Making Money with Your Blog in 2022

I always wanted to create an awesome and informative blog site that will serve other people. This truly a fantastic experience, and if done right, it's the way to make real money and support your lifestyle.

Benefits of making money with your blog

• Financial freedom.
• Working from home or anywhere you want.
• Escaping the 9-5 job.
• Automation of your income and making money when you sleep.
• Learning how to build your own business.
• Interesting collaborations with other creators.

Why most blogs don't make any money?

Bloggers fail because they don't think about blogging as a business. 

Think about how you're going to monetize your blog early enough before you even start creating content. The key is to focus on your site as a business. What products or services you can offer and to whom?

It's easier to define your audience if you're a member of any online communities yourself. That way you're closer to your audience and can understand the pain points of other people and more or less understand what to write about. But that's not where your research should stop.

You can go further and understand what part of your audience and where they mostly spend money.

That leads to another important aspect of profitable blogs. Focus on B2B instead of B2C if you can. It can bring you 10x, 100x, and even a bigger boost in revenue.

Popular ways of monetizing your blog

Affiliate Marketing

You become an affiliate of products and services in a specific niche. So if you, for example, blog about sports and fitness, you can share affiliate links on sports nutrition, equipment, workout programs, etc. Every time someone purchases one of the products you mentioned on your site, you receive a commission.

Things you should know. It would be best if you had many readers, and they should be ok visiting affiliate links and buying from there. Sometimes, it's something that people don't like, but generally, it depends on the audience.

Fun fact: someone who uses an affiliate link you posted can buy a completely different product even not related to that one they initially visited or even your niche. I've heard about a case when someone clicked on a link that leads to a DSLR camera and then bought underwear.

It's possible to use affiliate marketing platforms that allow you to generate links on all sorts of products.

Digital Products

Selling a digital product is a great way to make money, and it's one of the top ways of generating online income if done right.

One of the popular products that are being sold online is ebooks. You can research a topic and create one in a short amount of time. And if you already have a good amount of blog posts that cover a particular topic in many ways, you can use that as content for your ebook.

You can sell a software that you made by explaining every detail of how it works and its value. It requires time and commitment to make things and then write about it, but it can help generate passive income and automate the sales process if done right.

Also, you can sell digital assets like fonts, icon packs, kits, and pretty much all sorts of graphics if you are a designer. You can do so using 3rd party platforms, but they usually have a huge commission. So selling the same products from your blog site make you much more money. Also, you fully control the way you gain and manage your audience.

Online courses

There is a huge probability that you know something that readers of your blog don't. You can pack this knowledge into a course and even host it on your blog.

Don't worry. You don't need to build a fancy video setup and record yourself on a camera for each lesson. Of course, if you don't want to do so. You can start from a text course or slides in a presentation. You can create a screencast video with a voice-over and teach things that way. A podcast is another way that's popular for many years already.

Coaching

Teaching someone how to do certain things is quite rewarding. Even if this model is hard to automate still, it's a good way to make money.

You build expertise by blogging, and people might have specific questions for you. It can be something that is hard or even impossible to wrap up and create a course. This is where the coaching model can be handy. 

You can teach people specific things that they want to know and give individual feedback on what they're trying.

It can be group coaching as well as individual coaching sessions. All that can be done online.

Subscriptions and Memberships

This is a great way to generate a stable income from your blog. You need a certain amount of readers or fans that are willing to pay for premium content.

You offer Premium membership and access to a restricted area of your blog site where you store community posts, ebooks, tools, digital assets, etc. All of this available only to your true fans.

Ads and Sponsorships

My least favorite, but the easiest way to make money from your blog. However, in my opinion, not the neatest and most profitable. You can generate ads from popular platforms like Google or Carbon ads and place banners in your blog posts.

You get a commission from advertisers if someone has clicked on a banner, seen a banner, or made an action (i.e., newsletter sign up).

Be aware of ad blocks that can significantly disrupt this way of monetization. I wouldn't rely on it 100%, but that's still an option.

Freelancing

Your site can be a lead magnet for your potential customers.

You can write about your work, how you do it, how you overcome obstacles, the results of your work, and how it helps your customers. You're simply sharing your work in progress and how your business operates, which is a really good thing. 

