by Carol Tice
It sounds like a dream: Instead of sending query letters and relying on editors to give you paying assignments, you start your own blog and turn it into a money-maker. No matter where in the world you want to live, you’re able to earn a good living.
For a growing number of writers, it’s not a dream. I’m among the writers who now earn more from their own blogs than they do from freelance assignments.
But it’s not easy, by any means. The vast majority of blogs never find an audience and their authors never earn a dime. It’s hard to stand out—at the end of 2011, pollster Nielsen reported there were over 181 million blogs, up from 36 million in 2006.
In this vast sea of blogs, how can you write one that stands out and becomes the basis for a money-earning business? It begins with setting up the blog to attract a loyal readership. Once you build an audience, there are a limited number of ways you can earn income from your blog audience—I spotlight the five of the most popular methods below.
Many blogs don’t attract readers because they lack basic elements of design and usability that make blogs appealing, says Seattle WordPress trainer Bob Dunn (www.bobwp.com). Dunn’s own blog is the platform on which he’s built his business.
How do you create an attractive blog?
Free blog platforms such as Blogger and Moveable Type have limitations that make it hard to look professional (and some free platforms prohibit commerce). If you’re serious about blogging, pay for a host and use WordPress—it’s now the dominant blogging platform, Technorati reports.
Many bloggers cultivate an air of mystery, using a pen name and providing no contact info. But readers want to know who you are and be able to e-mail you questions, says Dunn.
With a million scams on the Internet, the About page has become a vital blog component—it’s usually the most-visited page after the Home page, Dunn says. This is the place where readers get to know you and learn why you write your blog.
“I can’t tell you how many times I go on a blog and there’s no About page,” says, Dunn. “It should be more than a resume, too—tell a story.”
No matter how wonderful your writing is, if your blog is a clutter of tiny type, dark backgrounds, multiple sidebars, and flashing ads, readers will leave, Dunn says. Begin with a simple, graphical header, title, and tagline that quickly communicate what your blog is about. You have just a few seconds in which to convey what you write about before readers leave, so be clear.
Many bloggers end up with multiple rows of tabs or long drop-down menus. Try to simplify—for every additional click you require, you will lose some readers, Dunn says.
While most blogs ramble about whatever the author feels like discussing that day, business-focused blogs stick to a subject or a few related topics, notes Dunn. This allows you to attract and keep readers interested in your subject.
Write with your readers’ needs in mind, rather than about your own interests, says Mexico-based Jon Morrow. His year-old blog Boost Blog Traffic (boostblogtraffic.com) earned $500,000 in 2012. If you don’t know what readers want, Morrow says, take polls and ask questions to find out.
If you want readers to find your posts online, your headlines need key words and phrases that relate to your topic, to help them rank well in Google searches for your topic. You can do keyword research free using Google’s tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool). Headlines also need to be lively and interesting to draw readers—Morrow offers a Headline Hacks report on his blog that dissects effective headline styles.
Blog posts are different from magazine articles because of how people read—make that skim—online, says Dunn. Good blog-post paragraphs are short, often just one or two sentences. Posts with bold subheads or bulleted or numbered lists are easy to scan and often enjoy higher readership.
To grow your audience, you’ll need readers to spread the word, says Dunn. Make that easy with one-click sharing buttons for Twitter, Facebook and other popular social-media platforms. You should be active in these platforms, too, building relationships with influential people who might send you readers.
One of the fastest ways to build your blog audience is by guest-posting on popular blogs with lots of traffic. Your guest post will give you a link back to your own blog and allow new readers to find you. This is usually not paid work, but think of it as a marketing cost for your blog-based business. Many top blogs do accept guest posts—look for writer’s guidelines on their sites.
“The big secret to making money from blogging is to get serious about marketing,” Morrow says.
The best way to stay in touch with readers is via an e-mail list visitors are encouraged to join, says Dunn. Subscribers who sign up through real simple syndication, or RSS, don’t reveal their e-mail address, so it’s hard to sell them anything.
Once your blog is set up to entice readers, you’re ready to experiment with ways to generate income off your blog. Among the common approaches:
Add a “Hire Me” tab to your site to begin attracting freelance blogging gigs from online businesses and publications. That’s the approach U.K.-based writer Tom Ewer took when he quit his job and launched his blog Leaving Work Behind (www.leavingworkbehind.com) in 2011.
A brand-new writer at the time, Ewer quickly got a couple of freelance blogging clients by applying to online job ads. More clients approached him after seeing his guest posts on big blogs and finding his blog from there. Ewer was soon blogging for pay about topics including WordPress and government contracting. By late 2012, he was earning $4,000 a month as a paid blogger at $100 a post and up, working part-time hours.
A similar strategy worked for Nigerian blogger Bamidele Onibalusi, who began his online-earning themed blog YoungPrePro (www.youngprepro.com) in 2010, when he was just 16. By 2012, he was making $50,000 a year writing for blog owners who learned of him from his dozens of guest posts on top blogs including DailyBlogTips and ProBlogger.
