The term “blog” is short for weblogging, which means logging information into a website. Blogging began in the early days of the internet, with users logging in personal information— frequently, diary-style—online. Other internet users can then access this information.
Over time, blogging has become a powerful tool for sharing information online, and today there are over 600 million blogs out of the 1.9 billion websites on the internet. These blogs provide information practically on any given topic you can think of and are equipped with features that enhance communication, feedback, and e-commerce, among others.
The staggering number of people visiting blogs makes it one of the most rewarding platforms for businesses and organizations to market their goods and services. The ecosystem rewards all partners involved, including search engines and bloggers, who earn a steady income from their blogs. As of 2021, the blogging industry is worth north of 400 billion dollars, according to reports.
Types Of Blogs
There are several types of blogs. However, we will be looking at the major types.
Personal Blog
A personal blog is published entirely for the sole purpose of sharing personal information. It often lacks structure; owners can share whatever they like with their readers.
Professional Blog
A professional blog is dedicated to sharing information based on expertise. This type of blog often covers a wide range of topics in a particular niche.
An example is a blog owned by a professional cook where several topics on food are covered. Professional blogs are created as a source of income and a means to establish the writer as an expert in their niche.
You can take example of our blog, it is a personal as well as professional blog because here I share about my personal things as well as my experience as a professional. Another example of professional blog is Alison Roman.
Niche Blog
A niched blog is also a Professional blog, but it covers a more defined sub-niche. A niched cooking blog might focus only on subjects related to pastries. For example Bakerykart.
Company Blog
A company blog is dedicated to sharing information on the company's services or products. Multi-billion dollar industries and small companies run a blog section on their website.
These blogs are often written to provide information and act as copies to convert readers to potential clients. For example the blog of Thrive Themes.
Multimedia Blog
A multimedia blog utilizes videos, audio, and images alongside texts as the primary form of communication. These media are presented in blog format. Some examples of multimedia blogs include:
Duckrabbit
MediaStorm
New York Times
Reverse Blogs
A reverse blog acts as a consolidation of several writers who are experts in their fields. Readers are encouraged to follow their preferred writers or choose categories(food, photography, career, entrepreneur, politics, etc.) they might be interested in. The most popular types of reverse blogs include Quora and Medium.
Everything covered in this course focuses more on professional and niche blogs. Although, some of the things taught can be applied to almost all the other types of blogs.
The Required Mindset To Make Money From Blogging
Before we launch deep into the course, let us establish the required mindset you must possess to win at blogging. At the end of this section, you are expected to re-evaluate your intent and how you intend to approach blogging.
Blogging Requires Patience
Many mistake blogging for some get-rich-quick scheme. Unfortunately, those who hold this belief abandon their blog within months or weeks because they cannot recoup the money invested in starting their blog.
According to a report by the New York Times, of the over 500 million blogs on the internet, 95% are abandoned. In other words, only about 25 million of these blogs are active.
Often I hear people ask, "How soon can I start making money from my blog?" and I answer, "As long as it takes you."
Where the niche, understanding of the target audience, and best practices often help shorten the waiting period, it is hard to say precisely when a blog will start pulling in money.
Blogging Requires time
Most people abandon their blogs once they realize running a blog successfully requires a lot of time. Also, the more your blog grows, the more time you need to manage it.
It becomes easier if you have a lot of capital and can outsource some of the work required to run a blog. However, you cannot completely outsource everything. You must dedicate a fraction of your daily time to ensure things are done right.
Blogging Requires A Combination Of Skills
To run a successful blog, you need to be able to wear several caps at once. You must be able to research, write and edit your post, which makes you a writer and editor. You must master WordPress, SEO, among others. You must be able to track spending, income, and expenditure. Blogging is beyond waking up in your pajamas and typing a few sentences.
Blogging Is A Business
One fundamental mindset to success in blogging is viewing it as a business. This mindset will determine how you handle your blog from the outset.
I understand you have a passion for gardening and love to share your knowledge about it, but passion can only drive you for the first few weeks of launching your blog. You have to manage your blog as you would any business.
This means writing what your readers want, more than what you want to write about; following a strict schedule for posting content; promoting your posts. You are expected to register your blog as a business sooner or later; have a brand identity; know the overall cost of launching and running the blog; and how much you are willing to pay if you will be outsourcing some of these processes.
If all these seem like a bother to you and you feel would kill your "passion," then you probably should rethink making money through blogging.
The Importance of a Niche
The term niche loosely translates to a specialized segment of a broad area. Within blogging, a niche describes a specific topic or interest within a broad subject of interest.
