How to Write a Blog that Makes Money




 

How Can Blogging Make Money?

 

hands typing

Are you ready to create a website business? Many people don’t know that you can make money by starting a blog website. You don’t even have to be the best writer (I can attest to that). There is so much information and knowledge on the internet that you can do research on pretty much any topic and write about it.

 

It really helps if you blog about something you are interested in. The reason for this is I’ve found that if you have an interest in a topic, you will be more motivated to research it and write about it on a regular basis. Of course, you can write about anything even if it doesn’t interest you, but sometimes your enthusiasm comes out in your writing and people can sense it. It’s just my opinion, but if I had to write about knitting every day I don’t think I would be successful because I have absolutely no interest in knitting, but someone else does. And their enthusiasm and knowledge of knitting may be able to help others who want to learn about it.

 

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First of all, start thinking about how to pick a topic to blog about. There are different ways to go about it. You could go with the interest thing, or you could also blog about something that’s popular, hot, or trendy. You could also just blog about life. Kids, food, animals, travel, work, cars, products, or any other host of things. Then from those you could even narrow down your choice to something specific. For example, if you’re a foodie you could narrow your blog choice down to Italian food and blog about recipes, restaurants, low calorie choices, etc. I could see many people being interested in following that. As you can see here, I’m blogging about blogging, so it’s possible to write about anything.

 

writing on notebookNext is where the writing part comes in. It is very important to have good spelling and grammar skills if you want to be taken seriously. Luckily for all of us, there is spell-check and we can put everything through Word or another program that spell-checks for us. But grammar is a different story. People don’t want to read an article that doesn’t make sense or has errors in it. But even if you’re not good at grammar there are online sites that can check it for you, and you could always find a friend or relative that is good with grammar and is willing to proof read your blogs. People generally like to be helpful and I’ve found a few people who don’t mind reading through my stuff.

 

Once you get going with your writing, that’s when the making-money part comes in. There are a few ways to go about it, but the best way to make money with blogging is to use affiliate marketing. If you click on the link, I go into much more detail about affiliate marketing and how it works. But basically, affiliate marketing is nothing more than adding links to your page that direct the reader to another site that sells something. If the reader buys that product from your link, you make a commission.

 

Here is an example of a website page that I created:

http://baseballmomstuff.com/what-if-i-dont-like-baseball

This is a blog page at my website: BaseballMomStuff.com. This website is for all of the things that baseball and softball parents might be interested in. There are thousands of baseball parents around the world, so you can imagine that many of them will be interested in products to buy for their kids or themselves and also in reading articles about baseball kid parenting. On the particular page above, I talk about how to keep yourself sane and interested if you have to be at your kids’ games, but don’t really like baseball, and tips for things to keep yourself busy at practice. On this page, I don’t have as many links…in fact I only have three that are very subtle because I want to keep the feel of the page to a blog-type article that’s not really there to sell stuff. That’s a good way to build trust with your readers and you want to make the pages all different so your website doesn’t get repetitive and boring.

Ad Banners

You will also notice that I have ad banners at the top, middle, and bottom of this page. The first two are Google Ads and it’s very easy to sign up for them and add them to your web pages. When someone clicks on the banners on a web page and are directed to a company ad, the blog page owner gets a small commission, but those can add up quickly if you have a lot of good content. They are targeted ads which focus on the computer user’s history and will be relevant to things they have looked at and searched for. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy.

 

The ad at the bottom is an ad from a website partner that hosts websites and has online training for website building and design, and how to incorporate affiliate marketing. They offer banners, just like thousands of other companies, to feature on your blog pages.

 

Website Hosting

Before I started any of my blogs, I had no idea where to go or how to get started with building a website. There are many website hosting platforms online, but I didn’t know how to use them and I was very intimidated. While searching around online for how to create a free blogging website, I stumbled onto a website called Wealthy Affiliate. I had no idea what it was so I did a little research and figured out that it’s not only a website hosting platform, but it’s also an online college of sorts where you can learn how to build a website from scratch step by step and also how to set up affiliate links in website pages. Since it was free and I didn’t want to spend any money on it, I signed up and started watching the tutorial videos. I found that it’s very easy to follow and the step-by-step instructions are perfect for someone like me who is not that computer savvy and doesn’t have a lot of spare time to figure this stuff out for myself.

