If you want to use your creative writing skills to earn a decent income online then blogging can be one of the best options for you. There are a number of ways in which you can earn via your blog. In fact, topmost bloggers of the world are earning jaw-dropping monthly income just by doing what they enjoy the most- Blogging. However, blogging is much more than creating awesome stories.
Here’s what it needs to start your own blog that can earn you a decent income every month. However, to be honest as a beginner you won’t be able to earn even 5% of what the top 10 bloggers of the world are earning. Having said that, 5% of the total monthly income earned by the 10th richest blogger in the world is around 7,500 USD!
Even half of that, i.e., 3,750USD per month (or just 2.5% of the total income) is not a bad thing for the beginners. Depending upon the inflation/monthly expenses in your country of residence, you may even be able to lead a comfortable lifestyle even if you have a family to look after! Just to remind you …we are talking about just 2.5% of the net worth of the 10th richest blogger! C’mon that’s not a Herculean task!
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How to start your blog?
Now the major question is how to start your own blog. It’s a strategic process and you would certainly not like to treat it as a fancy idea if you really want to make it big in the business of blogging. Here’s how to go about:
1. You first need to discipline your creativity. Understandably people visit your blog in order to gain deep insights and practical knowledge about something that you are expert at.
2. So, first, you need to find your area of expertise.
3. Are you good at saving money? Do you have a keen knowledge of stock trading? Do you possess the deep technical knowledge and can effortlessly impart the same to the dummies? Or is there any other skill that you excel at?
4. Just choose your area of expertise and concentrate your blog on the same.
5. For example, Harsh Agarwal calls himself a blogging scientist while Jitendra Vaswani is a pro at blogging, is an awesome speaker and calls him a rock star digital marketer. These people have rightfully earned these titles due to their expertise.
6. So cutting the long story short…you just need to find your area of expertise that you can comfortably explain to the people. Your blog will be based on that area of expertise! This way you will enjoy blogging and be able to offer the maximum ROI of the time invested by your readers.
Buy infrastructure
Next thing is to buy the digital infrastructure to start your blog. Talking in terms of business, you cannot start your brick and mortar shop without…well- bricks and mortar! In the same way, you need to have the digital real estate to start your blog. You should also have the digital address that will be used by your visitors to visit your blog.
You first need to buy a domain name (or digital address) from a reputed domain provider. The process is quite easy and straightforward:
1. Visit the domain provider’s website.
2. You will see a search box. Type your desired domain name inside that and you will see a page suggesting if the domain names are available or not along with alternative suggestions
3. The page also shows a number of different domain extensions (.in, .online, .biz, etc.) for the selected domain name along with their prices and a buy button
4. Click the buy button and you will find a few easy steps to complete your order by filling the necessary information (Billing Address, name, payment mode, and details, etc.)
Choosing the right type of hosting
There are 3 different types of popular hosting plans to choose from:
1. Shared Hosting:
In this plan, many websites share the same server and resources like RAM, hard disk, bandwidth, etc. USP of this plan is its cheap prices. That’s the right one for you. It is great for beginners, the lowest hosting plan among all the 3 popular types of hosting, and does not need you to involve in management or maintenance. However, shared hosting plans are not without cons.
You almost don’t have any privacy, these plans do not follow high levels of security and there are more chances of fluctuations in terms of performance, speed, and availability of your site as you have to share the same pool of resources with many other websites and there could be a tug of war between many websites when it comes to using the resources.
Wondering, why did we say that a shared hosting plan is best for you? That’s because as a beginner you won’t get heavy traffic or add loads of resource-consuming features on your site that automatically reduce resource consumption.
Besides, your security or privacy requirements aren’t very high as you have just started out in the business of blogging. That is why you can easily start your blogging journey with shared hosting plans.
2. Virtual Private servers or VPS:
VPS is a virtual private server is ideal for you when you start receiving good traffic on a regular basis with a steady increase. In VPS or virtual private server, the same physical server is used by many websites but that server is divided into a number of separate virtual servers. When you buy VPS hosting plan you are offered a specific “virtual server” that provides our separate dedicated pool of digital resources like bandwidth, hard disk, RAM, etc.