The success of your blog is dependent, first and foremost, on the niche you choose. Many have begun blogging, focusing on a niche, only to realize months later that they have made a mistake. The good thing is, choosing a niche can be easy, and I will share with you how to go about it. However, before I do that, below are a few reasons why choosing the right niche is important.
Your Niche Determines How Much You Can Earn
Niches are not equal. Some niches have a higher earning potential than others. There is a hierarchy that exists. Where you might be able to influence how much your blog earns with marketing strategies, there is a cap on what you can make based on your niche.
Your Niche Determines if You Will Still Have Content To Write About After A While
The niche you choose will determine if you will run out of content to write about months or years after starting your blog. Some niches are characteristically broad and deep, so you can never run out of content to write about. Others are narrow.
Your Niche Determines How Tasking Your Blogging Experience Will Be
Your niche determines how much work it will take to create content for your blog. A food blog is easier to maintain than a travel blog. The reasons are apparent. For a food blog, you can create content from your kitchen, including pictures and videos. However, to create content for a travel blog, you must travel and do it a lot! Similarly if you write about personal finance, you can create good content every week if not everyday. So, choose your niche accordingly. If it takes more time and resources to create content, probably you will leave it.
How to Choose A Niche For Your Blog
Choosing a niche for your blog can be challenging. However, it doesn’t have to be. The simplest way to choose your niche is to look for something you are already good at and then check to see if the niche is profitable.
Access Your Strength
1. List Out Your Passion:
What things are you passionate about? The litmus test of passion for anything is that you would still find joy if you could do it without being paid. List a couple of things you are passionate about. You may be interested in teaching maths, English, physics, chemistry or anything. You may also have interest in reading and listening and you can share your experience. You can review books, write articles and teach kids what not to do. There are lots of things you may have interest in but you did not have figured it out yet. It is time now to find them.
2. List Out Your Skills:
What skills have you acquired throughout your life? Remember, just because you find it easy to perform specific tasks doesn’t mean others find it easy. So, list all the skills you have.
3. List Out Your Professional And Academic Qualifications:
Your professional and academic qualifications are a pointer to what you are already an expert at. The advantage of going this route is that you have proof of your mastery in that niche. So, go ahead and list them out.
4. Divide up your interest into their respective niches:
Below is a list of niche curled from the Google Revenue Calculator:
Chose A Niche Based On Key standards
Armed with your list of proposed niches, the next step is to choose one based on a few standards. Some of these standards include:
1
Choose A Niche With High Earning Potential
There are high-earning niches, and your niche should fall naturally within any of these broad niches. According to research conducted by RankIQ, where they studied over 800 blogs earning more than 2,000 dollars a month, the top 4 earning blog niches are food, personal finance, lifestyle/money, and travel.
To find the niche with the highest earning potential from your list, visit Google Revenue Calculator. Select a country, and click on “Calculate.” You will be taken to a page where you will see the potential annual revenue from AdSense per the number of views on your blog for that niche. Do the same for the other niches on your list.
In the below screenshot, we have searched how much we can earn through Google Adsense in Asia and Pacific Countries in Finance.
Also, this is a rough estimate, you can earn a lot more or less based on other factors. Also, if the number of visitors increases and you develop your own products or start doing affiliate marketing (covered in coming modules), your earnings will increase.
2
Choose A Niche With High Search Volume
Most niches listed on Google Ad Revenue have a competitive high-volume search. However, each of these niches has multiple sub-niches. The trick is to seek out a sub-niche with a high search volume.
Perhaps you realize you have a passion for cooking, “COOKING” falls under the broad niche of “FOOD.” You must research the sub-niche “cooking” to know if people are interested in cooking-related topics.
To get the search volume of a sub-niche, you need the help of a keyword tool. Keyword tools can help us find out keywords which have high search volume in the niche.
For example, if we search for "cooking" in Google Keyword planner, we can see that there are 100k-1M monthly searches for the keyword "cooking" in India alone. You can change location and get know how much searches are performed in your own country. Here we can also get keyword ideas which are closely related to our main search.
Some top keyword research tools include:
3
Choose A Niche, You Can Easily Create Content For
Most of your time as a blogger will be dedicated to creating content for your blog. And you will be doing this for years. Therefore, you want to choose a niche you are comfortable creating content on. This means you should choose a niche that reflects your daily experience.
It is easier for someone who plays games to have a blog focusing on the game niche than someone who rarely plays games. It is easier for a digital nomad to own a traveling blog than someone who only travels once a month. It is easy for someone creating content for personal finance niche, if she reads a lot and has interest in personal finance.