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5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022

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5 ways to make money with your blog

5 ways to make money with your blog

Blogging has gone mainstream years ago, but people still wonder how to make money with blogging in 2022.

One of the most popular ways of making money with your blog is by publishing AdSense advertisements.

There are many alternatives but setting up AdSense is not just easy, it is also trusted more because it is offered by an organization like Google.

Do I make money with my blog in 2022?

If yes, how, and how much?

Right now, at this moment, my primary source of income is writing content for my clients.

I’m not directly making money from my blog in 2022.

I’m planning to change that in near future, but as of now, I use my blog to get more work.

On an average my blog gets me work worth $3000 every month, but as I just said, in the coming months I plan to turn my blog as my main source of income.

I’m outsourcing my work to, on an average, 15 content writers these days but to make this proposition financially viable, I need to generate more work.

No, these 15 content writers are not working at the same time.

I work with whomever is available for the ongoing assignment.

My primary reason for outsourcing to other writers is that I want to have enough time to devote to my blog.

I haven’t been sufficiently able to grow my blog because most of my time is spent working on client assignments.

The problem with working on my own is that there is only up to a certain amount of work I can do and after that, I reach my limit.

For many years I have known how to make money with my blog, it is just that, I have been caught in a vicious loop.

Fortunately, now I have a few writers I can rely on.

Although in terms of quality I still need to be cautious and I need to carefully revise and go through the documents before I forward them to my clients, nonetheless, it saves me lots of time that I can then put into my blog.

Can any blog be used to make lots of money?

How much money you make with your blog depends on your topic.

Technology and digital marketing blogs make more advertising money than gardening and sewing blogs simply because the ads that are published are published on technology and digital marketing blogs are expensive per click.

I have read that blogs on highly focused medical conditions also make lots of money.

But as you will discover, publishing advertisements isn’t the only option to make money from your blog.

You can promote events.

You can sell books.

You can build your personal brand which in turn gets you speaking and networking opportunities.

How do you choose your blogging niche?

My personal advice would be, choose something that you love and you have got lots to talk about.

Don’t choose a niche simply because you think it will be profitable unless you have lots of money and you can hire writers who would be interested in the topic.

Keep in mind that unless you have lots of money, you will be working on your blog mostly by yourself.

Although blogging can be rewarding in the long run, for a few months or even for a year, you may need to work non-stop, really hard, before you can see some money coming in.

If you are not interested in the topic, you will very soon get discouraged.

You may see no traffic building for the first 4-5 months.

People give up.

Unless you are truly interested in sharing your knowledge and thoughts on a topic, it is practically impossible for you to continue publishing a blog on your own for a long time.

Therefore, carefully choose a topic.

Something on which you can write non-stop for months.

5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022

When blogging started in early 2000’s it was mostly a hobby.

In the beginning people were not using their blogs to make money.

People mostly promoted their business websites through publishing articles on article directories.

Though I was not aware of the concept of blogging, I knew that if I published lots of web pages under my domain it would help me generate traffic, so I did, and actually generated good traffic for my business.

Gradually people realized that Google ranked blog posts faster than it ranked the conventional pages.

The primary reason was that compared to the usual website, a blog is updated with a greater frequency.

Which means, there is more content to crawl, index and rank.

Also a blog is thematic – some blogs may have scores of, and hundreds of blog posts on the same or the similar topics.

This gives a blog topical depth, which is preferred by Google.

When traffic began to build, people began to see a moneymaking opportunity.

Most of the ways people were using to make money with their blogs are still valid in 2022.

This is because the companies (for example AdSense) that were used to make money also grew on the backs of many big blogs.

If you think that the opportunity of making money with your blog has come and gone, and by 2022, there is too much competition and too little interest, you may like to reconsider.

For example, when researching for this particular blog post, most of the blog posts and articles that come up on Google on the first or the second page, have been written in 2022.

I used my blog to generate traffic for my business website in 2008, and I am still using it.

Most of my work comes through my blog.

Hence, if you want to make money with your blog, the opportunity still awaits you.

Below I’m listing 5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022.

On other blogs you may find 20 ways or even 50 ways, but they have simply inflated single topics into multiple subtopics.

The methods that I have listed below can help any blog make money provided you have chosen the right niche and you stick to your guns for a sufficient amount of time.

