The Ultimate Guide How to Start A Blog That Makes Money [Infographic]

Only 14% of all bloggers earn an income through blogging. That is a startling statistic given there are more than 60 million WordPress blogs. This just shows there are a lot of bloggers who blog out of passion or do not know how to make an income through blogging.

Fortunately this Infographic from Jeff Bulla’s takes us through how to monetize a blog the right way.

11 Blog Business Models

1 – Advertising

Check out our Tiktok Marketing Tips and Instagram Marketing Tips.

The Simple and plain old advertising.  You build some traffic and recurring visitors to your site then put ads to monetize the traffic. The ads could be from Google AdSense, Infolinks or directly from advertisers in your niche. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book but experts say advertising income is hard to scale.

You can make money from advertising in 2 ways.

(1) Cost per click – each time a user clicks on the ad you get paid a certain amount. This can be anywhere between $1 and $15 per click.

(2) Cost per impression – each 2,000 page views per month will generate an income for the blog owner. This could be $1 per 2,000 page views a month and requires a lot of traffic to see a good income.

2 – Webinar and Seminar

Jon Morrow uses webinars as one of his biggest income sources. Note – I said one of the income sources. The key to online income is to have multiple sources so you are not dependent on just one source.

3 – Books

If you have expertise and like writing the long form then you can create physical books to monetize your blog. Most people are nowadays turning to eBooks.

4 – Consulting

This is where you offer a service and get paid for your time and expertise. Consulting is low-cost to start and can be highly profitable.

5 – eBooks

eBooks are one the most commonly used monetization techniques.

6 – Offer Physical Products

You can sell physical products that relate to your niche. Let’s say your blog is about fishing and you could be offering fishing gear. The products could be from affiliate sites like eBay, Amazon or your own product.

7 – Sponsorship

This could be sponsored content, products or advertising.

8 – Speaking

When you establish yourself as an expert you could be in for speaking gigs. This could be local events or global.

9 – Affiliate

You offer somebody else’s product and get a commission, this is called affiliate marketing. Affiliates can get a commission of 10% to 50% of the sales price.

10 – Online Courses

When you create online courses that people want, you are creating passive income.

11 – Subscription

A subscription based website is where you charge each subscriber a fee to access your content. The fee could be for monthly, yearly or lifelong memberships. You can start a subscription based blog right at the start but this might be risky unless you are Corbett Barr of course who had built his reputation and a free blog first.

10 Steps to Make Money Blogging

1 – Find Your Passion and Purpose

The first step in creating a blog is to find your passion and a niche that has demand. I won’t go into too much detail here as I have previously written a post about this.

2 – Find Your Target Market

Once you have a niche, you then have to identify your target audience; their demographics, their likes, their problems and continually try to find solutions – one piece at a time. This will help you market your content and form your content strategy.

3 – Find a Host for Your Blog

Before you jump in to create your blog you need to find a home for your blog – this is the host. There are plenty of cheap hosts and there are pros and cons to it. Some experts say cheap hosts have performance impacts. So be careful which host you settle for. I created an Infographic post on how to start a blog in 7 simple steps which can help.

4 – Create Your Blog

Creating your blog is the easiest and most fun part in this process. It should get you excited, if not then you are in the wrong field and should get out of blogging now. If you have the 1^st step covered and have identified your niche then you should be able to create a blog in about 5 minutes. If you don’t believe me, you can check out the above post which has a video and a timer to show this is possible.

Tip: Include social sharing buttons like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Also include an SEO plugin like Yoast and an Email Opt-in box on strategic places.

5 – Produce Good Content and Give it away for Free

There is plenty of content on the World Wide Web and free content is not going to cut it; you need to produce awesome content on a consistent basis to attract viewers. Always remember to focus on content quality and not the quantity.

6 – Market Your Content

Content marketing is not that easy especially at the start and this is where the Ultimate Content Marketing Checklist Infographic will come in handy. Dropping links in your social media accounts alone is not enough when you start. So do check out the Infographic checklist for more pointers.

7 – Bundle Your Knowledge and Experience

After a certain stage in blogging, you might want to consider creating a product that you can monetize to create a passive income stream. What you need is expertise, knowledge and experience in a field or industry.

The easiest to start is an eBook that may be 10 to 20 pages long. You can then expand that into a book if you like. You can then start online courses, consulting, produce a podcast or video to up sell your knowledge.

Here is Jeff Bulla’s idea of turning a $29 eBook into a $3,000 product.

8 – Customize Your Platform

When you start to offer products and services, you need up upgrade your content management system like WordPress to accept payments. You also need to consider where and how eBooks and videos will be stored and delivered to clients after payment. This could be as simple as integrating PayPal buttons on your site or outsourcing this work completely.

9 – Build Partnerships and Relationships

When the wheels first start spinning it takes time but when in motion it spins effortlessly. Similarly, to create more momentum you can guest blog and promote your brand name. Guest blogging can help create relationship with other bloggers.

10 – Release and Promote Your Product

The final step of monetizing your blog is taking your product sales to the next level either by promoting it heavily and/or partnering with affiliates by offering them a commission on the profit to increase sales volume. You can use webinars to educate before you sell at the back-end.

Next Steps

Check out the related posts below and get an understanding of how to monetize a blog. Have a plan and structure your blog for success. The important thing is to take action and stop procrastinating and putting things off for a later date. Good luck.