You can escape the 9 to 5 with blogging, although it will likely take some time. Blogging is a free method of attaining website traffic. If you turn that traffic into cash, you’ve effectively got an online business. This is done typically by selling affiliate products from your blog or monetising it through advertising. The key point with a blog is to attract enough of the right type of traffic to make sales.
If you’re selling advertising space on a blog, you need your visitors to click on adverts. You earn a small percentage of advertising revenue from each click. With affiliate marketing you need to sell affiliate products to your visitors. So with the affiliate model, you’ll need to attract a specific type of visitor who is aligned with whatever you are going to sell.
Escape The 9 to 5 Through Blogging
The toughest thing with blogging is finding a topic you’re passionate about which you can also monetise through selling products. Since there’s a lot of competition with blogging (over 600 million blogs on the internet), you’re going to need to stick at it for several months at the bare minimum. Many bloggers start out with great intention, only to give up when they can’t make money out of blogging. The bloggers who succeed love blogging.
The man who loves walking will always go further than the man who wants to get somewhere!
So find a topic you’re going to enjoy writing about as a first step. If you don’t enjoy writing on your blog, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to sustain the necessary efforts required to become successful and get paid for your blogging.
Once you have chosen your topic, you need to align your blog with a specific product (affiliate product) which you can sell from your blog. You can place advertising on your blog too, but this tends to only pay tiny amounts and it can be difficult to make this work. Affiliate products, particularly recurring income affiliate products is a much better bet for monetising your blog. See also how to monetise a blog for more on this topic.
Escape The 9 to 5 Through Blogging – Keyword Research
Ideally your blog will rank on Google for your main keywords. But the reality is that there’s so many other pieces of content online that it’s very difficult to do this. To give yourself a better chance of ranking your content, you can look for longer tail keywords which don’t get as much traffic as the more popular ones. Although they don’t get as much traffic on Google, they are far less competitive than the shorts term keywords.
For example, write a blog post titled “how to earn from blogging” and you’re up against thousands of other bloggers who use the same keywords. But find a longer title, with perhaps more obscure keywords in it, and there’s less competition. Finding long tail keywords with low SEO competition is one strategy which bloggers use to rank their posts and improve their SEO score with Google. As you prove you are serious about blogging, your website authority should improve over time, if you keep doing this and churn out more and more content.
Escape 9 to 5 Through Blogging
Once you’ve found a “theme”or purpose for your website you can get started. Write content aimed towards your target audience according to your topic and the products you are going to be promoting.
Share your content through social media and build back links from other blogs by doing guest posting. Over time your SEO (search engine optimisation) score should go up and you’ll start ranking more with your content on the first page of the search engines.
It’s well worth building an email list from your blog too. This lets you collect subscribers who are interested in your content. You can do this by offering some kind of freebie giveaway on your site. I like using ebooks and free courses on my websites. I give them away when people join my email list. Then, you can market affiliate products to your subscribers.
By building trust with subscribers through offering value driven messages, you are much more likely to sell them a product. From a website, they only stick around for a few minutes. On an email list this time period can be extended into months and even years!
Align Your Blog With The Best Products
Not all affiliate products are equal and if you’re going to succeed with blogging you’ll need to find the best products in your niche. The best products are those which help people the most. Not all products pay the same to affiliates. For example, physical products pay affiliates between 1% and 10% commission.
Digital products pay between 30% and 40%. High ticket and subscription products are best because they pay the most and offer the most value to customers. For example, an email autoresponder is a piece of software used by affiliates which is pretty essential to their success. So if someone needs a tool, it’s a good thing to promote as an affiliate. Plus, certain software products pay affiliates a recurring commission. So each sale gives you an income from your blog rather than only a single “one-off” commission.
For more information on affiliate marketing visit https://affiliatemarketingmentorsonline.com or sign up on this website for the free video series.
You can also find affiliate marketing coaches who will help you on a one to one basis.