Blogging - Cash at Last

How to make money with your blog

Posted on by Ramone Smith

Ever wonder if you can make money with a blog? You can, but it is a long-term income strategy, not a get-rich-quick scheme. It may feel frustrating if you’ve been blogging for a while and aren’t making the money you thought you would.

Especially in the era of “gurus” who claim how easy it is to make money with a blog. Often, they brag about earning $100K a month. Today, I want to talk about how to monetize blogging, so you can quickly make money with a blog.

How to make money with a blog comes down to a few things:

Content
Traffic
Planning

Content is the foundation of your blog.

Don’t skimp on this part. Do your research and make sure everything you publish is top-notch. So many people start a blog thinking it’ll be easy to just throw some blog posts up and call it a day, but that’s not how it works. The reason “content is king” is such a popular saying is because it’s 100% true. Without great content, it’s difficult to make money with a blog.

How to monetize blog PRO TIP: Creating a content schedule or setting up an editorial calendar in Airtable or Trello can save you a lot of time – and headaches! Check out this article for comparison for both Airtable and Trello.

Traffic is important if you want to make money with a blog.

You don’t have to have millions of page views by any means, but if you don’t have eyeballs on your content, you can’t have sales, right?

If you’re relying on ads, your traffic is going to need to be much higher than if you’re building a solid email list and selling products. Either way, it never hurts to get more traffic.

How do make money with blogs Brainstorming step: How can you increase your traffic? Creating more content isn’t always the answer. Log into your Google Analytics and see which posts are in your top 10. Expand on those.

While content and traffic are important, keep in mind that planning also plays a huge role in how to monetize blogging.

If you’re writing whatever you feel like for the day with no rhyme or reason and then hitting publish, chances are, your blog will flop. Some bloggers build a brand based around sharing their lives or ranting, but the amount of people who truly care about how your day went and how you’re doing with your toddler’s potty training journey is usually fairly small.

People want to know what’s in it for them. What can you offer them? How can you help them? The key to getting your readers to come back day after day, week after week, is to educate or entertain. If you can do one or both of those things, you’re already ahead of many!

white paper with note — Photo by Bich Tran on Pexels.com

How to monetize blog with Ads

Making money with ads takes quite a bit of traffic. You can start out by charging for ad space manually on a new blog. For example, many new bloggers will charge $20 a month for ad space on their sidebar, until they get the traffic for ad networks. This is an easy way to make money with a blog!

It’s much less work to use an ad network, so that’s what most bloggers do. Ad networks like Ezoic are great to start out with because they have a lower traffic threshold. You can get approved with less than 10,000 page views per month.

To get approved for an ad network like Mediavine, you need at least 50,000 sessions per month. That’s not always an easy feat, but it can be done, regardless of your niche. AdThrive requires 150,000 sessions.

No matter which ad network you decide to go with, be sure to pay attention to how many ads are on your blog. Do you want video or pop-out ads to play? You have full control over how many ads and what kind of ads are displayed on your blog. Don’t feel like you have to “okay” every single ad placement.

After your ad network has placed ads on your blog, take a look at your blog as a visitor. Are there too many ads? Do they cover your content? Is the video pop-up too obnoxious? Everyone has their own idea of how many ads are the “right” amount. It’s important to play an active role in ad placement because this can make or break your readership.

street lights — Photo by Jose Francisco Fernandez Saura on Pexels.com

How to make money with blog by being an Affiliate

Some bloggers make six figures from affiliate earnings alone, which is so amazing! Getting started with affiliate marketing is something you can do as a new blogger. I recommend getting at least 10-15 solid blog posts published. While you could do it sooner, many brands only want to work with established bloggers. When they come to your site to see what your blog is about, you’ll want to make sure you put your best foot forward and have awesome content up!

To get started with promoting products as an affiliate, think about products you use on a regular basis and absolutely love. Think about products that will help make your readers’ lives easier. I like to choose products from sites like Shareasale, Awin, and Impact Radius. You can also reach out to companies and brands directly to see if they have an affiliate program you can join.

Don’t forget about Amazon! Some niches perform better than others when it comes to promoting Amazon products, and they don’t pay as much per product as other affiliates, but it’s a volume game.

How to monetize blogging PRO TIP: Only promote products you truly believe in. It may be tempting to promote junk products to make a quick buck, but I promise you’ll make more in the long run if you are your authentic self.

Make money on blog with products

Designing and selling your own digital products is one of my favorite ways to make passive income through blogs. You can sell ebooks, cheat sheets, a monthly membership, meal plans, or even courses. The possibilities with digital products are endless, and they’re mostly passive once you get them set up.

Create one time, sell thousands of times, rinse and repeat. Check out my other article for how to use a small email list to promote your blog and products.