Unlike the shared hosting plan, you don’t have to share the server or resources with other websites that certainly promises a better stability high performance and faster speed of your site that can enhance the user experience. Besides, you enjoy better privacy and security as you have greater control over your resources. However, the VPS plans are more expensive than shared hosting plans.
3. Dedicated Hosting:
The dedicated hosting packages are used by the cream bloggers that experience massive traffic on a daily basis and whose monthly revenue generally runs in 5 figures. Dedicated hosting offers you a dedicated physical server along with digital resources like RAM, Hard Disk, and Bandwidth.
Here you get the maximum control not only on your digital resources but also on your physical server. Dedicated hosting is the best plan in terms of security, privacy, and resource allocation. You can enjoy the extended ownership with the help of a dedicated hosting plan. However, at this point in time, you certainly don’t need a dedicated server.
While it is good to know about the different hosting plans at this point in time you just need to buy a shared hosting plan from a reputed organization.
Design the blog
Once you have purchased the domain and hosting, you now need to invest in designing your blog, giving it a presentable look and posting the content on a regular basis. At one point in time, you needed to hire web designers for the purpose. The web designing services aren’t only expensive but also make you dependent on others. Thankfully you can also use CMS or content management systems that allow youth to build a fully professional website without getting your hands messy with complex codes.
- All you need is to just sign up for a reputed CMS like WordPress and use it for designing your site.
- Whether you want to decide or change the color of your site or need to add blogs, WordPress allows you to perform such essential as well as advanced activities using a relatively easy ecosystem.
- While there are easier CMS available in the market, none can rival WordPress as the best, SEO-friendly CMS for blogging. So, WordPress is the best CMS for you even if it requires you to go through some learning curve.
How to earn from your blog?
So, your blog is ready now. The next question is how to earn through your blog. There are multiple ways to do that:
Google Ad sense
Google Ad sense is possibly the most popular way of earning for most of the bloggers. You just need to sign up for the Google Ad sense and the contextual ads will be displayed on your blog posts. For example, if you have written about traveling in Hong Kong then you should insert the ads for Hong Kong flights. Hotels or tour packages will be displayed there. Each time someone clicks on the ad your account will be credited with the commission.
Affiliate Programs
Another preferred way of earning through your blog is by selling products and commission. What you basically do here is to write informative content around a specific product and convince interested people to buy the product using your affiliate URL.
Registration immediately gets the affiliate URL when you signup for an affiliate program. This unique URL helps the main vendor/website to track your performance and calculate your commission. When your blog readers click on your affiliate ID visit the page and buy the product, a certain commission is automatically added to your account.
Sponsored content
Businesses that have their own websites need to maintain their online reputation in order to enjoy a cutting edge over their competitors. Besides, even the offline brick and mortar business wants to attract more and more internet users and leaving a deep impact on them so as to turn them into their customer. You can help such business by posting sponsored posts about their business propel, interviews, current discounts, salient features, and business story.
Such content helps the readers connect with them and may eventually turn into their regular cueist actively helping them to enhance their business. For example, if your blog is about traveling and in your blog if you have mentioned “XYZ sweet shop” it helps in connecting the reader with the sweet shop and next time when the reader visits he is most likely to visit the sweetshop that you mentioned in your blog. You can charge a fixed amount for sponsored posts.
Get Hired
If you are really expert at something then you can also use your blog to get hired. In fact, many expert bloggers have a specific tab on the top of their site at reading Hire Me. Whether you are great at digital marketing or possess good speaking skills, you can mention such services in the hire me section that can allow the users to hire you for expert service that eventually helps to enhance your revenue.
Offer quality Guest Post and Backlinks services
While mango manes have their own company blogs as they maintain on a regular basis, they still need some backlines on the decent platforms in order to enhance year reputation. And you can offer them guest post and/backlinking services where you can add their backlink on one of your relevant blogs. The link takes directly to the client’s sites that help him in better SEO ranking. The castor the backfills vary depending upon the digital reputations (PA ad DA) of our site. You may stay with a reasonable charge of reach guest post and can augment reasonably ones your blog starts getting popular.
Conclusion
One of the best and legitimate ways of earning is blogging. Are you an established blogger willing to offer your 2 cents or need to know about any or specify issue that’s I have demised here, feel free to comment below.
