The Big Fat Reality

You heard that you can make money from blogging and you did your homework. Starting a blog is pretty cheap; to be exact, it takes only around $4 per month using BlueHost which gives you free domain. You read a dozen ‘how to make money on a blog‘ and you are skeptical.

Most bloggers recommend you not to think about making money from blogging the first few months of starting a blog. Why? They say you will be disappointed because you can’t make a lot of money with little traffic.

What if I tell you that most of them are lying to you? What if I tell you that you should be thinking of making money from day one of starting a blog? Or maybe, even before you start a blog?

My name is Reginald and I have been in this blogging industry since 2006. I’ve my ups and downs in blogging and what I am going to share with you … is never been shared before in any blog post of mine.

And I am going to tell you two things in this blog post:

Why you need to think about make money blogging before starting a blog?
How to make money on a blog?

No, I’m not joking. I’m well aware that I’m sharing information that most bloggers considered sacred and against the norm. But I love to be different and above everything, you deserve to know the truth about make money from blogging.

Why you need to think about make money blogging?

Starting a blog isn’t cheap. Serious bloggers use WordPress (no offence to Google’s Blogger / Blogspot platform) and you need a web hosting service to fire up your blog. As I mentioned earlier, web hosting isn’t expensive but you are certainly going to fork out a small amount of investment before you can start calling yourself a blogger.

Blogging is a business and in business, we talk about return of investment (ROI). So, you invested $100 dollars to start up your blog. When are you expecting to get back the funds?

In the next 3 or 6 months?

That’s the whole point. Blogging will forever be a business and it is never too early to think about monetizing a blog.

Sure, starting a blog from scratch would mean you have little or no traffic at all to make money. But have you considered that just by putting one banner on the sidebar could create at least a 0.1% chance of clicking? And that single click could earn you a few dollars on Google Adsense or a couple hundred dollars through affiliate sale.

The whole point is simple. You need to think about blog monetization even before you start a blog.

How to make money on a blog?

Months before I started Success Ground, I was devoted to make the blog work for me and it goes all the way from how to gain audience, generate blog traffic and ways to make money from blogging — the whole 9-yard.

I took the road less taken, the path that most bloggers consider it to be stressful, time consuming and most importantly, procrastination kicks in.

Step 1: List down potential ideas

When you start, there is absolutely no way to know which idea is the best and for most entrepreneurs, your mind would be exploding with tons of business ideas.

Regardless the size of the business, write them down (I use Evernote to keep track on my ideas).

Potential ideas could also be generated by asking and doing research. I asked over a dozen times on social media platforms and head over to sites like Quora to determine the most popular question asked by majority.

Step 2: Validating your business ideas

In my free entrepreneurship course ‘Startup to Success‘, I shared 3 powerful ways to validate my ideas to ensure that there is enough growth, popularity and on top of everything, existing markets that will buy or participate in my idea.

Validating business ideas is an important step to ensure success of your business.

The main goal is to streamline the top 5 business ideas that you know they will work through valid stats and information. So you aren’t jumping the gun here.

Step 3: Determine your audience

Right — Let’s say you have determined you want to start a blog about ‘make money blogging’. The next step is to determine your target audience. And I mean very specific ones.

One of the biggest mistakes most bloggers do is by targeting a vast majority of audience. Unless you are managing a high traffic blog, you have better odds of success by targeting just a small market segment.

Target audience can be determined by using several tools. A list of my favorite tools would be:

Talkwalker
Facebook Insights

Talkwalker is basically an advanced Google Alerts that provides not only stats on keywords but as well as popularity of a specific keyword based on demographic. It even tell you the country, language and sex for that matter!

Facebook Insights is used by nearly everyone. All you need to do is to search for several related keywords and it will give you a set of data involving ages of people who might be interested.

Comparing Talkwalker and Facebook Insights, I rather use Talkwalker as it is basically on automation as it gives you details of everything while Facebook Insights requires you to input in relevant data before it can churn out stats for you.

When you have these data in hand, you’ll be able to determine:

The type of content that will attract readers
Ways of phrasing your content that fits the needs of the target audience
Understand their ultimate challenge and provide the right solutions (because you are the problem solver for them)
Have an idea of their buying persona’s or ability to spend

Step 4: Finding sources to make money on your blog

This part is fairly simple. Once you have determine the type of audience you are targeting and the problems they face, you can now decide on the solutions to provide to them.

For example, if my target audience are college students trying to find part time jobs, asking them to purchase equipment for podcasting may not be the best option. In fact, that could be a huge waste of time and effort.

However, what happens when you offer them a 1,000 words PDF tutorial which has over 50 part times job opportunities? I bet your email list is going to skyrocket overnight and you get tons of traction!

If you are thinking on how to make money on a blog, here are several sources to start with:

Google Adsense
Affiliate sales
Banner advertising

Google Adsense is probably the easiest to start with. Register for an account on here and ensure that advertisements (or banner codes) are placed on strategic locations on the blog. Most popular sites would be in the middle of the post and sidebar.

Affiliate sales is basically the big ticket to earning more money on a blog. A single sale could mean several hundred dollars and it could go up to thousands. The trick here is to promote an affiliate product (preferably something you know or use) that you know will solve their problem.

Avoid promoting a product which you have no experience on as it may backfire you on down the road.

As of today, affiliate sales is one of the key revenue generator for most of my blogs. The only thing you have to remember is that you are required to have an affiliate disclaimer to ensure that you doesn’t face legal issues.

If you are looking for a list of recommended advertisement networks or affiliate programs to participate in, here are a few which I use on a daily basis (click to join for free):

WP Engine Affiliate (Minimum $200 per sale)
StudioPress Affiliate (35% commission per sale)

Step 5: Analyze your stats to make more money on your blog

The last step is all about making more money on your blog instead of the typical, “How to make money on a blog” type of thing.

Again, traffic will be low and slow when you just started a blog. So being realistic is going to ensure that you doesn’t jump the gun, lose hope and throw in the towel within a few months of blogging.

Analyzing your stats is important because you’ll know exactly what is working and generating you income.

I usually compare:

Size of banners based on location
Google Adsense vs Affiliate sales
Clicks vs Conversions

The information above requires some time to collect. Depending on your blog traffic, it may take roughly 3 to 6 months to get highly accurate data. You must then decide how you want to leverage the statistics to make more money from your blog.