The next steps

No matter which path(s) you decide to take towards monetizing your blog, remember it comes down to delivering value for your audience. If you write blog posts that are engaging, easy to read, and helpful, your audience will come back for more every single time.

SEO for Beginners

Posted on by Ramone Smith

advertising alphabet business communication

You may want to perform SEO services on your website by yourself but do not know how to get started. You probably have always wanted to get involved more with SEO but simply do not have the time. Unfortunately, this is usually caused by the misconception that SEO is easy to implement and does not take a lot of experience. Even though SEO does require experience and time there are several options out there to start doing SEO on your own and be successful.

Option 1: Become an SEO Expert

This is the hardest path to take to implement SEO on your website while yielding the greatest personal satisfaction. You will want to start by spending lots of time reading books and online articles to catch up on the latest SEO trends, practices, and methods. Next, you should start experimenting with different methods you learn about, analyze the results, and change your website again. This is the continual learning process of search engine optimization and takes a great amount of time, energy, patience, and resources. However, after several months when you start to realize the benefits of your work it will yield a great deal of satisfaction.

This option is recommended for those if you want to start offering SEO services as a part of your business or if you have multiple websites that you manage. If you only have one website and do not plan on providing SEO services to others this route is probably not ideal considering the time involved to make it successful.

To help ease yourself into this option I am providing a FREE SEO Course to those that sign up for my newsletter below.

Option 2: Find a Professional SEO Guide

This is the ideal option for most people who want to start internet marketing on their own, learn more about the industry, and yet not invest a considerable amount of time in the project. There are several SEO consultants who would be happy to guide you along the way and assist you in creating a successful online campaign. With this option, you will not have to learn everything on your own but will have an experienced professional at your side to assist you in creating a successful campaign. The most difficult aspects of SEO could be handled by your consultant while you could manage SEO implementation.

For example, your consultant could assist you in developing a keyword phrase list, sample methods of finding link partners, guidelines for using title, alt, heading, bold, internal link, and meta tags. After you have finished working on a few key pages you could request your consultant review your work and give you further suggestions. At first, you will probably rely heavily on your consultant for advice but as time goes on your reliance on your consultant will diminish as you become more affluent in SEO practices and techniques. Another important service your consultant should provide is monthly or weekly progress reports. They will most likely have access to software that will enable them to generate reports such as rankings, keyword phrases, incoming link, and others. Consultants can usually provide other valuable insights to help your business succeed online on subjects such as PPC, conversion, usability, professional image, email campaigns, banner advertising, and other online marketing options.

Although this method will require some investment on your end it is far less expensive than a full-service SEO package and over time the cost will diminish as you become adept at SEO yourself.

How to Decide which Option is Best

When deciding between these two options the most relevant question to ask yourself is how much time do you have to invest in SEO. Through experience, I would estimate that having an SEO consultant at your side will reduce the time you need to invest in your SEO project by about 50-75%. You must also determine how competitive your industry is.

How to make money online without a product

Posted on by Ramone Smith

Everyone appears to be interested in making money online these days, making competition fiercer than ever. This guru offers classes, another guru has a YouTube channel and sells digital goods, and you’re just getting started. It may be tough to make money online without a product. That isn’t to say it’s impossible to compete.

When you’re just starting started, how do you compete with everyone else offering products? The short answer is that you don’t. You know the old adage, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”? That is true in life, but it is particularly true in making money online. If you don’t have a product – either because you don’t want one or because you haven’t gotten around to creating one – you can still make money online, and I’ll show you how.

Create a blog.

You’ve probably heard it before: create a blog, become wealthy, rinse and repeat! Making money online with a blog isn’t as simple as clicking your fingers. Blogging is not a get-rich-quick plan, but rather a long-term revenue strategy. However, it is a good option for constructing and protecting your financial future.

Choosing a Blog Name

It may be tough to come up with a name for your blog that isn’t already in use. Indeed, some bloggers claim that it is the most challenging aspect of the whole procedure! When picking a blog name, make sure it’s not already in use and that it’s simple to pronounce, spell, and remember. Also, consider how it will seem as a URL… Some words, when placed together, may seem different than you intended!

Questions to ponder:

What is your subject?
Will you be a lifestyle or specialized blogger?
Who is your intended audience?
Is it a name that will grow on you?

Niche bloggers often focus on a single subject, while lifestyle bloggers build a brand around themselves and discuss a variety of topics relevant to their lives. Whether you want to specialize down or develop a lifestyle blog with a broader range of subjects is a personal choice, and either path has advantages and disadvantages.

What is the demographic of your intended audience? To whom are you distributing your content? Who do you assist with your blog posts? It’s critical to know who you’re talking to when you’re creating blog articles!

