How to Make Money Blogging in 2020 (10 Simple Steps)

I feel safe to say, learning how to make money blogging changed my life forever but it’s not just me.

I’ve been able to help people like you go from zero dollars in no blog to making over five thousand dollars per month blogging.

And being able to quit their job to help people fight with anxiety and depression.

If you pay close attention to this blog and stay to the end I’m going to show you exactly how they do it all for free right now, yeah soon.

Step Number 1: Start your blog the right way to Make Money Blogging

Just like a home needs a great foundation so does your blog.

I do this in three easy steps.

Firstly,

I choose the right blog niche.

The first question most people have when blogging is what the hell do I blog about?

Most people end up overthinking this process.

The mistake most people make is when they start out they start trying to search for their passion or go on some yoga, meditation retreat to find enlightenment and find their purpose.

But the truth is this is kind of the opposite of what you need to do because when finding your purpose or finding your passion.

It happens through taking action and getting feedback from the action that you’re taking

So I’d start your blog about something that you either have experience in or something that you want to learn about.

Another way to think about this is what topic or subject do you bring up all the time with your friends and family like the one that you bring up over Thanksgiving and Christmas and during the holidays.

No my god he’s talking about dogs again and different dog breeds and the different subsections of dog breeds.

I wish you’d shut up like, that’s a good topic for you to talk about on your blog.

So choose a blog niche and a topic that you are either interested in learning about or something that you kind of already know about.

Secondly,

The next step is to select your domain name so the domain is another word for URL and the URL of YouTube is youtube.com again this is another place where most people spend a lot of time overthinking

Your name really doesn’t matter when it comes to a business in blogging.

You’d be surprised by how little names actually mean Samsung could be a local music store, Avis could be a place where you bought drones on the internet and SpaceX could be a website dedicated solely to astronaut horn the thing that defines these businesses is not their name per se it’s what they do.

So don’t ever think if you don’t have to come up with some perfectly clever name to succeed as a blogger I promise.

Finally,

You have to set up your blog with the right hosting on the right platform and by far the best place for you to get started is WordPress.

Now I know there are some other options out there like Wix and Squarespace but the problem with those is those websites are more geared to stand-alone stagnant websites so something like a personal portfolio or a resume

They’re really not that great when it comes to getting continuous blog traffic coming in overtime to your blog and having continually updated posts they’re just not optimized for that what’s gonna end up happening.

If you start with a Squarespace or Wix is you’re gonna end up going back to WordPress anyway, so just start there.

I understand that WordPress has a kind of a higher learning curve for most people but trust me when I say this is worth learning.

I also have this link for those wanting to learn how to start a blog and make money blogging the right way it’s a free 7-days online course.

It walks you through the process of starting a blog from scratch the right way and building it and designing it and doing all that stuff.

Step Number 2: Make your blog sexy through blog design

Let’s walk through some simple steps to make your blog clean and beautiful.

First, you want to choose a great blog theme, choosing the right blog theme is like choosing the right or wrong car at a used-car dealership.

You choose the wrong car you’re gonna spend hours and headaches on the car breaking down and on maintenance on fixing everything.

It’s gonna be a constant hassle in your life versus if you choose the right car and you never have any problems with it you’re gonna feel great.

Right now the best free themes out there are flash blog ocean WP and Hestia, while some of the best-paid themes are Divi, Thrive and Genesis and don’t forget to install the Elementor plug-in because it’s a great page builder that’s a perfect drag and drop for a newbie wanting to get started and building their blog and making it look the way that you want to.

Oh yeah, another important part about blog design is optimizing it for mobile.

Over 60 to 70 percent of visitors on the Internet these days are visiting through their phones so some things might look amazing on your desktop it might look really good there will actually look like shit on a phone.

So always check your work and choose an easy to read fonts like a ladder or an open sands or Roboto because ain’t nobody got time to read that cute but illegible font.

Okay so now you’ve started your blog and got a design like you want to.

Let’s move on to

Step Number 3: Create the content people need to Make Money Blogging

It’s time to answer the million-dollar question of what should I write about.

Well, this is actually a rather simple answer if your goal is to make money blogging you need to create the content that other people are searching for on the internet.

Every day millions of people type in searches into Google, Pinterest, YouTube when looking for videos and articles and blog posts trying to solve their problems.

If you’re able to serve that content to them the best and get to the top of those search engines well.

It’s very easy to make money blogging, okay it’s not super easy but it’s a lot easier than you think.

Here’s how you do this first you start doing keyword research, see there are all sorts of tools on the internet to see how often people are typing in certain terms.

