How to Make Money Blogging in 2021.
Before anything else, you need to learn how to start a blog. The first step is getting web hosting and a domain name. I recommend Bluehost as WordPress's the #1 recommended host and has more than enough features to do everything outlined in this guide.
With my link, you can get started with Bluehost for $2.95/month (63% off).
This article is all about making money this year – I won't give you a vague list of options like affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, online courses, or advertising.
Instead, we'll focus on scaling your blog like a startup by choosing your niche, scaling your content, and monetizing your blog to make $10,000/month in 90 days.
Let's scale your new blog like a startup.
Choose Your Blog's Niche Based on Market Factors, Not Your Passions.
There's a reason that 95% of bloggers fail, and it's not why you think.
The current myth is that bloggers fail because they aren't “passionate enough.”
“Push through failure to succeed,” they say.
Google “why bloggers fail,” and you get the same answer from the #1 result: bloggers fail because they aren't passionate enough.
I officially reject this notion.
The real reason bloggers fail is the same reason that any business fails: it's not profitable.
Take my passions, for example.
I'm passionate about a lot of things – drumming, flying airplanes, traveling, astronomy, distance running, personal development, Detroit-style pizza, etc.
However, if I wrote an endless amount of blog posts about one of these topics without making any money, I'd burn out 100% of the time.
Additionally, some bloggers claim, “I'm not in it for the money” or, “It's just a hobby.”
Hobby bloggers are just new bloggers that don't know how to make money yet. There are beginners and experts in any creative digital field – whether it's design, web development, photography, copywriting, or video editing.
And since most bloggers start as beginners by writing about a passion and try to figure everything else out later, they're destined to fail.
Source: Google.com
Plus, blogging advice is outdated, written only to rank on Google, and encourages a generalized appeal to the broadest possible audience.
Bloggers don't fail because of a lack of passion (they have that in spades).
Bloggers fail because they can't transition from blogger to business owner.
New bloggers forget to leverage networking and connections to their strategic advantage. And they don’t have enough market demand to scale traffic.
So they choose a non-lucrative niche targeting a low-value audience.
I want you to succeed.
Before launching your blog, it’s crucial to choose your niche based on passions and three business factors: audience budget potential, professional leverage, and market demand.
1. Audience Budget Potential.
To offer a valuable product on your blog, you need to solve a pain point for your audience. That's obvious.
As a blogger, you should deeply understand your audience’s challenges so that you can offer the most in-demand solution. Check.
Start by looking at niches where you’re a member of the target audience yourself. This way, your domain expertise shines through faster.
But don't think that after you've gotten that far, you should open up a generic list of 100 niches and narrow it down that way. Watercolors? K-Pop? Travel? Good luck with that.
What is the #1 most important factor when choosing your blog's niche?
How much your audience is willing to spend.
It's that simple.
Let's break it down.
So in this example, let's say you're planning to start a blog in the home design niche.
Your blog topics may pull in different readers. Visitors could include professional interior designers, college design students, and stay-at-home moms who want the latest home decor inspiration.
To monetize this niche, you would create a new blog and move your readers down the sales funnel:
* First, you’d create content to attract an audience
* Then you’d build out a home design “freebie” to get email opt-ins
* Next, you could use affiliate marketing to promote home decor brands
* Finally, you would offer your email subscribers a $300 online course (with a money-back guarantee) about 10 Expert Interior Design Tips for the Perfect Home
Nothing is wrong with this approach – this tends to be what most bloggers do, and it can earn passive income after a couple of years of building your audience.
But is it a lucrative audience? Stay-at-home moms, college students, and a few professionals with an average salary?
Here's the secret.
By changing just one word in your niche, you can increase your blog’s income potential by 200x.
All you do is change “home design” to “retail design.”
Let me explain.
By adding a B2B component, you just shifted your audience from individuals to businesses and increased your blog’s income potential by 200x.
Think about it this way. If you're selling to large businesses instead of individuals, you make more money for two reasons. The first is that they have more funds available. Second, it's not coming out of their own pocket.
Source: imab2b.com
The beautiful thing about this approach is that your blog launch, content strategy, and sales funnel are almost the same for both the B2C “home design” and B2B “retail design” niches.
Here's the good part: while the B2C “home design” monetization stopped at a $300 course, the B2B “retail design” niche doesn't just stop there.
After you build your professional brand, you become known as a B2B design expert. This influence allows your price to jump from a $20 affiliate commission or a $300 course – to a $5,000/month recurring consulting service.
