Before the dawn of the influencer era, blogging was the trendiest job on the internet. Bloggers could earn thousands of dollars a month in passive income just by writing about their passions and sharing their knowledge with the world. Do you dream of starting your own blogging business and gaining financial independence?
Maybe you want to leave the 9-to-5 hustle to live and earn on your own terms. Perhaps the digital nomad life calls to you, and you frequently get lost in daydreams of you blogging beachside with a mouse in one hand and a martini in the other. Perhaps you want to be on the road and make money while Overlanding. It’s all feasible if you know how to get started and what it takes to make a blog stand out today. This guide will walk you through several blogging business ideas as well as tips on how to start generating income from your site.
Figure Out What’s Here to Stay
Trends are great for gaining visibility, but viral posts only go so far in the long run. Rather than trying to copy whatever’s garnering attention today, do some research and learn about the most popular blogging niches. What industries have proven themselves to be highly profitable for the last several years or even 10? Some of the most popular blogging niches you can always expect to cash in on are:
- Travel
- Fitness
- Mom blogs
- Food and cooking
- Beauty and fashion
This isn’t to say you can’t find success outside of these niches, but you should avoid anything too obscure if your hope is to get money fast. What will help you truly stand out among the crowd is picking a familiar subject and optimizing it with a niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about.
Boost Your Skill Set
One of the worst things you can do for your business is start a blog about something you know nothing about. You’ll be forced to spend hours researching topics with the hopes of passing as a professional, but all you’ll really be able to do is repeat generic information that’s at the top of Google’s search engine results. If you aren’t any expert in anything you could blog about, consider expanding your horizons and going back to school.
Earning a degree has two major benefits. First, you can choose a major that ties into growing your business, be it marketing or web design. Two, you get enough education to write about something on a deeper level, which opens up the potential for guest posting later on. Cost is by far the biggest obstacle to overcome, but it can be done. You can look into private student loans that will help you add skills to your blogging background with ease.
Explore Advertising and Affiliate Marketing
These are the two most common means of earning an income blogging. If you want your site to generate passive income, then you’ll have to run ads that earn you a small commission per click. Affiliate marketing is the act of promoting products on your site and having a special link or exclusive discount code that earns you money with every transaction. These are both highly flexible, so you can decide how much effort you want to put into each. But for someone with a good niche and engaged audience, affiliate links can easily earn you $2000 to $6000 a month.
The most important factor when it comes to success rates is building trust with your audience. They aren’t just pawns for you to ploy into buying something so you get paid. They’re real people tuning in because they value your voice. Create authentic content that reflects that, and they’ll be more likely to take your word for products or services you endorse.
Push Traffic from Social Media
Blog reading is still a thing, but most people only find new sites because they came across a post on social media. Pinterest is massive for bloggers, and an optimized page can easily generate thousands of clicks a week. Some of the most successful users on the platform get millions of views every month. Be sure that you have your account settings in accordance with how accessible you want to be.
Although there are hacks to view private Instagram profiles one key to blogging success is easy social media access for your readers. Pinterest blog marketing is a special skill in and of itself, and one that it pays to know. Make sure you consider your target audience and where they are most likely to hang out online. Then, create content that ties-in with your posts and inspires them to click through to your site.