So we can see that people look for how to make money blogging over one hundred thirty-five thousand times per month and that’s exactly why I’m writing this blog.

Start with a tool like keywords everywhere, it’s a completely free Chrome extension that you can install and type in anywhere you type into a search bar, you will be able to see the volume of that search term being looked at.

Another great free tool that most people often underuse is Pinterest, type in your topic into the search bar and hit enter, after the page loads if you look to the right you will see all sorts of additional suggestions.

These are keywords people are looking for as well and using this method will help you come up with endless topics that you can cover on your blog or website.

Tools for Professional Bloggers

After using these tools for a while you can upgrade to more professional tools like SEMrush and Google’s keyword planner which will give you more accurate search data.

Now, this doesn’t mean you only have to post things that people are searching for.

There’s room to create your own sort of unique content when making money blogging.

You just need to follow the 80/20 rule 80% of the content that you create should be that things that people are searching for and problems that they’re trying to solve and 20% should be where you flex on them a little bit and tell them a little bit more about you and blog about the things that you want to write about.

Ok so after your first 5 posts are written it’s time to move on to

Step Number 4: Get traffic to your blog

There are lots of ways to get readers to your blog, there’s Pinterest, Facebook, Google SEO, YouTube, Instagram, guest blogging, email drips, forums, Snapchat, and I’m sure a dozen more that I haven’t listed there.

The biggest tip that I can give you right off the bat is to start with one traffic source.

I know there are lots of entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk telling you that you need to be everywhere and be on every social media and be on every platform but the truth is that’s kind of a one-man show what ends up happening with most people is.

When they try to be everywhere they usually end up just sucking at everything that’s why I tell my followers to try to instead of sucking at everything master 1.

Two of these things are like red foreman said don’t half-ass everything pull last one thing keep up with a smart mouth and my foot will be nine-tenths of the way up to your ass.

So the next question you should probably have is how do I find the perfect traffic source for my blog.

There are tons of different factors to consider, here including competition type of platform demographics of your target market and more so to make this simple here are my thoughts on the top 5 traffic sources.

Facebook

Facebook has the most users of really any social platform but it also comes with the highest competition and Facebook has recently made algorithmic changes that really don’t feature blog posts anymore.

It’s very few and far between that, you’ll read blogs much where the content is geared towards memes and video content and things that just don’t blog posts.

Facebook groups however are still going very strong and it’s actually a great place to meet like-minded bloggers but it might not be the best source for driving traffic to your website but that being said I wouldn’t write it out because those groups can be so valuable especially to beginners.

Starting off I have a group called the Blogging Secrets as well so feel free to check it out here.

To find these groups you can just type in your search term into the Facebook search bar and hit click groups and you’ll see dozens and dozens of groups on almost any topic, again not the best way to drive traffic to your blog but a great way to interact with potential customers and peers and people you look up to in your industry.

Instagram

You’ll find that Instagram follows a similar trajectory as Facebook where it has a high amount of users but it also has a high amount of competition and the thing is it is a purely visual platform yeah you can write captions in the description but really if you’re not creating dope images you’re not gonna get anywhere on Instagram.

So the niches you want to be in to succeed on Instagram are going to be mainly visual things, like travel, health, and fashion work really well because they’re visually stimulating.

Unfortunately and something to keep in mind its kind of stupidly hard to get people off of Instagram and on to your email list or on to your blog posts are over to your products people tend to stay inside of the app and Instagram is designed it that way.

Google

Google is similar to Facebook and Instagram that it has high competition but it comes with one big difference and that difference is that it’s a search platform, so the people that type in how to make money blogging, for example, will continue to type that in month after month after month and you will get organic traffic coming in all the time.

This is very different than Instagram or Facebook where things are more viral in nature and then they die off over time, so Facebook and Instagram you kind of have this constant need to roll out this new crazy mind-blowing content.

Went on something like Google you can optimize your posts and continue to be shown over and over and over again sucking in that organic traffic but obviously, because of this value, it’s very hard to get at the top of the search.

It can take a long time to do and just be prepared that if this is the route that you want to go on needs to go in for the long haul, it might take you up to six months to get serious traffic to your blog.

YouTube

YouTube is an entirely completely different animal than the all, it is the highest barrier to entry by far because most people do not want to get on camera and I understand why this barrier to entry provides actually an easy way to connect with your audience, build a following and drive them back to your blog and make purchases with them.

But again comes with a high barrier to entry because shooting videos is difficult and very time-consuming, so if you’re extraordinarily good-looking gorgeous or like me and don’t mind being on camera youTube might be a great option for you.