Is the blog name you’re thinking about one you can develop with? “Mom of Two Littles” may seem charming today, but when your children are teens or you have three more children, the moniker will no longer ring true. Consider your future self in 5 years: where do you picture yourself? Is this a blog name you’ll be able to stay with?

You may use these suggestions to name your blog, or you can utilize a blog name generator.

ACTION STEP: Come up with a list of blog names. Look them up on social media, Google, and other search engines to ensure they are not already in use.

Creating your blog.

You can create a blog for as little as $100:

I suggest Siteground for hosting.
Domain registrar: I suggest GoDaddy.

To get started, choose a free theme. Your design won’t mean much until you start receiving traffic, which won’t happen until you have some fantastic content up!

Setting up a blog isn’t as difficult as you may assume. There are tutorials on YouTube that show you how to set up a WordPress blog on every host you can think of.

The next step in starting a blog is to start publishing material. What subject have you chosen for your blog? Why did you choose it? Delivering your enthusiasm for this subject via your blog articles is essential for rapidly building a following.

Keep your reader in mind whenever you create a blog post: how can you assist them today? I like creating articles that offer my readers (you!) tips and techniques because I know I can save you time, money, and effort if you learn from the errors I made along the way. Even better if you can provide a “shortcut” to your readers!

ACTION STEP: Choose a blog name, purchase a domain, and set up a self-hosted WordPress blog on a hosting service of your choice.

TIME REQUIRED: 2 HOURS MAXIMUM.

Create an email list.

While you should establish social media accounts, platforms change all the time, so if you have limited time and energy, it is preferable to spend your time and energy in creating great blog content and increasing your email list. You control your email list, while social media sites are owned by individuals like Mark Zuckerberg. Because you don’t control your social media accounts, and the algorithm may change at any time, it’s like constructing a home on sand instead of solid ground. It’s constantly volatile and unstable, and you never know when it’ll collapse.

Instead of depending on social media’s vagaries, create a few freebies and use them as opt-ins to get your readers on your email list. I can assure you that this strategy works!

ACTION STEP: Create an email list once you’ve written at least 15 blog articles. I suggest MailerLite since it is comparable to ConvertKit but at a much lower cost. If you need assistance setting up your mailing list, look for tutorials on YouTube or on the MailerLite website.

TIME REQUIRED: 1 HOUR MAXIMUM

Become a partner.

This is where the true magic takes place. When you don’t have goods, making money with a blog typically consists of a combination of advertising, maybe a few sponsored articles, and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a simple method to earn money without creating your own product.

Where can you discover affiliates that are a good match for your brand?

Authenticity is the most essential aspect of affiliate marketing. Finding affiliates that pay well and share your brand’s beliefs and objectives may be challenging, but it’s not impossible. Spend some time looking for affiliates to advertise on sites like Awin and Shareasale.

Effective affiliate marketing entails more than just including an Amazon link or two in a blog article. You should develop cornerstone content that is simple to read, easy to distribute, and converts effectively.

Affiliate marketing is your golden ticket to generating numerous passive income streams without the need to promote your own product straight immediately. As a beginning blogger, you should concentrate on evergreen, shareable material that is beneficial to your readers. Working your affiliate articles into this structure is the key to increasing your blog’s revenue.

ACTION STEP: Identify three companies for whom you want to be an affiliate and apply to their affiliate programs. If you are authorized, create a useful blog article that encourages your readers to utilize the product or service you are advertising.

TIME REQUIREMENTS: Vary. Spend an hour at a time and concentrate!

Learn all there is to know about internet marketing.

I’m not talking about listening to spammy people; I’m talking about going deep and learning about blogging, email funnels, and affiliate marketing. YouTube is completely free, and you may learn almost everything you need to know on that site without paying a single penny.

Time is money, therefore if you have any extra cash, you can take some classes or purchase a few tools to assist you along your path, but you don’t have to.

Finally, your blog and affiliate marketing activities will be effective if you regularly produce useful material for your target audience. Sign up for the newsletter below if you have any questions about getting started. I’d be delighted to assist!

How to Make Money Online Blogging

Posted on by Ramone Smith

For teens all the way up to senior citizens-easy cash from blogging is possible

A lot of people who blog make money online from their homes. The great thing about starting a blog is that it produces passive income. To get a clear understanding of what passive income is, I want you to remember what it’s like to work for a living.

Typically, you would have to show up at a physical location, punch the clock and sit your butt down for 8 hours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re pushing paper around or you’re getting up to do physical things for work. Your time is locked in a particular space for 8 hours.

If you don’t do that, you don’t get paid. Welcome to the world of active income. It can simply be reduced to the simple formula of no work, no pay. It’s like you’re a chicken. If you don’t scratch and peck on the ground, you don’t eat.