Generating traffic for business website

This is how I make money with my blog.

As of now I don’t make advertising or affiliate money.

If you see advertisements on this blog, it is a recent development.

I use my blog to generate traffic for my main website and then my main website generates work for me.

So far my blog has helped me maintain my search engine rankings.

Since my blog is under my main website domain, when it improves its search engine rankings, it also has a trickle-down effect on my main website.

Through improved search engine rankings of my blog, the SEO of my business web pages also improves.

Most of my clients for whom I write blog posts use their blogs to build targeted traffic or to simply have a blogging section because most contemporary websites have them these days.

Is this a good way of making money from your blog in 2022?

Surely, if you prefer that.

As I have mentioned above, most of my clients use their blogs to improve their search engine rankings.

In this sense, I have been using my blog to make money for the past 14 years.

Building a personal brand to make money with your blog in 2022

You can make money with your blog in 2022 by building your personal brand through it.

One of the best examples that comes to my mind is that of Seth Godin.

He is a bestselling author and a speaker.

He goes to conferences.

He gets many paid gigs for speaking in front of audiences.

He has published multiple books.

He has built his personal brand by sharing intelligent insights about doing business from his blog.

He posts a blog post every day, or at least, he was posting a blog post every day when I was regularly following him.

He was so particular that he never missed publishing a blog post even on Christmas eve.

To make money with your blog by building a personal brand requires immense thought leadership.

Therefore, if you are a consultant, speaker, or a coach, you can use your blog to build your personal brand which will generate unlimited moneymaking opportunities for you.

Publishing advertisements to make money from your blog

This is the commonest way of making money with your blog and people are still making lots of money through publishing advertisements.

The caveat is that you need lots of traffic.

You make decent money from programs like AdSense only if your blog gets more than 20,000 visitors every day.

The real money is made by blogs who get millions of visitors every month.

Again, it also depends on your topic.

Some years back I was publishing a technology blog and even with a traffic of 300-400 visitors per day, my blog was making $2-$3 dollars every day.

Sometimes, a single click on an AdSense advertisement can get you $1 and sometimes, it gets you just $0.01.

Hence, how much money you make through advertisement depends on your niche as well as the amount of traffic you can generate.

The easiest way of publishing advertisements is joining the AdSense program.

It also has a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish ads on your blog within a few hours.

Why I say within a few hours is that when you sign up and activate the ads, the AdSense algorithm analyzes existing content.

This blog post lists some AdSense alternatives that you can use on your blog to make more money.

Advertisements don’t have to be from third-party companies like AdSense.

Recently I was approached by a company to place their advertisement directly on my blog.

I’m not posting direct ads right now because I don’t have enough traffic to charge them decently.

Promoting affiliate products to make money from your blog

Affiliate links are unique links given to you by various merchant websites like Amazon.com.

You use the link on your website and when someone clicks the link, he or she goes to the merchant website, and buys the product represented by that link, you get a commission.

The commission is normally 10%-30%, depending on the affiliate scheme.

You can sell various items through your affiliate links such as subscription-based services, digital products, books, movie tickets, and conventional products from websites like Amazon.com and Shopify.

For example, if you have a blog on arthritis, you can have affiliate links for various arthritis-related products from Amazon.

Among bloggers, this is the second most favorite way of making money after publishing AdSense ads.

Some bloggers claim that promoting affiliate links makes them more money than publishing AdSense ads because affiliate links are better targeted.

Sponsored blog content to make money

This is another option I will be considering in near future.

When your blog builds up a decent traffic there are many businesses who would like to publish a sponsored blog post on your blog.

As the name goes, since it is a sponsored blog post, they are ready to pay you for publishing it.

Why do businesses want to publish sponsored posts?

They want exposure.

They want to associate their brand with a blog that is growing in popularity, or is already popular.

They want to improve their search engine rankings.

Why I’m more excited about this way of making money from my blog is that whereas advertising still doesn’t make me money, I already get proposals for sponsored blog posts.

But I’m going to wait.

You need to provide the screenshots of statistics of your traffic before you can tell people how much you are going to charge for publishing sponsored content.

My traffic isn’t much right now and I don’t want to charge too low for publishing sponsored content.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to such an opportunity.

If you write your own blog posts it means you are a prolific writer and you can charge additionally by writing the sponsored posts on your own instead of getting them written from other businesses.