Pinterest

Last but not least my favorite traffic source for bloggers is Pinterest.

Pinterest like YouTube and Google is also a search engine so there’s that opportunity for organic traffic but unlike Google, it doesn’t take as long to get results we’ve had tons of people take our Pinterest traffic secrets course and go from zero views to over 20 thousand views a month on their blogs because of its speed of results and the fact that you can get organic traffic.

Pinterest does end up being our number one traffic source for bloggers if you’re in almost any niche, I would definitely get Pinterest a try.

Alright so you built your blog you’ve designed it, you start to get your first readers your first visitors checking out the content that they want to see, now it’s trying to turn those readers into raving fans.

Step Number 5: Build a subscriber fan club to Make Money Blogging

I remember the look of contempt my wife gave me when I told her that I am gonna need to collect emails because she had always thought of in balls and the inbox is just some terrible thing that she never wanted me to do because all she got was spam all the time.

But here’s the truth about blogging is that most people are never gonna buy your products until they’ve built up a certain level of trust with you and the best place to build that trust is through an email list.

Link Tracker

I’ve tracked the data on ClickMagic and I can clearly see that my email list provides us much better purchase rates than just linking our products on our blog.

An email list is one of the most valuable assets you have as a blogger and setting it up is not as hard as you think.

The basic formula is that you first create a lead magnet, this is just a simple download for people to have a checklist or simple guide will work.

You’ll want to create a small but helpful download for people so that they can give that you can give that to them in exchange for their email address.

Autoresponder

Then you need to add these opt-ins to your blog with an email subscriber service like a Getresponse.

This is actually a very easy process to do this way when people are scrolling through your posts they see the opportunity to put it to get your download and they put in their email address and receive the download and finally what you’ll want to do is create an automated email sequence.

This is just an automated sequence of emails that you send after somebody gets your download.

These are called often an indoctrination campaign it’s more like a get-to-know-you thing where you’re kind of helping them out with whatever problem that they’re trying to solve at the same time sort of explaining a little bit about more about you, about what you’re about.

Why you created your blog again all design to build that trust and turn that subscriber into a really true fan.

Great now your blog is all set up, it’s beautifully designed, you’re getting people in the door, you’re getting your fruit and first few subscribers now it’s time to make that money, chase that paper, get those dollar bills sorry what are your superpowers again I’m rich okay.

Step Number 6: Learn the different ways to make money blogging

They’re really five of them.

What we’re gonna do now is we’re gonna go over an overview of these different ways and then we’re gonna walk you through which steps you should start with, at kind of what phases of your blogging journey.

Ads

The first way to make money blogging is through ads, now there are a few different types the first thing you probably know about our display ads, these are ads that are you’re scrolling through content and then you’ll see an ad for something or like right before this post.

I’m sure there was a display ad another term for this is pay-per-click because when somebody clicks on it you get paid.

Sponsored Content

The second type of AD is something called sponsored content, this is when somebody like a big company pays you to write a review or write something about their product.

Another type of ad is a giveaway this is very similar to sponsor content but instead of the company paying you they give you their product for free.

Affiliate Marketing

The third type is that you can make money blogging is through affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is where you earn money promoting another person’s product or service.

So let’s say you write a post about your top 5 favorite books on whatever your topic your blog is about.

What you can do is you can actually link those books in the blog posts themself and link them to Amazon.

When somebody clicks and checks out that book and says okay that looks awesome.

I’m gonna buy it like the reviews you know four and a half stars look good to me when they buy that product then you will get a small commission from Amazon and that is kind of affiliate marketing.

Now affiliate marketing is a huge category and you can make a lot of money on it and I’ll go over that in the next section but just so you know it’s when you sell other people’s products or services through links on your blog.

Digital Products

Number three is when you sell your own digital products now this is how I make well over a hundred thousand dollars per month blogging is that I sell my own digital products and services.

There are a few different kinds, first are ebooks, these are electronic books like kindle downloads there are printables and workbooks where people can purchase a printable that you’ve created and print them out and use it for themselves something like a journal or a workbook.

Before you make fun of that or think anything sarcastic about it.

I do know a blogger who makes over 200 grand per month selling printables, mind-blown online courses, so online teaching and training that where you can teach them via video and finally, there are membership websites where people pay a certain amount to get access to regularly updated content usually by yourself.

Physical Products

Number four there are physical products, I sell T-shirts in my blog, now you’ll find with physical products they’re actually a lot easier to sell because they’re tangible good right, people can when they buy that product they get something tangible back but it’s much more satisfying usually than a digital product.