Understanding your audience’s pain points isn't enough.
To 200x your revenue potential, your audience needs to be in a lucrative B2B niche and pay a monthly recurring basis.
Source: Datapine.com
To recap, when choosing your niche, rather than worrying about your passions and getting thousands of passive, low-value site visitors, focus on closing 2-3 high-value clients.
With this approach, I hope you’re beginning to understand why I truly believe you can make $10,000/month in 90 days with a new blog.
2. Use Your Professional Leverage to Choose Your Blog's Niche.
After uncovering a lucrative audience to provide value to, the next step is to discover the strategic advantages you may have over others.
Ask yourself:
* What is my current level of professional experience?
* What connections do I have in my industry?
* Can I leverage this experience into a profitable blog?
* If I could pitch any website in the world to contribute a guest post, who would take me seriously from the start?
To build a truly successful blog, you first need to build influence. And to build authority, you need to step outside of your comfort zone and leverage your connections, professional experience, and everything at your disposal like never before.
You will also be performing a lot of outreach to make new connections.
Outreach includes building relationships so you can guest post on authoritative sites in your niche. These posts give you relevant, high Domain Authority (DA) backlinks for SEO, which is still one of the best ways to rise in the Google search rankings. And according to Broadband Search's recent Internet statistics from 2019, Google process 3.5 billion searches per day – or over 40,000 every second. There's plenty of traffic to go around.
And when you're just starting, you may not have many connections or published content out there. You might say: “Why would anyone feature me?”
Leveraging your background helps tremendously.
For example, if you're a photographer, you might have a base of clients, contacts from local meet-up groups, and even know photography influencers that you met in the past. If you can leverage these contacts in the future, you can accelerate the growth of your blog.
3. Your Niche Needs Market Demand.
Before you get started, you need to research and see if people search for the topics you want to write about – and they are monetizable.
The two main types of monetizable keywords are “best” list posts and “how-to” guides.
These two main types of keywords have the most affiliate marketing revenue potential.
For example, in the case of the “best” list posts:
* In travel, this could be “best travel insurance” or “best travel backpack.”
* In finance, it could be “best savings accounts” or “best Roth IRA.”
* In tech, it could be “best VR headset” or “best PS5 exclusives.”
When people are searching for the “best” something, they are looking for long-form guides recommending products written by bloggers. Most of these will have good affiliate programs to join and promote.
In the case of “how-to” guides, these could be:
* In marketing, how to make a website.
* In lifestyle, how to decorate your kitchen.
* In health, how to get rid of acne.
These how-to guides are long-form tutorials packed with high-quality content. These are also good for adding affiliate links.
Once you understand your leverage and passions, take your chosen niche and develop the top 10 keywords to target.
Next, use a keyword research tool like GrowthBar, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ahrefs and enter your keywords.
With GrowthBar, you can do your keyword research right while you're searching on Google.
Here are some strategies to keep in mind when it comes to keyword research.
If your top 5 keywords have search volumes of at least 5,000, this shows that there is interest in these topics. Here's an example of my target keyword in this blog post:
After that, look at the keyword difficulty score (a number from 0 to 100 on how difficult it will be to rank for the keyword).
If your keywords have difficulty scores of 80 or higher, the competition may be too fierce for you to make an impact.
Shoot for target keywords with over 2,000 monthly searches and under a 50 difficulty score so that you can potentially get more traffic with less competition.
Another way to view competition is to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to see search engine results page (SERP) data. Specifically, look for the first page results' Domain Rating (DR) and the SERP position history.
If the top 10 results all have a DR over 70, your new blog with a DR of 0 will not get on page one, thus getting no traffic.
However, if you see a website with a DR under 50 on page one, that's a good indication that you can outrank them over time with quality content.
Lastly, if the SERP position history hasn't budged over the last six months, that means that positions #1 – 5 have stayed in the same spot. In these cases, the competition may be too intense for that keyword.
To recap, when researching your blog's market demand, shoot for topics that have keywords with:
* 2,000+ monthly searches
* A keyword difficulty score under 50
* The first page of Google has at least one site with a DR under 50
* A SERP position history that has changed recently.
To summarize, focus less on writing and more on keyword research – every single blog post needs to target one keyword.
Make sure to choose your niche based on audience budget potential, professional leverage, and market demand.
Find an audience that you’re a part of and understand their challenges personally. Up-level that audience to make sure there’s a B2B component to 200x your revenue potential.
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