Is blogging profitable? There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and not all of them are profitable. In fact many bloggers only blog for fun, rather than for profit. Still, you can make money from blogging if you do it for long enough and learn how to monetise a blog. But the key to building a profitable blog is to firstly get a lot of blog visitors coming to your site on a regular basis.
Without traffic, you’ll never make a blog profitable and even if you do have traffic, there’s still no guarantee you can make money. Most blog visitors are looking for information. So with an information blog, you only attract visitors who are looking for titbits!
However, many affiliates will write reviews about products. These attract people who are looking to buy something. If visitors are very targeted like this they are likely to buy something. You can then send visitors to affiliate products which are linked to your content in some way. A review website is just one way to do this.
Is Blogging Profitable – Affiliate Marketing
Many bloggers will monetise their blog content with affiliate products and services. Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which third parties can get paid for referring people to goods and services online. As a blogger myself, I send people to products which I have found helpful. When someone buys from one of my affiliate links, I earn a commission based on the sale.
Affiliate products can be found in almost any niche. So whatever topic you care to blog about, you can usually find affiliate products to promote which are suitable for your target audience. The target audience for affiliate marketing is an important thing to understand. Your target audience is the small section of the online marketplace who will actually want to buy your products.
Get to understand the needs of your audience and you will become better at selling affiliate products from a blog.
Is Blogging Profitable – How Long To Make A Blog Profitable?
How long it takes to make money from a blog is the million dollar questions. It depends on many factors such as:
- Your blog topic and the relative competition
- How often you write and the quality and quantity of your content
- The products you choose and how you sell them
- How people respond to your content
- How well you actively promote your content
- Whether your content ranks on the search engines
Those are just a few of the factors which will effect whether you can make a blog profitable or not. Ideally choose a topic you can create a lot of content on for an indefinite period of time. Some blogs will take off sooner than others. In a very competitive niche, expect to have to work at it for much longer than in one with very little competition.
You can become profitable with a blog within 6 months. Or it can take much longer. It really depends on so many things that it’s impossible to say definitively.
Aligning A Blog Topic With A Profitable Affiliate Product
There’s a couple of main ways to make a blog profitable. You can use advertising on a blog (e.g. Google Adsense) or you can use affiliate products. These are the most popular ways to monetise a blog if you don’t have your own product, business or service to offer. Your choice of affiliate products to promote from a blog and how you go about it will have a lot to say in whether you make it profitable or not. Of course you also need traffic to a blog and this should be your priority.
But before running in a building a tonne of content, it’s worth finding a good affiliate product to align with your blog. So if your blog is about Yoga, for example, you’ll want to find a Yoga related product which you think is hugely valuable. Make sure you pick wisely since there’s a lot of affiliate products which don’t really sell that well.
You can also sell a lot of physical affiliate products without really making very much. Amazon, for example pays very little in terms of commission to affiliates (as little as 1%). Digital products pay much more – typically between 30% and 40%.
The most profitable digital products to sell from a blog are those which offer high ticket affiliate commissions. High margin products to sell online are the best for profit, assuming you can find one in your niche. You should also consider selling subscription affiliate products too. With a subscription sale, you stand to continue earning from it long after you make the sale.
Email Marketing – Leveraging A Blog
Once you have build up an audience through blogging, it doesn’t necessarily make it profitable straight away. You still need to turn those visitors into buyers if you’re monetising with affiliate marketing. If you’re using advertising instead, you’ll need a huge volume of visitors. It’s wise to try different things out and see what works the best. But nothing works without traffic, so that should be the priority for a blog. Traffic is attracted by creating a lot of content and keeping doing so for a long time. But you also need to actively promote your content too. Don’t rely entirely on Google to find your content, because it may not do so.
To get more from your traffic it’s worth offering a giveaway on your blog. With a giveaway, you can collect your visitors details and send them follow up messages. This extends the time with which you can encourage a blog visitor to make a purchase. On a blog, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. But capture their email address on your blog and you can keep in touch for months, and even years.