But also as well there are margins to be had so there are you have to ship the product, you have to create the product, you have to manufacture the product, that’s a lot more steps than selling something like a digital product but we’ll get into that note in a minute.

Services

Number five is services, speaking engagements, digital services, dog-walking speaking engagements for dog-walking, coaching, virtual assistants, freelance writing, and whatever service people are dogs or whoever needs you can sell it through your blog.

In fact, it’s a great way to do this because you’re already building massive trust with your audience.

Okay, those are the types of ways to make money blogging, now we’re gonna get into the nitty-gritty of where you should be starting.

Step Number 7: Start with ads and sponsored posts

The first thing that I see bloggers doing when they first start, their website is usually running around trying to throw up Google Adsense on their website to make a quick buck.

The problem is that the reality of your ad earnings is probably gonna fall pretty short of your expectations when we did this.

The first time I remember I threw up these ads and I thought I’m gonna get a lot of money coming in automatically per month because I had a decent readership there.

You know one of these days could be tomorrow I’m gonna be a millionaire and I think after a full month or a full week I had only made two dollars and 93 cents that’s not enough for even three Taco Bell tacos so you can understand that that wasn’t working mathematically for me as a viable way to make a ton of money.

I thought I was gonna write off ads forever but that was only until later on that now I make over three thousand to four thousand dollars a month with ads here’s how I’m able to do this.

My blog gets a lot of traffic like over three hundred thousand views a month and because I get that amount of traffic I’m able to partner with premium ad networks so really specialize really awesome networks that can give me higher returns on the ads and the clicks that we do get.

So here’s a recommendation for newbies like yourself ads are kind of a good place to start for newbies just because it can be motivational or give you a little inspiration at the beginning but it is not the primary way you need to be monetizing you can be focused on the bigger picture here.

Partner with Premium Ad Networks

Try to wait until you’re getting a consistent amount of traffic so you can partner with premium ad networks the one that I partner with is one called AD thrive but there are a few others including media vine, Media net, propellor ads.

And I’m sure a few more this will net you a lot more money than just throwing up Google Adsense and praying that somebody clicks sponsored posts.

Sponsored posts as explained before are where people are paying you to write an article on your blog usually kind of reviewing their product or service.

These articles often come in the form of print reviews and recommendations.

So it is a viable way to make money blogging and make money pretty quickly sponsored posts might be perfect for you if you love to write can find good opportunities that fit your niche want to build a relationship with other companies and brands in your niche and want a way to diversify your blogging income.

Sponsored posts might not be right for you if you face a lot of time constraints it can be very time consuming to find good opportunities and filling out the required work and have your heart set on the passive income you’re technically still trading hours for dollars here.

So just something to keep in mind sponsored posts opportunities can be found on websites like blog meets brand, Laquita, and others.

Ok, now I’ve got your feet wet a little bit started with sponsored posts and ads now it’s time to take things to the next step with.

Step Number 8: Progress and Master Affiliate Marketing

There are risks associated with every form of monetization method when it comes to blogging but affiliate marketing is unique as it will teach you not only how to sell but it will also prepare you for creating your own future products.

Mastering affiliate marketing is usually kind of one of the key steps to becoming a successful blogger.

You’ll see that a lot of successful bloggers first start on affiliate marketing, start making money affiliate marketing, learn how to make money blogging, and then progress on to higher margins with their own products and services.

Just like in my example when we talked about writing a blog post on the top 5 books and your recommended niche.

Amazon Associates

You can start out by doing this exact process with Amazon Associates, this is the very small very easy way to start out in affiliate marketing and it progresses and gets much more advanced later on how you do this with Amazon Associates is easy and the reason I tell you to start out there is that everybody uses Amazon.

I make a very simple way to get your first few transactions and feeling good about blogging and its potential right off the get-go, getting signed up isn’t too hard, just go type in Amazon Associates to Google and you can join for free.

Once you’re approved you can recommend Amazon product on your blog.

Knitting blog sells Amazon knitting kits, dog blog sells dog treats, got a parenting blog about raising teenagers to sell a muzzle.

I’m kidding don’t muzzle your children put them on a leash, this creates an awesome form of passive income for most bloggers.

I make over 500 dollars per month doing this, once you sold a few affiliate products and Amazon it’s time to start leveling up your affiliate marketing and thinking about going to big affiliate networks and partnering with a bigger product.

Amazon Alternatives

So there are networks like Clickbank, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten and so many more these networks are going to give you a much higher price Commission than something like Amazon but keep in mind they’re going to be much more difficult to sell because they’re not checking out using Amazon’s platform.

