The image above is from my Amazon Affiliate dashboard for the month of May 2020 showing my affiliate commissions earned. It is my highest income month to date while working online and I hope that my answer will be able to help other people get started on their journey of making money online.
Although there are a number of different ways that you can make different amounts of money online, I am going to be focusing on methods that you are able to use to replace your regular day job rather than methods that you are able to use to earn some beer money on the side. This is due to many people wanting to be their own boss and be location independent when they work letting them travel around while earning a full-time income online.
I make the vast majority of my income with my affiliate blog network and I managed to make almost $6500 in May 2020 and I am trying to grow this to be >$25,000 per month as soon as possible. I am basically going to lay this answer out in a way where I will be pointing out the various tips and tricks that I have picked up over the years that I wish people had told me rather than me having to learn them myself from trial and error.
Why You Should Go With Blogging
The three main ways to try to earn a full-time income online right now seems to be blogging, print on demand, and dropshipping. Although there are a few less common ones out there, I just want to quickly go into why I think that blogging is the better option for the majority of people over the other two options.
First up, dropshipping requires a fair amount of start-up cash to actually buy the items that you are planning on selling and it also carries a large amount of risk with it. I have lost count of the number of stories I have seen from people who tried their hand at dropshipping, ordered a bunch of stuff from China and now have a garage full of the items they ordered as they have been unable to sell them.
There are so many people online trying to say that dropshipping is easy and that Fulfilled By Amazon will deal with most of the process for you but this is not the case. Amazon are becoming stricter and stricter with who they approve to their FBA program and more and more people are having their items rejected.
In comparison, blogging requires a little bit of start-up cash for your hosting when compared to dropshipping and some time to site down and churn out your articles. Although it's going to come down to personal preference and your own risk appetite, I would take blogging over dropshipping every day.
Next up we have print on demand that has been becoming more and more popular since around mid-2019. The process is based around making items such as t-shirts with unique designs on them and then using a service that will only actually create the t-shirt for you once a certain number of them have been ordered.
Although the process seems easy, more and more people seem to be getting into copyright issues due to using designs or similar designs that they don't have the right to use and end up being taken getting in trouble. I saw a popular YouTuber get fined $50,000 as they used a design that was similar to a design that had copyright on it so again, I rather go with blogging and avoid this risk altogether.
Choosing The Perfect Blogging Niche
If you are going to try your hand at blogging, one of the most important things to get right from the very start of the process is to choose a niche that is suitable for you. Your niche should be popular enough that you will likley be able to get traffic for it while also having a number of products available so that you have affiliate programs available as well as brands spending their money on display ads too.
I have a video on YouTube dedicated to choosing the perfect blog niche for you that goes into more detail than I can here as this answer is going to be long but in my opinion, you should always stick to your hobbies and interests. As these topics are likley things that you have been involved with for many years, you will likley have already built up a large amount of knowledge on them that will save you hundreds of hours when it comes to actually publishing your blog articles in the future.
If you are totally new to blogging then you may think that this is an overstatement as many people try to paint blogging as an easy job that takes little to no effort but this is far from the reality. Over the last five years or so Google has changed the way it works and moved from favoring smaller, specialist niche sites to favoring larger authority sites with hundreds, if not thousands of articles on them.
As you should be going with a hobby or interest that you already have, you should easily be able to think of plenty of keywords for the articles on your blogs but I will go into a few tips and tricks on how you are able to do this later in the article anyway. Anyway, the point that I am trying to make is that as you scale your blog up with more and more content, being able to avoid the thirty minutes to two hours research phase for each blog article quickly adds up and lets you scale quicker.
One of the main mistakes that I made myself when I first got involved with blogging is not sticking to niches that were my own personal hobbies and interests. Not only did going for niches I had no experience in mean I had to waste more time and effort researching the articles but I found them boring and always ended up getting burned out and giving up on the blog.
What Content Management System Should You Use
Another common mistake that I see people make is that they will use a restrictive content management system (CMS) that is either not really designed for blogging or has just been put together really badly. Companies such as Wix and Squarespace have massive advertising budgets so are able to buy up tons of ad space online and end up luring people new to blogging to their platforms but I think that this is a mistake.
Both Squarespace and Wix as well as other CMS platforms such as Weebly were not initially designed for normal blogging and essentially had it added on to try and expand their market share. In my opinion, you should always be going with Wordpress and all of the affiliate blogs I own all use it and I have never had an issue due to my CMS.
Due to Wordpress being such a popular option, it has countless free themes and plugins available so you are able to easily use it without having any coding experience at all. Wordpress released their Gutenberg editor a few months back and it has made the whole process of blogging even easier in my opinion and due to the developer community being so big for the platform, if you do run into an issue, you can often Google it and fine the solution.
Although I go into choosing the correct content management system for you more in this video, there is one exception where I would recommend the Ghost platform over Wordpress and that is if you are a coder. Ghost has been designed from the ground up to be the perfect CMS for blogging if you are able to do parts of the coding yourself but as most people have little to no coding skills, Wordpress is always my default recommendation.