It gets old quickly. Wouldn’t it be great for you to work once, but earn money many times over from the stuff that you worked on a long time ago? This is called passive income. Of course, there are many different variations of passive income.

You can publish software, you can create an app, you can write a book or if you want something lower impact and more in line with your experiences, you can make money online by blogging. Let’s continue to find out how to properly start a blog that makes you money online.

The secret to blogging success

A business man gives the viewer a thumbs up

It’s very tempting to just jump into blogging. I mean, after all, how hard can it be? There are all sorts of free blogging tools like medium.com, wordpress.com, and blogger.com. You don’t have to spend money on a domain name, you don’t have to spend dollars on a hosting account. It’s free.

It is no surprise, however, that given the low barrier to entry, most bloggers fail. I don’t say that to depress you. I don’t share that to discourage you. But this is a reality check. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t start.

What follows is a quick guide on how to do it right. The reason why people fail at blogging is that they just blog about anything that they’re interested in. On a personal level, this is fine. But the problem is your blog is not a personal diary.

You’re trying to make money from your blog. You’re trying to turn your time into dollars. If you want to do that, then you have to have a plan.

As the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, you are really planning to fail. Given the ridiculously high 90 percent failure rate of most blogs (whether they launched 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago), you really have to have a plan coming in. The good news is that your plan only needs to have 3 parts: niche selection, monetization plan, and content strategy. By thinking strategically and knowing these key planning elements ahead of time, you pave the way for your eventual success.

Step #1: What is your niche

A niche is a subject matter. For example, you can blog about coffee tables and that is a niche because people looking to buy coffee tables would go to your blog. If you want to blog about how to pick up women, that is a niche because people are interested in figuring out how to meet women.

Within the subject matter, there are many different sub-topics. So when you say you want to blog about coffee tables, everything that will be included in your blog will have something to do with coffee tables.

Maybe it’s about designing, maybe it’s about how people can use a coffee table, so on and so forth. Now, just because you are interested in a topic doesn’t mean it’s going to make money online. This is the central point that you need to master when trying to Make Money Online Blogging.

You have to pick the right niche. How do you know? Well, first, you need to find something that you are personally interested in. Make no mistake, if you don’t have passion for something that you’re writing about, eventually, you will fall out of love and it will always be about the money.

Unfortunately, love for money can only take you so far. You have to have an emotional connection. There has to be passion there. So the first thing that you need to do is to list down all the topics that you are so passionate about that you would talk about them for absolutely free.

Next, filter your list of topics based on how much advertisers are going to pay for them. You can easily find how much advertisers are going to pay to advertise on content focused on those topics. You can easily find the commercial value of niches by using the Google adwords keyword planner tool.

Type in your topic and it will spit out some keywords. And when you look at the dollar value of those keywords, then you will get a rough idea of how much advertisers will pay per click of ads connected to those keywords.

Obviously, you should delete low-value keywords and you should also delete very high-value keywords. The reason why you should delete keywords that earn $50 per click is the traffic is filtered really well and there’s really not that much demand for those.

The high dollar value is definitely exciting, but let’s get real. You probably won’t make that much money from those topics unless you’re some hyper expert on them.

The next step is to filter your list based on average monthly search volume. In other words, there has to be enough demand for these topics. If you like underwater basket weaving, for example. It may be a strong personal passion of yours, but if only 2 people look for that information every month, you’re not going to make money from your blog. That’s the bottom line.

So, there has to be a healthy volume. Now, here’s the thing. You should cut out low-volume keywords, but you should also cut out very high-volume keywords. Why? Chances are everybody in his dog are blogging about those popular topics and you’d have too much competition.

Finally, you should plug in your remaining keywords into Google’s search box. When you do this, Google will tell you how many websites target that keyword. This gives you an idea regarding the overall competition level of the potential topic for your blog. Once you’ve gone through this, you would have a good idea of which niche to focus on.

Step #2: Reverse engineering like a boss

Type in your keywords into Google to find high-ranking sites in your niche. Once you find these websites, reverse engineer them. That’s right! There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Just copy top players in your niche.

Figure out what they blog about, figure out their format, figure out how they make money off their blog. In other words, what kind of ads do they show? Once you have figured this out, copy the most common topics, format, layout, and ad choices.

Step #3: Create your brand

Once you have put up a website that reverse engineers existing content strategies without copying the actual content, the next step is to make your own brand stand out. You make money doing this by actually listening to your blog visitors.

Create surveys, conduct polls, actively ask them for feedback. Once they give you this information, you can then craft your blog so it has a unique identity.

It’s not only possible, but it’s probable with the right plan and strategy.