How to Make Money Blogging – The 2019 Guide

From my experience of blogging in 4 years, I can guarantee that making money online is not an overnight business. Therefore, if you want to make a blog for money easily and quickly, you can stop reading from this point because I cannot guide you to do so.

I know that some bloggers could earn thousands of dollars per month after a short time starting a blog. However, many others do not earn that much but still claim they are successful. Do not believe people who boast of easy money from blogging because it takes a lot of time, devotion and hard work to make money online.

I have made a lot of mistakes and also learned a lot from them, sometimes I wish I didn’t spend that much time for my problems. That’s the reason why I want to write this post for newbie bloggers who is starting the idea of making money online. If you want to earn more from your blog, then below is my suggested task-by-task schedule. You can approach this guideline in a different way, depending on your time, target, working style and resources.

1. Starting a Blog

• Choose the right blog niche: The niche of your blog must be taken very carefully, it should focus on topics you enjoy and have a passion for. Don’t just choose a niche because you see other people successful with it.
• Pick your domain name: Domain name is also very important and could make your blog stand out. Getting a short, descriptive, generic and memorable domain name is always recommended because it will be easier for your visitors to type the URL correctly. Besides, you should purchase a short .com domain with no dashes.
• Get a reliable hosting service for your site
• Install WordPress on your host: WordPress for self-hosted blog is the best publishing tool and also the most SEO-friendly platform. You can install WordPress easily by using the Quick Install service in your cPanel. After that, you need to install necessary plugins and find a suitable theme for your blog. Don’t use free themes on the Internet as it would take you a lot of time to fix and customize. Premium themes are worth your money, you can check out some popular WordPress theme providers such as Elegant Themes, Studiopress or Thesis.

2. Add Content and Must-Have Pages

You must be excited to see your new blog live, however, this is just the base and you still have a lot of works to build your house. Now, start adding valuable content for your blog.

• There are 6 important pages that every blog should have. At this point, you need to add at least the About and Contact pages.
• Till now, you have your blog set up, it is time to start adding content. Content quality is very important at this stage, it will show exactly how you can blog and your blogging potential.
• Develop an editorial schedule for your blog. You should know how often you can blog and what you will write about. Set yourself some targets.
• Add at least 3 evergreen articles each month. The articles are not time dependent, therefore, they will still be relevant months or even years later.
• When you add new posts, make sure to link your content together. This is not only helpful for users but also helps search engines index your site better.

3. Promote your Blog

• Create promotional plans for your blog. Don’t be afraid if your traffic is still too low.
• Implement at least one of your promotional plans. Don’t be crazy commenting, building links, submitting to directories, social networks or advertising on Adwords or Facebook. You should find the balance between them.
• Check out Google Analytics and see which strategies are working well on your blog and which ones are not as efficient as you expect.
• Guest post on other sites in your niche.
• Make sure you continue to have good relationships with other bloggers by linking, regularly commenting on their blogs and participating in various conversations.
• Get your visitors more involved by responding comments quickly, writing more how-to articles or holding some contests.
• Joining active blogger communities to improve your search engine rankings and boost your traffic.
• Youtube is also a great tool to generate traffic and get engaged with your visitors. Check out the guide by Neil Patel on how to get more Youtube views for your videos.
• Start learning how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and find ways to improve your SEO practices and rating. You will soon see a better PageRank, meaning more chances and money for advertising.

4. Make Money from Blogging

• Consider adding an advertising option. Google Adsense is my suggestion as this is still the best advertising network on the Internet. It is not a good idea to add too many ad blocks to your blog at early stage.
• Consider adding an affiliate program that is suitable with your blog. Add a popular affiliate program such as Amazon or Shareasale. You should write your articles linking to specific products with affiliate links instead of using just a general affiliate link.
• Review results of your existing affiliate and advertising programs. If their revenues are not improved or not significantly, experiment with other alternatives.
• Another revenue source could come from sponsored posts, which mean you will get paid for writing a review of a product/service. SocialSpark is the most popular marketplace that connects advertisers with bloggers for sponsored blog posts and you can find a lot of offers here.
• When your blog becomes more well-known, add Advertise page to start receiving direct advertising offers.

5. Improve Readers’ Experience

This is an important step to increase returning readers.

• Research showed that mobile-friendly websites produce 75% higher rate of revenue and pageviews for mobile users. Therefore, try to make your blog easy to read on all devices. I recommend you to use responsive themes because they can adjust to any screen size, from the large screen of laptops to small screen of smartphones.
• Improve the loading speed of your site. Readers become more impatient and they will leave your site if it takes too long to load.
• Hire designers to make a unique logo and design for your blog.
• Test different ad placements so that you have the highest cost-per-click (CPC) and don’t annoy readers at the same time.

This is the plan to monetize my blog, I hope it will be a useful guideline to get you started with blogging for money.