Making money online is real and millions of people are doing it.

You don’t need a degree to make money blogging, you just need to dedicate your time and be willing to genuinely help your readers.

Now that you know a bit more about blogging and how you can make money blogging, go be a blogger.

I’d love to hear from you, drop your thoughts in the comments below.

Also, before you go, if you got value from this post, please share it.

I’ve made it super easy for you to share by just clicking any of the social icons or images below.