How To Become a Successful Blogger and Make Extra Money

One of the most common questions I receive on a monthly basis is people asking me in some form or another “how to become a successful blogger and make money”.

Unfortunately, there’s really no straight forward way to answer this question as building an authoritative blog is a process that takes time, effort and dedication.

However, anyone who is willing to roll up their sleeves, put in the work, learn the right marketing strategies and dive in head first has a great chance of success with their blog.

In this post we’ll look at a few powerful blogging tips that will help guide you in the right direction:

Blogging Tips- How To Become a Successful Blogger

Before we dive into the list below, if you want to learn the basics of actually starting a blog (like signing up for hosting, choosing a domain name, installing WordPress, picking out a theme etc.), then I highly recommend you check out this post here.

The blogging techniques we will go over today are ones that I have personally used (and still use) to increase my overall reach, search engine rankings, organic traffic, leads, conversions, readership and exposure.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

1.) Create Your Blog Around A Specific Niche (that you’re passionate about)

Highly successful bloggers will tell you that they absolutely love the niche they operate in and what they write about on a consistent basis. It is essential that you create your blog around a niche you’re passionate about, so generating content never ever feels like a chore. When you write about something you love, it shows in your work and will ensure your content comes off as fresh and engaging for your readers. It also ensures that ideas will always be flowing and you’ll never run out of things to write about (assuming you’ve picked a big enough niche, which is also recommended). Try to choose a niche that is full of hungry people looking for more information, answers and/or solutions to their problems. For example, my blog is based around Internet Marketing, blogging, SEO, passive income, entrepreneurship, personal development/finance etc. This is an area and subject that I really gravitate towards which makes producing content an absolute breeze. Which brings me to my next point…

2.) Generate Consistent Content

Consistent and quality content is the lifeblood of any thriving blog. If you want any shot at becoming a successful blogger, you must publish top-notch and unique content every single week. This shows the major search engines like Google and Bing that your site is relevant and worthy of coming back to. On the flip side, blogs that struggle to produce content on a regular basis will soon fall out of the search results and be outranked by fresher and more evergreen websites. At the very least, strive to publish a 700 – 2000 word blog post once a week.

3.) Have An SEO Strategy In Place

The most successful blogs are generating much of their traffic organically through the search engines. This means they have proper search engine optimization (SEO) in place to take advantage of the keyword phrases they want to rank for. For bloggers, SEO doesn’t have to be too complicated. Plugins such as Yoast really help to cut some of the learning curve for beginners.

To start, focus on making sure that all of the most important SEO tags (Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Headers Tags and Image ALT tags) are properly optimized with your most important keyword phrases in place. This will provide you an excellent foundation and explain to the search engines what your site/pages are about. You’ll also want to make sure your content (blog posts and pages) is properly optimized as well with target terms and internal links where appropriate. In both your SEO tags and content, please make sure not to ‘keyword stuff’.  Meaning do not add an unnecessary amount of keyword phrases, as this could hurt your site more than help it. Keep it natural and modest and follow the lead of plugins like Yoast for keyword density recommendations. We will discuss another SEO strategy below separately since it deserves its own paragraph (link building). For now, follow the link above to read a little bit more about a few SEO best practices…especially if you’re new to this.

4.) Have People Contribute Articles To Your Blog

A very underrated blogging strategy is opening up your website for guest posts/sponsored posts.  Accepting guest posts is beneficial for a few reasons 1.) It provides you with consistent content 2.) It can create an additional stream of revenue (I’ll explain more below) and 3.) It allows you to connect with other successful bloggers. When you’re blog is brand new, you can start by accepting free guest posts to get things rolling. However, once your blog starts gaining more authority, you can charge anywhere from $10-$500 per post (if not more) for people to publish content with a backlink on your website. Other bloggers are always looking for backlink opportunities and are willing to pay top dollar if your site is worth it. This is a win-win situation as not only does it create an additional income stream but it also gives you consistent content as well. I’ll give you a real simple trick to get this started…see screenshot below:

In the navigation area of your website, make sure to add a “Write For Us” or “Contribute” or “Guest Post” page. Thousands of other website owners search Google daily using these search queries looking for guest posting opportunities. When you have a page dedicated to this, it increases the likelihood of receiving article submissions. I personally receive numerous requests/submissions each and every day since I added this page to my website.