These are the most prevalent ways of making money from your blog, in 2022, and beyond.

I must admit that publishing a successful blog isn’t as easy as it was when the blogging was just starting.

The competition is tough.

Almost every niche is already covered.

Top rankings have already been taken by big websites and blogs.

But then, almost every month I see a new blog emerging and becoming successful, despite tough competition.

Therefore, don’t let other successful blogs dissuade you from starting your own blog or using your existing blog to make money.

 

6 ways to make money with blogging

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6 ways to make money with blogging
6 ways to make money with blogging

Wondering how to make money with your blog? In this post I’m going to share 6 ways you can make money from your blog. There are multiple blogs and articles on the topic offering you 25 ways or even 50 ways to make money from your blog, but they are basically a regurgitation of the 6 ways that I have mentioned here.

In the beginning when people started blogging, it was for a hobby. People wanted to share their hobbies. They wanted to share their coding expertise or their web design techniques. Some mothers and fathers shared their travails with their kids. Some early bloggers started giving health or self-improvement advice.

As their traffic grew, people began to see the commercial prospects of their blogs, mostly by publishing AdSense ads. People started making money with blogging. Many bloggers made lots of money with AdSense. Some bloggers are making $300-$600 per day from the AdSense ads – or at least that’s what they claim.

I have been publishing a blog on content writing, copywriting and to an extent, content marketing, for more than 10 years now. I never thought of publishing AdSense links because it is a business blog. I mostly use it to promote my content writing services.

My blog has been gradually picking up traffic. My search engine rankings have improved for many related keywords and search terms. Therefore, I get at least two queries from my website asking if I would publish sponsored blog posts.

Sponsored blog posts mean they are ready to pay for the blogs that I publish on my blog (provided by them) along with a “do-follow” link. I turn them down. I create content for my blog on my own. I do accept guest blog posts. But not sponsored blog posts.

If you want to publish a blog and wonder how you can use it commercially, I’m listing 6 ways you can commercially use your blog.

Now, before you can use your blog for making money or for any commercial gains, you need to build traffic. Lots of traffic. Whether you want to make money through advertising, affiliate links, or any other means, you need to build an entire platform where hundreds of thousands of people come to your blog on monthly basis. Even if you’re getting around 1000 visitors every day, it is difficult commercially milk your blog.

Hence, if you want to use your blog to make some decent money, in the beginning don’t get desperate. Focus on the quality of your blog. Provide maximum value. Build traffic. Just focus on that. It may take you a year of regular publishing (1-2 blog posts every day) before you get some decent traffic.

How quickly you can start commercially using your blog also depends on your niche. There is a great chance of early success if you don’t face much competition but there is great demand for the topic you have chosen for your blog.

If the market is quite competitive or saturated, you have got an uphill task for yourself. It will be a bit difficult to make money and you may have to persist for a long time.

For example, if you want to start a technology blog, you should keep in mind that there may be hundreds of thousands of technology blogs. Every major news website or magazine has a technology section. And they are publishing 10-15 updates every day. As a single person, it may not be possible for you to compete. Therefore, before starting a blog, make sure you choose a topic or a field that is less competitive, but people do want it.

With this out of the way, let us go through the 6 ways you can make money from your blog.

1. Use your blog as a business blog

Since I publish a business blog, this is the first topic I want to talk about. Every business these days seems to have a blog. It may be a fad, or they actually see a merit.

Publishing a business blog has multiple benefits:

  • It builds an audience.
  • It gives people a reason to visit your website frequently.
  • Your search engine rankings improve.
  • Higher ranking blog posts improve the rankings of even your main website web pages.
  • More people link to your website.
  • Your prospective customers and clients feel more connected because they are constantly reading your thoughts and observations.
  • Search engine crawlers crawl and index your content with greater frequency.
  • Your website becomes a knowledge hub and you come to be known as an expert.
  • You have original content to share on social media websites.
  • People readily subscribe to your mailing list when they see that you are publishing quality content.

2. Publish AdSense and other promotional links

As you know, Google makes most of its money through advertisements people place on the search engine itself as well as on partner websites. These partner websites publish AdSense links. Whenever someone clicks the link, Google makes money.