He’s blogged for paying clients in the United States, United Kingdom, Greece, and elsewhere about real estate, accounting, and weight loss, among other topics. Onibalusi says he impresses prospects with long, highly useful posts with strong key words that attract an ongoing stream of readers.
“Google has sent me most of my business,” he says.
Build a major following on your blog, and you can earn well writing and selling your own books and e-books. That strategy has been successful for Jeff Goins of the writing and social-change blog GoinsWriter (goinswriter.com), who has two Kindle e-books and a traditionally published print book under his belt.
Launched in 2010 and now boasting 25,000 subscribers, GoinsWriter has loyal fans who help drive more than $3,500 a month in sales of his two low-priced e-books, including his co-authored You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One), which goes for just $2.99.
Goins first creates excitement around his e-books by blogging about the upcoming release first. Then, as the publication date nears, he gives more than 100 diehard fans a free PDF of the e-book in exchange for Amazon reviews. When he officially publishes a few days later on Amazon and elsewhere, the glowing reviews help encourage thousands of purchases. The reviews and frequent downloads keep his e-books ranking highly for the writing category, which drives more sales. Links in the e-book also help bring more blog readers.
E-book sales also kicked off the blog-earning career of Pat Flynn, a southern Californian who first had modest blog-monetizing success with an e-book he wrote on how to pass an architectural exam. He started the Smart Passive Income (www.smartpassiveincome.com) blog in 2008 to dissect that success. This second blog went on to greatly surpass the original project, bringing in over $200,000 its first year alone.
Flynn earns primarily through affiliate sales, a strategy in which a blogger receives a commission for selling someone else’s product or service. It’s an approach that works best with a large audience—Smart Passive Income has 57,000 subscribers and gets 100,000 visitors a month.
His audience includes many bloggers who need to set up their websites, so many of his affiliate products are tools or services that enable bloggers. Flynn’s top-selling affiliate product in 2012 was website host Bluehost, from which he now typically earns $20,000 or more monthly. He receives a commission every time someone signs up for website hosting through his unique affiliate links.
“I find products that help them get from A to Z,” he says. “They’re recommended products I’ve actually used. You want to be sort of an expert in it.”
Flynn builds loyalty by creating free blog posts that offer “high value content that would usually require payment.” Rather than slapping up ads that might annoy readers, he simply states that site links earn him a commission. Fans are happy to click, and even send him thank-you notes about the products he sells.
Like many top-earning bloggers, Flynn uses videos and podcasts to help promote his blogs. Flynn’s Smart Passive Income Podcast has brought many new readers—it’s one of the top business-related podcasts on iTunes and has seen more than 2 million downloads.
When you’ve built your reputation through delivering useful blog posts, you can sell your fans more advanced information on your topic. Courses and coaching are the main earners for Boost Blog Traffic’s Morrow, who teaches a guest-blogging class and takes just 10 students at a time in his $10,000-a-head, five-month coaching course. The secret sauce in the guest-blogging class includes personal introductions by Morrow to top blog editors.
Build your authority enough, and customers pay just for the opportunity to learn from someone they respect, says Morrow.
“I’m not really selling products,” he says. “I’m selling me.”
Morrow attributes part of his earning success to hard work to improve the marketing campaigns for his paid programs. He says he’s spent hundreds of hours testing and tinkering with marketing e-mails and promotional videos that help sell the courses. Now that he’s refined his process, he says he needs to spend only five hours a week on his guest-blogging course. Affiliates do much of the selling of his blogging course for him.
An extension of this teaching niche is public speaking, for which top presenters can earn tens of thousands of dollars per appearance. Morrow recently presented at the New Media Expo (formerly known as BlogWorld), for instance.
Once they’re publishing, teaching, speaking, and creating audio and video materials on a topic, bloggers can leverage all that content to earn even more through a paid membership community. Inside the community, members can access large amounts of training materials and their favorite expert’s advice via chat forums for one low monthly rate, instead of paying for it piecemeal. The community model allows bloggers to earn more as additional members join without having to do much more work, as members mostly access existing content.
Large communities can be major money generators—for instance, A-List Blogger Club (www.alistbloggingbootcamps.com/alist-blogger-club-join), a blog-building training community started by top blogger Leo Babauta of Zen Habits that I used to learn how to build my own blog, had roughly 900 members in 2012 paying $20 apiece per month. The blog Write to Done (writetodone.com) serves as the main platform that introduces writers to the club.
Blogging is not for every writer. It’s a lot of work coming up with post ideas and writing several posts a month or even a week. It can be many months until a blog starts to earn money, and there are no guarantees it will ever catch on. But for writers with the drive to stick with it and a willingness to learn about blog marketing, the rewards can be rich.
CAROL TICE writes the Make a Living Writing (www.makealivingwriting.com) blog and runs the writers learning community Freelance Writers Den (freelancewritersden.com). She has written two nonfiction business books and co-authored the Kindle e-book 13 Ways to Get the Writing Done Faster (www.amazon.com/Ways-Writing-Done-Faster-ebook/dp/B009XM03SK).