How to Make Money from Blogging and Achieve Financial Freedom

May 2, 2007 · Filed Under Start An Online Business, Ways To Make More Money · 7 Comments

You have a blog? Huh.. then you have a higher chance to achieve financial freedom than others. This is because you can leverage on the potential of blog and make money from blogging.

Prove that blog can make you money

First of all, let me show you some of the bloggers that are making a good living from blogging.

Darren Rowse from problogger.net is the legend of blogging by making six figure income from his blog yearly. He even manages to buy a house from his blog!!

Steve Pavlina from stevepavlina.com announced that he is making $1000 per day from his Personal Development Blog. Now should be more as this announcement was made in 10/29/2006.

My favorite bloggers, Yaro Starak, entrepreneurs-journey.com and John Chow, johnchow.com just announced that they made $6549.25 and $8545.25 from their blog in March 2007 respectively. The most shocking is blogging is only their part-time business.

Why Blogging is a good part time business that let you achieve financial freedom?

Darren from problogger.net started his blog from his part time. Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur-journey.com is blogging part time for a full time income while at the same time running other businesses.

Blogging is a business model that can let you build a substantial income part time. If you want to start a business and do not want to quit your current day job, then blogging is for you.

There are a few benefits of blogging business that you must pay attention on:

Low start-up cost. You only need to buy a domain name, get web hosting and install a free Wordpress Blogging Platform to start your blog. The startup cost is only as low as $50, depend on what kind of hosting plan to get.
Blog in Part-time. You can start your blog and write the content for your blog in your spare time without leaving your day job. This going to be the biggest chance for you to build a part time business.
Multiple Income. With a blog, you can easily build multiple income streams for you. I will show you some of the income resources that you might use in your blog to make money below.
Catch Up the hot trend. Blogging is one of the hot trends in online business. Catch up the trend by starting a blog and make money.

So what you need to know for blogging?

Well, blogger is professional and they have their own technical know how like those engineers. Here is the list of them:

Research your market and choose a niche for your blog by knowing what others want to know, what is hot in current internet market, what is your passion and so on….
Choosing a domain name and getting a web hosting to host your blog
Prepare a blogging platform or setup a wordpress blog in your domain. ( Wordpress is one of the famous free blogging platform that many bloggers are using now, even me!)
Basic web programming knowledge on HTML and CSS. So you can modify your blog layout or theme easily. If you want, you can always hire someone to design a theme base on your needs
You must know some of the technical words such as RSS, pings, trackbacks, page rank, Alexa Ranking and etc which is helpful for you to develop your blog
Basic Internet marketing knowledge such as search engine optimization, social bookmark, tagging, directory and etc so you can market your blog in the internet
Last but not least, ways to monetize your blog and start making money from affiliate program, contextual advertising, text link ads, paid reviews and etc.

Above I just listed those know how that are important for a blogger. I might leave something out. Sorry if I make you feel uncomfortable and head spin with the list, however you can always start small and learn the know how day by day. Google and wikipedia is a great source if you come across anything that you do not know. Well this is the price (hard work) you must pay to build a business style blog that bring you substantial income.

So what are the strategies that you can use to make money from blogging?

As I mentioned just now, one of the biggest reason that blogging can be a really good way to make money is because of its leverage. By starting a blog, you can make money in multiple ways. Let me show you the ways below:

Contextual Ads. Ads that you can put in your site which are optimized in certain way according to your blog. You get pay when someone click on the ads. Famous program : Google adsense, Bidvertiser, Kontera, YPN
Selling text links. Famous company will be Text-link-ads, linkworth
Paid Reviews. Some one pay you money to review their products or site. Famous site : Reviewme, payperpost
Affiliate Program. Selling others products and earn commission. Famous Program : Amazon, Commission Junction, Clickbank
Direct Ads Selling. Sell your ad space to advertiser and make a stable income
Donation. Get some rewards from others who appreciate your hard works.

In future, I believe more income source will come out to market and the earlier you can start your blog, the earlier you can make money from the internet using the above money making resources.

It is All About TRAFFIC

In online business, it is all about how many traffic you get for your site. Traffic is the main, important factors that determine how much money you can make from internet.

How you get the money? In most cases, you get the money when a visitor

Click on your ads,
buy a affiliate product from your blog,
Read your paid to review articles
Seeing an advertisement that you put in your blog
etc

Actually this is a number game. The more visitors come to your blog, the higher chance that they will click on your ads or buy something through your affiliate link and make more money. The good news is once your blog is famous, it is hardly to get it down. So your hard works on getting traffic do pay you in long run.

Now the question is how you can generate mass of traffic to your blog.

How to build traffic?

If you want to make money from your blog, please treat it as your business. If you want to success in business, you must learn how to provide value to your customers. In your blog, you must provide some kind of value to your visitors.

One of the common thing that I found from the 4 bloggers above is they really provide some good information, know-how and knowledge to their readers. I always believe that â€œContent is kingâ€ for a blog and because they provide some kind of good content to us, they make money.

So first of all you must learn how to write a good content for your visitors. Below are the 4 steps that I'm using now to generate content for this blog:

Visit to forum, discussion group, del.icio.us, or other site that people gather and ask question.
Collect some of the questions that most people ask about which are related to you blog topic.
Do some research over the topic, learn more about it and if possible, research deeply in the topic so you can provide some unique know-how to your visitors
Write the article base on the information that you collected
Rearrange, double check and post it to your blog.
Wait for the response, sometimes you can even get some new topic idea at this stage.

Once you provide some good information to your visitors, they will come back and even help you to spread it out. Well, as you know today people like to share their information with others. This is why site such as del.icio.us and digg appears.

Other than writing some good contents, you also need to do some marketing for your blog. Some of the common marketing skills for blog are:

Helping people in forum. Yes, I said helping people in forum. I believe that forum is a place for lots of people to ask question and search for helps. If you can help them, you will build the credit and your site will be credited too.
Share your Opinions over others blog. As you know, a blog can let reader post their comments. So you also can post your comments over others blog with you opinions.
Post your content to Blog Carnival. This is a special event happens in Blogging world where every blogger submit their article to a host(blogger too). After the dateline, the host will compile and make a series of article for readers. You can submit your article to a weekly carnival and expose your blog to other readers.
Social Marketing. You can submit your articles to famous site like del.icio.us and digg.com. But if your article is good enough, your readers will do this for you. If your articles appear in those sites, you really can taste the feeling of breaking your daily record.
Submit your blog to Online Directory. You can submit your blog to directories that match your blog topic. Most of them is free but some will charge a small amount of money to list your blog.

If you want to read more, I will recommend an article from Steve Pavlina, How to Build a high Traffic Web Site (or Blog). This is a must read if you want to build a high traffic web site within 15 months.

Can you make a decent income from blogging?

Yes you can. Everybody can make it if they believe in it. By the way, the 4 bloggers that I mentioned above are just a normal human and not the superman that we can see in the TV. So if you are normal, then you have the chances to achieve what they have right now.

They are success because they already spent hundred thousands of hours improving their blogging skills and write thousands over of good articles on their blog. If you do the same thing, no doubt, you also can make it. All you have to do is starting a blog topic that you passionate on, write the content or contribute to the society and money will come to you.

I believe the greatest failure of the life is Giving Up!

Good Luck

Harrison

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