The 5 Basic Steps
Here are the five basic steps if you want to make money blogging. I’ll discuss them in more detail as we go, with an emphasis on #5.
- Establish your home base
- Produce valuable content
- Build relationships
- Grow your platform (and branch out)
- Choose and implement streams of income
If you find yourself getting overwhelmed as you read through, you’re normal! Don’t worry, I’ll give you some tips for starting at the end. Also, please note this post contains affiliate links.
Alright, let’s break it down.
1. Establish your home base
If you want to make money blogging, obviously you’ll need a blog. If you don’t already have one, no worries, simply follow the steps I outlined in How to Start a Blog. This is the easy part (even if you’re not technically-inclined).
2. Produce valuable content
Once you have a blog, write. Draw from your expertise and experience and write informative posts and articles about your chosen topic. Make your content excellent. In order to make money, you must have visitors, but in order to have visitors, you must have content worthwhile to visit.
Writing and producing content is the time consuming part. It’ll be a while before you start seeing an income. There is no way around this. There are no shortcuts. We all have to put in our time.
3. Build relationships
While you create your content, start building genuine and sincere relationships via social media, commenting on other blogs, forums and the like. Reach out to people in your niche. Find people who could use the information you provide. Get to know them, interact, be friendly and helpful by offering no-strings-attached tidbits of your expertise. Building authentic relationships is important for a few reasons:
- You will establish a reputation of being trustworthy and generous.
- Your site will be found. People won’t naturally find your site if you don’t put yourself out there.
- It’s very possible these relationships will turn into much more than just acquaintances to chat with online. These people will likely support you in the future and more than that, they may become fantastic, life-long friends.
4. Grow your platform (and branch out)
Keep growing in the knowledge of your craft so the content you produce gets increasingly great. Use your blog to get exposure, build authority, gain trust and be helpful. (Have I said that before? It’s just so important.)
A lot of people don’t realize that for many bloggers, much of the money they make does not come from their blog directly. A blog is a platform. It’s online property, a digital home. After proving their trustworthiness, bloggers use their blogs as springboards to launch other projects that bring in income, such as ebooks, books, speaking, products, etc.
Only think about making money once you have earned trust. Many, many people want to skip ahead to the money part, but if you try to dive into monetizing before you’ve really built your platform, you run the risk of damaging the good reputation you so desperately need.
5. Choose and implement streams of income
This is the part you’ve been waiting for—the actual ways people make money blogging.
Following is a list of income streams bloggers adopt, broken down into five main categories:
- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Digital Products
- Physical Products
- Services
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