Wordpress .com Vs .org
So unless you are a coder, you will now have hopefully settled on going with Wordpress but there are two versions, the commercial version that is known as Wordpress .com or “Hosted Wordpress” and the non-commercial version Wordpress .org that is known as “self-hosted Wordpress”.
They are essentially the same CMS but with Hosted Wordpress, they usually offer you a very limited version of the CMS that they will host for you and then overcharge you when it comes to growing your blog and paying them for your hosting. On top of this, the Hosted Wordpress will just be a sub-domain meaning you blogs URL will be something like myfirstblog.wordpress .com so it looks a little unprofessional.
On top of this, due to the black hat SEO community using Hosted Wordpress and other Web 2.0 properties heavily for tier link building, it can be an absolute nightmare to get your articles on this version of Wordpress indexed in Google never mind ranked to get you traffic.
This is why I would always recommend that you go with Self-Hosted Wordpress and all major web hosts used the 1 click installer or some variant of it to allow you to install Wordpress on your own hosting with ease. As you can install the CMS on a hosting package of your choice, you can hunt out a much better deal then you will be able to get if you go with Hosted Wordpress.
Choosing Your Hosting Company
That brings me nicely onto actually hosting your blog as this can be a minefield in itself. So many people recommend companies such as Bluehost or Hostgator but this is usually down to those companies offering >$60 affiliate commissions for sign-ups to their service. Both Bluehost and Hostgator are owned by EIG who have a terrible reputation when it comes to hosting and usually overload their servers, overcharge, and offer poor customer support.
In my opinion, you should be looking to go with either Sitegrounds or Cloudways as your hosting company of choice for your blog. They are not recommended anywhere nearly as much as Bluehost but this is due to them offering $15 and $30 commissions for getting people to sign up to them rather than >$60.
There are also tools out there that you can use to actually check the server of a blog who is recommended Bluehost or Hostgator to their readers to see if they are actually using them as their own hosting company. It is surprising how many bloggers are recommending something like Bluehost to their readers for the higher commissions while using another company for their own blog that offers much lower commissions.
If you are on a very tight budget then you can sometimes get some really cheap hosting deals on forums like Webhostingtalk in their special offers sub-forum. That said though, if you are new to blogging then these should be avoided as they offer little support and may not offer everything you need for blogging. Additionally, many of the hosting companies on that forum are essentially start-ups with a high fail rate meaning that they may go under and knock your blog offline and if you have not been taking regular backups, all your hard work is lost.
Affiliate Links Vs Display Ads Vs Hybrid
So now that you have chosen your blog niche, chosen your CMS, and chosen your hosting company, its probably a good idea to decide how you want to earn money from your blog. Although there are a number of additional things you can do, the three main ways are via affiliate links, via display ads, or a hybrid of both. They all have their advantages and disadvantages and it will likley depend on what you are planning on doing.
The vast majority of my content is based around affiliate blogging with the Amazon Affiliate program targeting higher price point items for better commissions. Although some people are not a big fan of the Amazon Affiliate program due to it offering 3–4% commissions for most categories, the Amazon brand has a ton of trust behind it and the conversion rate is usually much bigger than on other platforms.
In my opinion, the higher conversion rate on Amazon as well as the fact that you earn a commission for everything that a user checks out within their cart helps push it ahead of other platforms, especially if you are new. My blogs usually run at around $80 per 1000 visitors up to around $130 per 1000 visitors depending on the niche but the keywords are usually higher competition because of this making it a harder option.
With display ads, you can usually use any type of content and use a program like Adsense to inject the ads into your content for you so you earn some money from your blog. This is probably the easiest option when first starting out as you can target pretty much any keyword out there and there's no need to factor in buyer intent either.
The downside of using display ads is that they usually offer a much lower income per 1000 hits when compared to affiliate blogging. You can improve upon this by going with a premium ad network with higher ad rates but even then, I have seen these top out at around $15–20 per 1000 hits to your blog. The usual progression for ad networks with display ad blogging is to start with Adsense, then go to Ezoic, then to Mediavine, and finally to Adthrive to get the most money possible.
One thing that I would like to point out with display ad blogging is that you can usually find keywords with lower competition but higher search volume than affiliate blogging. This can sometimes result in you earning the same amount of money from an article using display ads to an article using affiliate links due to the much higher traffic potential.
The final method is to use a hybrid of the two methods used above. Although this is simple enough to do, you should be adding the URLs of your higher price point affiliate articles to your ad network to make sure it doesn't show ads on your affiliate pages. There's no point in losing a reader on your blog for an ad click worth $0.05 when they could have potentially clicked an affiliate link and converted earning you $20.
Keyword Research
Another really common area where people can go wrong when first starting out with their blogging is with keyword research. I have lost count of the number of people that I have seen reach out for help with their blog only to see that they are targeting keywords that they never stood a chance of targeting.
A keyword is essentially the topic your article is based around so choosing keywords or topics for your articles that have low competition to allow your article to actually rank in Google is well worth the time and effort. Without your articles actually getting traffic you are unable to actually make money from your blog so keyword research should always be done!