You have to learn how to build a lot of trust with your readers and that’s why I said at the beginning you should start an email list.

Because that’s the best place to start selling higher-priced affiliate courses and products and other things.

Yeah okay, now you’ve got some money rolling in a from affiliate marketing starting to get down the sales process and learn about how to sell through your blog and how to build trust with your readers.

You’re building a fan base, building people who are interested in what you’re doing it’s time to move on to,

Step Number 9: Create your own products and services

Create both physical and digital products and services.

The power of creating your own products and services is you control the margin, so you control the prices, you control the sales page, you control the entire system and the entire flow of selling your own product.

That’s why all the biggest bloggers you know all the ones that are making the most money well they sell their own stuff.

This does not have to be digital products either this can be physical products as well, the key here is to do something better than what is before you, so you don’t want to just go around and replace your affiliate links with your own crappy products and not a good version of it.

Only replace products that you can truly replace and do it better, the goal here is to make a better experience for your audience if you make a worse experience for them the results are not going to be what you want.

Don’t creat all products

There are always some products that are better suited as an affiliate product versus you creating your own.

Just something to keep in mind something like hosting, I’m not gonna create a hosting company.

So I’m gonna partner with somebody like Bluehost who is a hosting company where I can sell hosting packages.

Also as said before you can sell your services whether you’re a public speaker, virtual assistant, a freelance writer you can sell all of these products and services on your blog.

Selling your own products is the only true way to scale your blog and this is how you take something from a thousand dollars a month to ten thousand dollars a month and do so passively, do so without actively constantly having to work and trade hours for dollars.

Okay at this stage you’ve come a long way started your blog, you designed it well, you created awesome content, you drove traffic to the blog, you collected email subscribers.

You’ve monetized the blog in a variety of different ways.

Now your blog is set up.

You’ve made your own courses, made your own products, you’ve found your audience, found your voice, found these things.

The next part is actually a very fun part of blogging.

Step Number 10: Scale and Optimize

This is the really fun part because really you’ve done a lot of the hard work now your job is to just scale what you do and again this is what makes blogging such a different thing than let’s say going and working for somebody, they’re gonna pay you to let’s say 50 grand a month.

Wow, fifty grand a month fifty grand a year to do customer service right but when you’re blogging and creating your own products and services just a few tweaks here and there are getting a blog post to go viral or are creating some new content immediately raises up your income and this is kind of a two-part process.

I want to show you how it works really quickly

Sales = traffic x conversion rate

I want to show you how your conversion rate on your sales page is 1%, so for every thousand visitors on your sales page, you make 10 sales.

Scale

Now let’s say you add a few testimonials to your sales page and include a couple more and your email sales funnel that bumps your conversion rate to 2% which means that you have just doubled your cells now a thousand visitors is getting at 2 percent which is 20 sales.

So you’ve just doubled your income that’s crazy now let’s say you start working on Google SEO as additional traffic sore and are able to get an extra thousand customers to your sales page that doubles your sales page again because two thousand visitors times two percent equals forty sales.

You’ve just quadrupled your income that is the big difference between blogging and going out and making 50 grand a month working customer service.

It is a giant leap because the amount of work you do ends up reflecting much better on the actual income that you make the final piece on how to make money blogging is to scale and to raise up those conversion rates.

Optimize

And here are some of the main ways that you can do this, you can add in testimonials and prove, your page speed, make changes to your sales page, make changes to your sales funnel and a few other marketing changes but those are the main ones.

This part of making money blogging is really fun because you can often see the changes right in front of your eyes and it’s very cool to watch.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the 10 step process for how to make money blogging, whoa I did it.

Oh man, that is a long blog.

The Conclusion to Make Money Blogging

All right let’s summarize this and get the data here.

Point 1,  we start our blog the right way.

2, we design our blog and make it sexy.

3, we create the content people need.

4, we get traffic to our blog by focusing on one to two traffic sources.

5, we build an email list to build up those lists of raving fans turn those subscribers and those readers into raving fans who actually love what we do.

6, we learned the types of ways to monetize.

7, we monetize with ads and sponsored posts.

8, we master affiliate marketing.

9, we make our own products and services.

And 10, we scale and optimize.

Last thing and I plead with you please if you found this blog helpful send me a what’s up down there and in the comment section say something, speak up, I want to hear your voice, I want to hear how this helped you.

I want to hear how I can improve this blog, if you have any questions please hit me down there I respond to every comment that I get so please hit me up.