According to a good AdSense explanation published on the SEMRush blog, Google pays 68% of the click amount. How much advertisers are paying per click depends on the niche. They can range from $0.20 to higher than $25. The above blog post also explains how to find the niche that can make you the most money. It is better to choose a niche that pays you higher per click if publishing a blog for commercial purposes is your primary goal.

AdSense isn’t the only program. This Hubspot blog post has reviewed some great AdSense alternatives for bloggers.

3. Promote affiliate programs

Promoting affiliate programs is one of the earliest forms of making money on the web. Even when there was no blogging, people were making money off affiliate programs. In fact, in a sense, even AdSense is an affiliate program because you are helping Google sell its product, advertising.

In affiliate programs, you don’t need to have a product or a service. Someone else has a product or a service. You simply promote it through your blog. When someone purchases the product or service through your blog, you earn a commission, which is called affiliate commission.

Amazon.com has a widespread affiliate program. People publish reviews of various products and within those reviews they include Amazon links. Once you have created an affiliate account with Amazon, you get custom links that you can include in your blog posts. If someone clicks on those links, goes to Amazon.com and purchases that item, you get a commission.

There are many companies that offer such commissions.

4. Promote your brand

Personal branding can be greatly beneficial. Take for example Seth Godin, a speaker, an author, and a marketing expert. He has been blogging since the inception of blogging. The legend has it that he never misses publishing a blog post.

If you are an expert in a field – leadership, business management, data analytics, politics – you can share your thought leadership blog posts to maintain visibility and establish yourself as an authority figure.

Once your blog becomes famous, you can get book deals and speaking assignments. You can organize seminars and workshops and podcasts and whatnot. Some people have turned their blog posts into books.

If you’re a consultant, it’s very important for you to build your brand through publishing a regular blog displaying your expertise.

5. Publish sponsored blog posts

As I mentioned above, many people approach me to publish sponsored blog posts on my business blog. Once your blog builds traffic, people are ready to pay for getting published there. Many high traffic blogs publish sponsored blog posts, and they mention at the top that it’s a sponsored post.

Suppose someone is launching a product or offering an attractive discount. It will be easy to get exposure on a high traffic niche blog. If you are one of those niche blogs, you can charge a premium for publishing a sponsored blog post or a press release on your blog.

Don’t overdo though. Keep a 9:1 ratio – nine non-sponsored blog posts and then one sponsored blog post.

6. Offer premium content

This is a good way of making money from a blog for people who are experts, and the others are ready to pay to them for their expertise.

Suppose you publish a great blog on web design but there are some much-needed but difficult-to-get techniques that you know but aren’t sharing publicly. You can make them available in a private section on your blog which you can call a premium section. People who subscribe to your monthly updates can get access to that premium content.

Conclusion

Just like any other business venture, it takes hard work to build a blog that can make money for you. A moneymaking blog has the following characteristics:

  • Persistently high traffic for relevant keywords.
  • A very narrow niche.
  • Less competition and more demand.
  • High-quality content that is published regularly.

Is there a formula for commercially successful blogs? I cannot say there is a formula, but if your blog has the above-mentioned 4 attributes, you can certainly create a blog that makes money for you.

How to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog

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The image shows a games court with a goal post encouraging you to write meaningful blog posts

Writing meaningful blog posts for your business blog

A business blog isn’t always about promoting your business. Of course, you want to cover every possible topic not just to improve your SEO but also to give a reason to people to visit your website repeatedly so that you can engage them and establish a lasting relationship with them.

But the success of your business blog depends on writing meaningful blog posts.

When I’m writing blog posts for my business blog, for example this particular blog post, my intentions are

  1. To help you learn something about content writing and content marketing.
  2. To showcase my knowledge and experience.
  3. To give you as much information as possible so that you can make up your mind about hiring me as your content writer.
  4. Making it easier for you to find my website on search engines.
  5. Giving people a reason to share my content on social media.

If I can achieve the above five or at least a few points, the blog post becomes meaningful for me.

Multiple times on my blog I have written about “searcher’s intent”: why someone is searching and trying to find the content that you have. If your blog post satisfies the intent of the searcher, it is a meaningful blog post.

Find out what is the searcher’s intent and then write.

You may like to read How to write content for the Google RankBrain System.

Remember that substance is very important. People can easily make out fluff. Whatever you publish, it must solve the purpose of its existence.