 

french calendarIt only took me a couple of weeks to have my first website up and running and to actually start writing blog pages. I have to tell you that I was very excited and proud to have done this. The nice thing about doing it on this site was that there are people there who are willing to help you if you get stuck. It’s a whole community of people at different levels of skill that are there working on their own website projects. It’s been really great connecting with other people doing the same things and bouncing ideas off of each other. There is an activity board where you can see who’s online and you can chat with people. Remember above when I talked about checking grammar? There is a feature at Wealthy Affiliate called “Site Feedback” where you can ask people to evaluate your pages and give suggestions and constructive criticism on your pages. This can be invaluable in perfecting your web design and writing skills. It’s something I highly recommend trying and since you can sign up for free you don’t have to invest any money just in case you change your mind or decide you don’t want to continue with it.

 

The main thing you should remember with starting a blog website is that making money usually takes some hard work and perseverance, and there is no get-rich scheme that really works, so you have to put the time in to do your writing and in maintaining your website. I admit that it’s hard to stay focused on it at times and I have to take a break, but it’s been very fun and rewarding to have a way to make extra money, and I hope to be able to do it full-time in the near future.

 

 

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16 comments

  1. Hey,

    thanks for sharing useful advice with people like this.
    There is so many information out there and it’s really hard to understand everything when you are a beginner.

    But on your blog people can focus on what’s the most important and follow your steps, to reach their success.

    I hope you are very successful, and I wish you all the best in 2017.

  2. Excellent information, especially the reassurance that you don’t need to be a great writer to make money online as a blogger. I will add that learning basic SEO skills and maybe completing the inbound certification from HubSpot (it’s free) will help anyone become a better blogger capable of making more money. They now have some SEO training over there as well. That will definitely help elevate a blog’s earning potential.

  3. Really great advice you are giving us here. Yes we can make money blogging and its my favorite way of making money online. You make good points here in your article. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. Hope to read more from you soon! Keep up the good work. 

  4. Thanks for explaining all the steps in an easy understandable way. There is so much info to be found online that makes these things sound unnecessary complicated.

    Your articles will be very helpful for newcomers that want to get serious in starting an online business. Thanks for letting us show one of your websites, as I believe showing something says more than words!

    Keep up the good work!

    1. Jurgen, thanks for taking the time and reading my article.  Yes, I believe if you want to be credible in this business, you need to show your work and it needs to be good.  🙂

  5. What is the best way to blog and make money? Straight away do it full time or do as in the side. I think for me I do in the side. Because blogging can be very slow paced to see results. With Wealthy Affiliate, I learn to create my own blogs. I never had such a helpful education system like this before. The making money part, I am still learning.

    1. Kit, in my opinion blogging should be started as a part-time venture to make sure it will work for you.  I also have a home business that I still run, but I plan to transition to working on my blogging sites full-time.  🙂

  6. Hi Shannon,

    Thanks so much for posting this guide to blogging. I really enjoyed reading it! I have been looking to get into blogging/website creation for a while now. I am very glad that I found your website to help me out. I also liked that you pointed out that blogging isn’t a get rich quick scheme, but that it actually takes time and work. 

    Keep up the great work!

    1. Hi there.  You’re right…anything that promises the idea of get-rich-quick is a total scam.  You need to put in work, but it can be really profitable and also satisfying work.  🙂

  7. This is a great article on how to get started online. There are so many ways to go about building a business online and different places that give great information and others that just want your money. I think also you are right in the fact that you have to speak on something that has meaning to you otherwise you won’t be as committed to growth and sticking with it when you are going through the beginning stages. Keep up the great work and thank you for the valuable information.

    1. Exactly right, Chris.  Sticking with a topic that you know a little about but are really interested in makes your writing much more believable.  🙂

  8. Great article and very good information.

    I’m blogging for a while now, in the way of doing affiliate marketing, combined with ad banners.

    What I can say is that it earns pretty good, it takes a while before you can attract people, depending on the niche you are, but once you got it, it is easy.

    This posts also shows other ways to do it, I never tried them, but maybe I should consider doing this as well.

    Thanks for sharing this with us!

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