If you are asking the question “How to make blogging a profitable business?”, I assume you are in one of the 2 situations:
- You want to start a blog to make money
- Or, you already have a “hobby blog” and are now ready to turn it into a profitable business
If that’s where you are, look no further…
Today, I want to share with you 7 secrets on how successful bloggers make a 6 to 7 figure income from their blogs, and guess what?
You can too!
Disclosure: Some of the links in the article contains affiliate links, which means that if you make a purchase through it, I will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to continue to make free content. I will only recommend products that I use and love. Thank you for your support!
Secret #1: Understand The Blogging Business Model
In order to understand how to make blogging a business, firstly it’s important to understand the unique business model behind all of these.
Let’s first take a look at the traditional small business model.
It usually requires a large amount of investment up front to set up the business and create a product or service. Next, you go out to find the customers to sell to. By then, you are already under a lot of financial pressure from the investment.
As for the success rate? Only 50% makes to year five, and 33% survives in year ten.
The blogging business model works exactly opposite of that.
Rather than investing cash on a product that you don’t know if there’s a market for, a profitable blogging business model asks you to start with investing in building a relationship with your audience.
Once you build a trusting readership from your audience, they will create a “pull” on the product and service that they need. This is when you will be able to create something to meet their needs.
While this may take a while for you to build your readership, the good news? Once you’ve are successful in doing that, you already have a market before creating your product or service.
Many successful bloggers used this simple yet unique business model to make a 6 to 7 figure business.
You can read more on the blogging business model and the foundations of making it profitable =>HERE.
Secret #2: Find Your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA)
Now that you understand the unique business model behind how to make blogging a profitable business, let’s dive into the most critical element of setting you up for success – knowing your ideal customer avatar (ICA).
Einstein marketer puts it perfectly:
“A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It doesn’t make assumptions or categories of people into groups. The avatar focuses on one person and outlines everything about them.”
Knowing YOUR Ideal Customer Avatar is the start of building your readership. Once you have a clear vision of who you are writing posts to, what their pain points are, creating content becomes a lot easier.
Not sure who your ICA is? No worries…
I have created a FREE worksheet to help you out with this… download yours here.
Create Your
Ideal Customer Avatar
Secret #3: How to Make Blogging a Profitable Business? – Email Marketing
The 3rd secret on how to make blogging a profitable business is email marketing.
“Money is in the list”, I am sure you have heard this by now?
For those of you who are new to email list building, bloggers can make up to 90% of their income from email marketing. That’s how powerful an email list can be.
Most people who visit your blog for the first time will not buy anything, nor they will return to your site. Having effective ways to capture their emails so you can communicate with them via email, is the start of building and nurturing the relationship.
Use email marketing to keep your audience informed about your new blog posts, keep bringing value to them, and ask for feedback. This will build the foundation to turn these readers to your customers.
Secret #4: How to Make Blogging a Profitable Business? – Ads
This one is probably the worst kept secret…
Once you have established steady traffic to your blog, one of the most common ways to monetise is from the advertisement.
But how does it work?
It’s like selling real-estate on your blog on the advertisement. Most of the Ads networks pay you in 2 different ways:
- Pay per click – PPC: You get paid every time your readers click on the ads.
- Pay per view – PPV: You get paid by how many impressions the ads get on your blog.
The Blog Income Report Research Study by The Blog Millionaire shows that Ads is the number one income stream (35% of overall income) for bloggers who are making $2-7.5K/month. So if you are just starting out, Ads is a good way of bringing profits.
It’s also worth to note that, food bloggers make more money from Ads than any other niches.
Secret #5: How to Make Blogging A Profitable Business – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very popular income stream amongst bloggers. When done correctly, you can make a full-time income by doing affiliate marketing alone.
How does it work?
You recommend other people’s products and services to your readers. When they make a purchase from one of your links, you get a commission.
It works in 4 simple steps:
- Customer search for something specific
- You create content and promote products that meet their needs
- They buy the products through the affiliate link from your blog
- You get a kickback from their purchases
I know it sounds all very simple, but only if you took the time to establish your credibility as a blogger of your chosen niche and build trust with your readers right from the beginning.
Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income advises to only recommend products and services that you have used yourself and believes that it can help your readers. This is the only way to create trust with your audience.
Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and flexible, it accounts for a high percentage of income for bloggers who make between $2-25k per month.
For bloggers who make above $25K/month, they start putting almost all focus on creating their own products, which results in 80% of their overall income. More on this later.
Secret #6: Sponsored Posts
Another way on how to make blogging a profitable business is through sponsored posts.
This is when a brand or company pays you to write up a post about its product or service on your blog.
Bloggers typically charge from $250 to upwards of $1500 per post depending on the amount of effort required.
Find out how Alexis from Fitnantial gets paid $3,000+ a month with sponsored posts.