Nobody wants to deal with a shady service provider or a company that nobody knows what it does. Blogging about your business makes your business more transparent and attracts new customers.

It's even more amazing when you attract customers that went through your content at least partially. They're more prepared to work with you. It's easy to find a common language and agree on all the processes before signing a deal and start working.

Essential Things To Do With Your Blog To Profit

Choose a Profitable Blogging Niche

In simple words, you need a large audience who buys things online. 

A good niche is usually a combination of multiple things like what you like to write about, where people spend their money online the most, and if there is a big competition on the intersection of the first two things. You will find a perfect niche if there is an overlap.

Sometimes, your niche is what you already do, and you want to share your expertise online. So more people know about your business. And more people will connect with you after reading your blog.

The narrower niche, the better, but with the right tools, you really can write about different topics. If so, it's more a question of how you manage all this on one site.

Level up Your Content Skills

Start with research, know what content is popular in your case, and focus and write mostly about those topics. 

Don't be afraid to experiment. Try different things you read online and figure out what works best for you. One way to do that is to try writing in different styles. How to do that? First of all, pick two or three bloggers you like reading and try to do the copy work — it's basically re-writing their articles or snippets that you like the most.

Making money blogging can take some time and a lot of practice, but it can pay off in the long run.

Generate Traffic

Getting traffic is confusing, especially when you are just starting up. It's important to find reliable traffic sources if your site is relatively new and not yet popular.

Make sure your blog has a good SEO, and your content is optimized as well. It helps to be found in search engines like Google.

Facebook groups are another good source of traffic. 

You can find Subreddits in your niche and post there. 

Twitter works, but you need to have some following there. 

Pinterest is slow but can bring you a good portion of traffic for free, but you need to create eye-catching, informative graphic posts. It's not an instant solution tho.

Of course, platforms like these have rules, and you can't just post a bunch of your content and get free traffic. It's important to be nice, don't spam, and read community guidelines not to be banned.

Various sources of data show that usually, most of the traffic comes from Google or Facebook. These are two big sites where people hang out online most of the time. 

Of course, it also depends on your niche. You can have a lifestyle blog, and you can get a lot of your traffic from social media websites by simply posting lifestyle content there.

Business topics and product reviews are more searched in Google and other search engines than on social media.

It's a good idea to research first and test some ideas before investing your time in traffic sources. Both Social Media and SEO are time-consuming. And if you understand early enough where most of your traffic comes from, the best you can do is focus your efforts on that source to make your blog perform great.

Start Building Your Audience with Email List

We usually don't want to fill out some random forms and share sensitive information like email or even a name. 

Moreover, we as users hate to be interrupted with random questions in pop-ups when we're searching for some information or simply reading an article. 

When a new visitor comes to your site and leaves without giving you his email, then there is a high probability that he will not return.

However, if you strongly believe that your content brings value and changes people's lives and businesses in a good way, then it's probably a good idea to be a little bit pushy in some sense. I mean, you don't have to push several pop-ups at a time to your visitors, and we definitely can get creative and think about solutions where and when it's suitable.

So if you don't want to leave this opportunity on a table and have something valuable to offer, it's important to collect Emails and engage with your audience.

User Experience

Probably, you've heard or read about the importance of User Experience in blog sites nowadays. 

Basically, it's no longer enough to just create a site with a random template design, write a lot of content, build links, etc. Now, how your blog site looks and works for your reads matters. 

Well, it's was always important to have a good User Experience on your site, but now it's officially impacting your rankings in search engines like Google.

Poorly made blog templates are conflicting with web standards that we have these days, and quite often, they don't perform well on mobile screens. Also, the loading speed is one of the important metrics even tho some people already have access to 5G.

Make sure you choose the best blogging software and up-to-date templates for your site. It can be a game-changer for your business.

Final words

If you've read till that point, you probably know the answer. Yes, you can make money blogging in 2021, and I believe for many more years ahead. And yes, it's definitely challenging to start now but at the same it reasonable since the number of internet users increases every day. Meaning more opportunities and potential markets to explore.

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with your blog if you have one below in the comments section. Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear from you.