Hi, in this article I want us to quickly look at blogging, how blogs work and make money. This is just a blogging overview suitable to anyone who wants to start a new career in content creation or blogging. It is also useful if you want to re-strategize your blog techniques. After this post considers reading our other articles on this site.
What is blogging?
Blogging is a widely used word, in most cases how you understand it is what you take it for. That said, my understanding is that blogging is basically keeping a diary on the web. The difference is that this diary is useful to many other people and it is more informational. Each entry in a diary, here it’s called post. The moment you begin to write interesting and useful stuff on the web for others to read and learn something, entertain them or help them solve a problem then you become a blogger. You don’t have to own a site to become a blogger, you can simply make your posts on existing platforms, Facebook pages, Medium, Quora, Dev.io, and all other platforms.
Who should blog
While anyone can start a blog or create posts, most people can’t maintain creating content or maintain being visible to their audience for long. For that reason, I’ll discuss the qualities that I think if you have then you can make a good blogger. Note that even if you don’t have some or all of them you still can blog and excel these are just my observations from over the years.
- Passionate About Sharing Knowledge: To be a blogger you must have passion, passion is what keeps content creators going. You should be willing to share what you know with others, remember you are here to solve their problems. You should be as well passionate about the niche you are creating content for. Don’t write about something you don’t love. I see people choosing a niche because there is money or market. To get a perfect niche for you to read this article that we talk about niche finding.
- Patience: Every blogger should have patience, things just don’t blow up instantly, you don’t just become a better writer from your first post. Most importantly you won’t start making much in your first few months. Most blogs take 6 months to 12 months before they can start realizing a good amount of organic traffic. This also depends on how good you do your SEO. Most people give up on blogging and content creation in general within the first 3 months or less.
- Ready to Learn and have an open mind: Whenever field you are in, learning never stops. As a content creator ranking algorithms will change monthly, weekly, or even daily. As such, you need to learn new ways of doing things. You also must understand what your audience wants and that’s what you give them. Accepting corrections from others is key here.
- Have Communication Skills: To be a content creator, you need to able to communicate, either written or spoken depending on whether you want to blog or vlog. You don’t have to be a guru though, all that is important is your readers or followers understanding what you are talking about.
- Hardworking: It is very easy to assume that content creators or bloggers just do nothing and earn. There is a lot of hard work involved. You must be ready for it.
- Persistent and Consistent: Consistency is very important for content creators. Anyone who understands how blogs work will tell you that consistency and persistence helps in growing your blog. Even on youtube and other social media, the more consistent you are the more they grow.
How do blogs make money?
This is the part that most people want to know about and that’s because this is what most people see from bloggers. Making money blogging is not so hard if you have the above characteristics, but it can be messy if you get into blogging just for money. It is very important to know that you only earn when you give value to people, you solve their problems, teach them something, or entertain them. Blogging is also a big industry with many competitors so you have to be unique and original. There are several ways you can earn from blogging. I’ll discuss some of them below. You can choose one that interests you.
- Ads (Adsense): This is the most common and easiest way to monetize a blog. This is when you apply ads to be placed on your blog site. When people visit your blog they see the ads and intern you earn for that. You just need the right advertising network, there are several of them but Google Adsense is one of the best. They also have requirements that we will discuss in a later post. You also need good traffic in order to earn a reasonable amount from ads. Normally they pay per 1000 views and it is not much so you may want to try the next.
- Affiliate Marketing: You don’t need a lot of traffic to start earning. Affiliate marketing is where you register with another company and get a link to their products. You then sell this product and earn a commission. The good thing here is that you just write about this product, why it is useful, and how to use it then leave your affiliate link. To know more you can check out here
- Promoted Posts: If you are doing it right then once in a while you’ll be getting offers to do a promoted post. These pay so well but hard to get. Now promoted posts is when you get a business or company to pay you to write a post about their product, (it could be Ksh. 300k per post ) You can also approach some of them and ask them for that kind of deal.
- Selling your products or services: After affiliate marketing, this is the best way to monetize your blog. You sell what you have. Either service, digital product, or physical product. You can sell a course, a book, skills(like software development), etc just write well and you start making sales. this is something to consider when deciding a niche.
Final Words
Whether you just want to write for fun, promote your business, or create a new source of income, just get started. Create your blog today not tomorrow and start creating content. It is true you will never be ready. You can also take advantage of other existing platforms while you are preparing to start your blog. For instance, write on a Facebook page, medium, quora, etc so when you launch your blog you already have an audience and posts to give you backlinks. And that was an overview of blogging and how blogs work and make money. If you want to start your blog read this or if you want step by step guide then read this. Thank you for reading let us know what we forgot to talk about in the comment section.