5.) Share Blog Posts on Social Media | Encourage Sharing As Well

This step is pretty self explanatory but it’s vital that you share each and every blog post your write on your social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon etc. Social media is only continuing to grow in popularity and more and more people are spending their time there. This is another audience that you can capitalize on and traffic that you can drive back to your blog. Another thing you’ll want to do is have “share” buttons on your blog so people can easily share your content with friends, family, co-workers etc. This sometimes has the chance to make a post go viral so it’s important to have share buttons in place. Encourage people to share your content with others and maybe offer an incentive if they do. Get creative in your social media approach and don’t be afraid to try different methodologies.

6.) Focus Heavily on Link Building

Link building can produce some dramatic increases in terms of search engine rankings, organic traffic and domain authority. This should hands down be a mandatory and on-going focus each and every month. To explain a bit further, Google ranks websites based on their on-site SEO (explained above- meta tags and content) as well as their off-site SEO (# of quality backlinks). The more quality backlinks your blog has pointing to it, the higher up in the search results Google will generally place you. This in return will bring you in more organic traffic. This is incredibly powerful information to understand as it could mean the difference in getting 10 organic searches versus 100,000+ organic searches per month.

Now a really simple and natural way to build quality backlinks is through guest posting on other authoritative websites. You would start by creating a list of relevant websites in your niche to see if they are accepting guest posts. An easy way to do this is to use certain search queries in Google like:

• “write for us” + “keyword”
• “guest post” + “keyword”
• “contribute” + “keyword”

Once you generate your list you would simply pitch these sites a few blog topics that they would be interested in. Most will let you place a link within the content of the article or in the author bio which would provide you with a powerful backlink. Did I mention this is powerful? Again, you want to build as many quality backlinks as possible and work at this every single month (if not every week). Eventually you will start to see real momentum with this approach and will realize that all the hard work is well worth it. To gauge your progress, keep track of the guest posts you get published on other websites (on an excel spreadsheet) and also enter your site in MOZ’s open site explorer feature every couple of months. This will give you an idea of your overall domain authority and how many links are pointing to your blog.

7.) Monetize Your Blog and Make Money

There are endless ways to monetize your blog so that a percentage of your visitors turn into buying customers. For starters you can create a “Write For Us” page like I explained above and start charging for article submissions to your website. Another quick way to make sales is through affiliate marketing and utilizing banner advertisements. For example, see the screenshot below of how I’m using banners and ClickBank products to make extra revenue from my blog. Every time a visitor clicks one of my banners and purchases the product, I get paid generally 50-75% of the commission!

I also have a Recommended Tools section where I refer people to the tools that I personally use in my online businesses. This is a navigation link so it’s one of the first things people see when visiting my website (check out my “SEO Services” pages too which are also income generators). See screenshot below:

Last and certainly not least is building your email list. This is incredibly important if you want to have life-long customers who will continue to buy from you months and even years from now. A good way to capture email addresses is to offer a “Freebie” whether it be a report, video series, informative email follow-up etc. Encourage your visitors to enter their email address in exchange for a high quality freebie. Always create as much value as possible and in return people will be happy to buy from you down the road. You can then follow-up with them promoting your own products, affiliate products, other blog posts and more. See screenshot below of the squeeze page I have set up on my blog (I also have an exit popup as well):

If you’re interested in learning more about the email autoresponder I use, please take a look at my ConvertKit Review here.

8.) Patience

Finally we get to patience! Which is a trait that every accomplished blogger has. You need to realize that becoming a successful blogger is not going to happen overnight. It takes time for you to master your craft, for people to find you, for Google to place you in the top of their search results and for you to make money from your efforts. I wish I could tell you that there is a quick way to make this all happen but there isn’t. You need to adopt a long-term mindset if you ever want to build this into a part-time and/or full-time income. Stick to a plan, like the one laid out above, be persistent and you will put yourself miles ahead of the competition.

I hope these tips sparked some motivation to get things moving in the right direction for yourself.

Don’t let a few small hurdles hold you back…Keep pushing forward until you get the results that you desire.

If you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach out!