This is another common income stream especially for the $2-7.5K /month income bracket. As bloggers make more, the focus shifts away from sponsored posts to creating their own products.
… which brings us to the 7th secret of how to make blogging a profitable business.
Secret #7: Sell Your Online Digital Courses
This seems to be the final destination for many bloggers who want to take their blogging business to the next level.
Why?
Creating and selling your online digital course is one of the most profitable of all income streams for a blogging business. Simply because you don’t have to spend a lot of cash (although it does take some time) to create it, you get all the profits.
Is there a market for it?
People are spending more money learning online than ever before! The fact that they can access endless eCourses online and learn in the comfort of home, at any time, at their own pace, makes it so attractive comparing with the traditional classroom education.
How do you know what online courses to create?
This comes back to the readership you have been building over time (Secret #2). Figuring out what their needs are, and what problems they are trying to solve, will guide you to create the right online courses.
Wrap up:
Well, here you have it. The 7 secrets of how to make blogging a profitable business.
Blogging can be lucrative, but it is NOT for everyone. It takes passion, hard work and patience.
If that’s you and you already have the tools and resources to start it, I wish you all the best!
But if you are unsure of where to start? keep on reading…
Where to Start?
There are many ways to start a blog, here I want to share with you what got me off the ground and running – Wealthy Affiliate.
It is an all in one platform that hosts WordPress websites, provides step-by-step training, and has an over 1.4 million member community to support me every step of the way.
I know many bloggers promote third party hosts like Bluehost, SiteGround etc. Based on my own experience, while these sites have a very low initial cost, there is a lot of additional cost on top of that in order to get your website running properly and securely. As for training and technical support, you are pretty much on your own.
This is not the case for Wealthy Affiliate. Not only do they have 24/7 technical support, but there is also a library of training to teach you how to make blogging a profitable business step by step.
The best part? It has a well-paid affiliate program. So you can start making affiliate sales while learning.
Wealthy Affiliate was the right platform for me to start my profitable blogging journey, and I hope it can help you too…
Click below to try its unlimited FREE start-up membership.
If you decided this is the right path for you, I would love to offer you 3 personal bonuses:
Remember this offer is only available within the first 7 days after starting your free membership with WA.
- Bonus #1 – A $30 OFF of your first-month Premium membership. (Instead of $49/month, you only pay $19)
- Bonus #2 – 24/7 support from me, with access to private messages.
- Bonus #3 – Learn from experience: 5 Mistakes Newbies Make at Wealthy Affiliate (A video, via email)
I wish you the best with your profitable blogging business, and hope to see you inside of the Wealthy Affiliate community!
Chloe
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This is a good article on how to build a blogging business that actually makes money. Many people have a hobby or passion that they know a lot about already and they can use your tips and strategies to build a dream business that can start building you income streams that will grow over time. I will bookmark this site to refer back to!
So glad to hear this was helpful and you can refer back in the future.
I’m glad to see I’m already ahead of the curve in several of these areas – from affiliate marketing to growing my own mailing list. And I can tell you from experience the bulk of my own sales comes via email – but if there’s one thing I’ve been lacking it’s that I haven’t actively shared my blog with my mailing list. I do have an email blast coming tomorrow so I’ll do this for the first time and see what the results look like. I’m particularly interested in sponsored posts, however. Would I be able to earn income writing this for other sites, or should I have someone do this with my own?
Hi Todd,
Glad to hear that you are taking the action on building your email list – this is such a critical step!
For the sponsored posts, I was referring to getting paid by posting on other sites.
Chloe
This is interesting because i have a blog but i haven’t though of taking it as a business because i thought it would be very had and the chances for me to make money would be very slim but thanks to your very awesome article it would be more easier now as this secrets would be very helpful.
Hi Juliet,
It’s never too late to make blogging a profitable business. In fact, you are ahead of the game. If you are serious about making money from the blog, start applying the business model by building the relationship with your audience. Start to grow your email list. Here are 9 Strategies to Grow Your Email List.
Chloe
One thing that I tend to sort out for when it comes to doing things that I haven’t done before is secrets as they help you take advantage of that particular stuff. I have been think of starting off a blog, although I have taken few courses but to me, I am not ready yet as things like blogging is not something you just jump into so I still kept searching..after reading this article I think my search is over thanks a lot for sharing
Hi David,
Glad to hear that I helped you end your search… We often just one decision away from starting something amazing! All the best to you.
Chloe
I can tell that this is a really good one. I should first commend the input of effort in making this superb website with nice features and also writing an article on how to make blogging a business. great secrets is what has been revealed here and i am going to run with them to help me establish my business.
All the best Benny, thanks for stopping by.
The first i want to do is try to share this great article with some of my friends. The website is really nice. and i have learnt something tangible from this well detailed article on how to make blogging a business. blogging is already a business for me and i am looking for ways to improve on it. thank you for this post.
Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad to hear you find this helpful. Please feel free to share!