Listed below are a few steps you can take to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog.

Understand what your readers are looking for and then provide the information in their language

To be able to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog it is very important to know for whom you’re writing. The more you know, the better you write.

Remember that blogging is a conversation. This is why it is different from your main website content. Your blog is informal. It is formatted in a friendly, convenient manner. When people read your blog, they must feel that someone is sitting right in front of them and talking to them. Someone who understands them. Someone who knows what they’re going through and accordingly, is offering a solution.

Also, write in a language your target audience is comfortable in. Industry jargon is good if you are writing B2B content and in fact, sometimes if you don’t use technical knowledge, it can be counterproductive. Hence, again, it is very important to understand your audience and then write your blog posts accordingly.

Write to share knowledge and know-how

I’m perpetually writing on content writing. Sometimes content marketing and copywriting. But my primary motive is to explain to my readers why quality content is important for their business. The more knowledgeable my readers are, the more comfortable they get with the idea of hiring a professional content writer for their website and for business blogging.

Take for example this blog post. In this blog post you are learning how to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog. After reading this blog post, you may decide to write on your own, you may decide to hire another content writer, or you may decide to contact me. But the basic purpose is, to make you knowledgeable enough so that you decide that you need meaningful content to maintain a successful business blog.

The good thing about sharing knowledge is that it makes people feel good about themselves. After going through my business blog, you end up knowing more about not just content writing and content marketing, but also the benefits of having high quality content. I don’t force you to hire me. I just share the knowledge and then leave it up to you.

Showcase your skills and experience

For specialized fields, it is very important that you share your skills and experience through your business blog. I write for a mobile app development company and they often publish blog posts on various technology stacks, programming languages and interface design tools that they use with their projects. They also discuss the pros and cons of using certain programming languages and interface design tools. This tells their clients that they haven’t just used different technology stacks, but have also used them in such a manner that they can share their skills and experiences with these technology stacks. This is a reassuring to prospective clients.

Don’t let search engine rankings dominate your thought process

Higher search engine rankings are important. If you want people to be able to find your content, you shouldn’t ignore SEO. But the problem is, many businesses want to publish blog posts on their business blogs solely for the purpose of SEO.

The entire purpose of writing blog posts for your business blog is to deliver value. When people go back after reading your blog post, they must feel enraged. You blog post must solve the purpose of its title. When you close the tab after reading this blog post, you must know at least something about writing meaningful blog posts rather than simply filling your blog with SEO-friendly content.

Even if initially you can improve your SEO without focusing much on meaningful content, you will lose your rankings once people negatively respond to your blog posts. Google uses artificial intelligence to figure out how people respond to your content and accordingly rearranges your rankings.

If you don’t want to neglect your SEO, carefully choose your topics. For example, I want people who want to write meaningful blog posts (or at least want to help their content writer achieve that) for their business blogs to be able to find this blog post. This is a focused topic. If I stick to this topic and if I include all the necessary information that makes this topic meaningful, search engine optimization will be automatically taken care of.

Focus on your writing style

Your writing style is very important to keep people hooked to your business blog. Sentence structure is important. Where you use what words is important. Therefore, even if they have complete knowledge of their field, many entrepreneurs prefer to hire a professional content writer so that they can have freely flowing writing on their business blog rather than something that sounds stiff and displays lack of writing practice.

Participate in ongoing discussion on other blogs

This can be very interesting, and it constantly gives something new to ponder to your visitors. There must be many niche blogs in your field and the publishers must be publishing thought-provoking and sometimes even controversial blog posts. Do you agree with what they have published? Do you disagree? You can publish counter blog posts on your own business blog, with your own facts and research.

Publish well researched blog posts on your business blog

People love statistics and data. Researching can be time-consuming and if you have hired a content writer then it may even cost more per blog post compared to non-researched blog posts, but it is worth the effort and expense.

Research doesn’t always have to be data crunching. It also means backing up your claims by linking to other well researched articles and blog posts. For example, I say that well researched blog posts do better, and if you don’t believe me, you can read this Buffer post How and why to write persuasive, research-backed content.

Business blogging is a commitment. It is a coming together of your business and your customers and clients on a common platform. Your blog must touch the lives of your current and prospective customers and clients through valuable content. Only then your business blog will be meaningful.