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People look to blogs as sources of expertise and authority on the subjects they’re searching for online. Well-established blogs with a depth of high-value content will likely see traffic numbers go up as their reputations grow. Although a blog requires ongoing, regular updating, it also opens up lots of opportunities to earn passive income once it becomes successful.
Let’s explore the qualities that make for a successful blog and the different ways that you can make money with a blog.
Can you make money from running a blog?
You can make money from running a blog, but to do so you’ll need a large and dedicated audience. Many of the blogs that exist now weren’t started to make money, but rather for people to write about hobbies, interests, and areas of expertise. Some blogs within this category have ended up making money because they became popular naturally. Generally speaking, though, to make money from running a blog, you need to treat it like a business and go in with a plan to monetize it.
To generate consistently high visitor numbers, you’ll need to give people reasons to:
Visit your blog for the first time
Click between different articles to find out more
Return to your blog in the future
Share your content with their own social networks
To do these things, you need to consistently make high-quality content within a popular niche. Website traffic is important because blogs don’t make money simply from having good writing on them that people enjoy reading. Rather, blogs make money from advertising, sponsored content, affiliate marketing, and even online stores. And, to see a notable return from those potential income streams, a blog needs a high number of visitors to see and engage with them.
How does a blog make money?
It’s important to be realistic when starting a blog. You won’t make passive income immediately. However, if you commit yourself to producing regular, high-quality content (try starting with at least two posts per week), you should start to see your blog pages ranking in search results for keywords that relate to your niche. This will help to bring more and more traffic to your blog, and it is at this point that you can start exploring ways to make money with your blog.
Some ways to monetize your blog include:
Advertising for companies whose target audience matches your blog’s audience. They can engage people who’ll be interested in their products and services through you.
Sponsorship from companies whose products are appropriate to your blog niche. You may be able to secure agreements to write about their products, so that your audience is more likely to want to buy them.
Affiliate partnerships with brands. These agreements allow you to share products on your site using a custom link and make a commission on any products sold after readers click through.
An online store where you sell the things you write about in your blog. This store can feature products with affiliate links as well as custom merch featuring your blog’s own branding.
Gated content with members-only access, where you charge a fee to read a certain set of blog posts or a specific blog. If you’ve written enough content, you could paywall a certain set of posts without needing to regularly write new gated posts.
It’s important to note that only some of your blog visitors will become customers or click on your ads, which is why it’s so important to have high visitor numbers. If an advertiser, for example, is going to place their ad on your blog, you both benefit if a large number of people are seeing the ad, since only a small number of your total visitors are likely to click the ad or buy a product.
What kinds of blogs make money?
There is no specific type of blog that is guaranteed to generate more passive income than another. Over 63% of the world’s population uses the internet, so the subjects people are interested in are incredibly broad. But you can still be strategic in choosing what kind of blog to write to make the highest possible passive income.
When you start a blog, you’ll first need to determine your niche. Choosing a niche for your blog is about finding a subject matter that’s popular with people searching the internet but that isn’t currently covered by many other blogs. If lots of people are searching around a particular niche, but not many people are blogging about it, then you may have found a potentially profitable niche.
Whichever niche you choose to focus your blog on, there are a few rules you should remember above all if you want your blog to start generating passive income for you:
Post high-quality, well-researched, original content.
Post content at least twice a week.
Keep posting—if you’re going on vacation, schedule your posts in advance.
Consistently posting quality content in your niche will help you rank on search engines so that more people see your blog and are likely to visit it. Don’t forget to market your blog by collecting emails for a newsletter and sharing posts on social media. With quality posts and an engaged audience, you’ll be in a much stronger position to start monetizing your content.