Unfortunately, there are an absolute ton of expensive keyword research tools out there right now that promise you the world and deliver little to nothing in return for your hard-earned money. There's no need to spend $50-$100 a month for any of these premium keyword research tools though as my own personal methods are based around just using the search engines results page on Google when you search a keyword.
If you are brand new to trying your hand at blogging then the zero search volume keyword strategy that I cover in this video is probably going to be the easiest way to quickly and easily find keywords with low competition. Don't let the name scare you off, just because the keyword traffic prediction is zero, many of these terms will pull traffic from secondary keywords, long-tail keywords, and one time searches allowing you to pull some solid traffic when used in bulk.
The method is usable for both buyer intent affiliate keywords as well as informational intent display ad keywords too and it can be used in any niche. Although it can be done for free using the Keyword Surfer browser plugin for your search volume predictions, I would highly recommend that you spend $10 on 100,000 credits for the Keywords Everywhere browser plugin as in my experience, it is much more accurate.
Another popular keyword research method is the KGR method but in my opinion, it should be avoided in 2020 as it has a number of issues that can end up resulting in you wasting your time with it. I go into the issues with using the KGR keyword research method in this video in more detail with live examples of why it is a bad strategy.
That said though, the main issue that it has is that it is based around how Google worked 5 or more years back rather than how it works today. Modern Google understands searcher intent and how different ways of phrasing words can mean the exact same thing. As KGR is based around the “Allintitle” search modifier it delivers a ton of false positives that you are unlikely to ever rank for as shown with live examples that fir the KGR method in the video linked above.
Content Creation
So now that you have the keywords that you are wanting to target with your articles, you have to actually site down and churn out that content. Although you are able to hire freelance writers to help you with this, in my opinion, if you are brand new to blogging you should publish the content yourself to keep your initial costs as low as possible.
Everyone has their own style of blogging with each person having their own individual preferences and way that they phrase things. This is all well and good for the display ad side of things as your ad network will inject the ads where they want them but it can cause some problems when it comes to the affiliate side of things.
Optimal placement of your links in your content can make the difference between someone clicking your affiliate link or them not even seeing it to even have the chance of clicking on it. Poor article formatting is such a common issue for people who are new to affiliate blogging that I see many people reaching out for help on the topic. Due to this, I made this video going over how I format my own affiliate and display ad articles with examples that are easy to follow along with.
If you are wanting to try your hand at affiliate blogging rather than display ad blogging it is well worth watching to work out how you should be formatting your content for optimal click-through rates to your affiliate program of choice. Another thing that is worth doing if you are planning on taking the affiliate blogging route is to learn how to make free comparison tables for your article that I cover in this video.
The traffic analytics for my own personal affiliate domains definitely suggest that most people who visit the blog tend to read the first few paragraphs, check out the comparison table and then click through to Amazon and don't even read the rest of the article. Avoiding simple mistakes such as putting all of your affiliate links in the middle and bottom of your article is a simple way to help avoid this.
If you are planning on trying your hand at blogging using the zero search volume strategy that I mentioned above then you are going to need to do it in bulk. As you are going to need to be churning the content out to get as many articles online for your blog as possible, this video where I go over a number of tips and tricks on publishing your articles quicker might be worth checking out.
I usually spend around two hours working on one of my 2000–3000 word affiliate articles for one of my own affiliate blogs. This is with them being in niches that I know well due to them being based around my hobbies and interests too meaning I don't have to put much time into researching the topic.
Even just shaving 15–20 minutes off the total time it takes you to publish one of your articles is able to help you churn out more content at a faster pace. With more articles online for your blog you have a better chance of getting more traffic at a faster pace and traffic can then equal money.
A Realistic Look At Your First Six Months Of Blogging
So, now that you should be smashing the content out for your blog, I wanted to mention that I have this video that offers what I would consider to be a realistic look at what to expect in your first six months of trying your hand at being a full-time or part-time blogger. It offers a good idea of the amount of content you should be looking to publish, the amount of traffic you can expect including month on month traffic growth as well as the amount of income you can expect from your blog too.
Another problem that I see with people who are new to blogging make is that they will give up in month two or three of their blogging journey. Although I go into more in this video, the Google Sandbox period is real in my experience and I have never had a blog not experience this effect. It is essentially a waiting period where it can take four to eight months for your articles to age in with Google and start to get traffic.
So many people get started with blogging and are really motivated only to give up, cancel their hosting package, and let all of their hard work go to waste before their blog even has a chance to get out of the sandbox period. Don't let this be you, this is totally normal and I go over my own personal domains analytics in the video linked above showing the traffic growth curve and how every single blog in my portfolio has had this Google Sandbox effect.
If you are struggling with motivation for your blog then this video may also be worth checking out. It is essentially a breakdown of how I managed to take a brand new blog from being totally new to earning me $14,000 in ten months. It shows the amount of content that I published, the amount of money I spent on promotion, the traffic it managed to get including its Google Sandbox wait period and the type of income growth it got.
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