Everyone has heard (by now) that you can create an income online.
After searching for years for the perfect way to make money online and reading countless blogs, every thing I came across for starting a blog felt so scammy.
I wanted to create an income online in a reliable and sustainable way.
This is why I’m so glad that I stumbled upon Income School and what they teach about creating a niche blog.
What is a niche blog?
A niche blog is a website that is created around a specific topic. The article’s are geared towards providing good information to readers. The topics covered on this type of blog should be things that people tend to search on Google to find answers or to solve their problems.
The main idea is to write good content that can rank in Google, so when a person has a question, your blog post can come up in search with an answer.
How does a niche site earn money?
The simple and easy way that niche blogs earn money is through ads and affiliate links.
So if you can get enough traffic to your blog, you can start earning money. Traffic = Money
Ads
(through a network)
Sign up with an ad network and they will put display ads on your blog and pay you per thousand page views.
Affiliate links
(commissions through other businesses)
Placing links to products on Amazon (or any other affiliate offer) that are in line with the topic you are writing about. Earn commission when someone buys something after going to that site through your link.
How to choose a niche before starting a blog
Think about what you have researched a lot, these searches can give you some idea’s.
Like for instance, my kids wanted to get guinea pigs. So I just searched that to death.
Like:
What cage should I get for guinea pigs?
Can guinea pigs eat carrots?
What is the best hay for guinea pigs? and a lot more …
So what did I do, I started a site all about about guinea pigs. (For those of you who are interested, I will post a case study about how my guinea pig site is doing soon.)
Try to pick a niche where you can post evergreen content, that will still be relevant for years to come. Try not to post content like trends and news, which will be old tomorrow.
How to create a niche blog
- Start you website
- Create content – Your first content should be answering questions (these posts should be around 1000 words each). – The next batch of content should be tips, lists and maybe how-to’s (around 2000 words per post). – The third batch of content should be big topics like an ultimate guide.
If you really want to succeed with blogging, try to create and publish around 10 pieces of content per month.
Then you get to month 6 and …
……….. crickets ………..
Nothing.
Don’t get discouraged at this point. This is normal. It is important to know what to expect.
A lot of people don’t know what to expect and think that at 6 months you should have more traffic and income and so they decide to throw in the towel. Please don’t give up. A lot of people fail, because they just give up too early. Why? because they just don’t know what to expect.
I don’t expect you to have a lot of traffic or earn anything at this point.
If you do have have some traffic or have earned a little something already, that’s awesome, but not expected yet. Either way keep going. There is no such thing as get rich quick. Blogging takes a lot of work up front, and if you put in the effort, it is so worth it in the end.
- What do you do now? Keep up a writing and publishing routine. You just keep adding content to your blog. (What if you are really busy and have a full time job and kids? – Try working on your site just one hour a day, creating content and just keep going.)
We want to create a snow ball effect. Content takes a long time to rank, so if you create a lot of content at the start, the batch of content should start to rank in about 5 to 8 months. If you keep it up and create content consistently, it should start to bring in more and more traffic from this point forward.
Should I do social media for my blog?
You can get caught up in the social media trap really fast. If you look again, you’ve spent hours on Facebook right?
You can set up social media for your blog, but this should not be your main focus. It’s much better spending your time to create new content.
Social media can help to get some traffic to your site sooner, though, while the content takes its time to start to rank on Google.
I would suggest Pinterest. Pinterest can be very beneficial in sending traffic to your blog.
Create 1 to 3 different pins for each blog post you create and pin them to the relevant boards on Pinterest, schedule each pin about a week apart.
Ok, I’ve got Traffic – what’s next?
I would apply to Ezoic to place ads on my site. Ezoic has recently scrapped their traffic requirement, they now accept brand new blogs. (They used to have a 10 000 page views per month criteria, but you can now apply at any stage of your site.)
I got Ezoic on my guinea pig site in month 2, without any traffic. (so, I made cents, lol, because I had almost no traffic.)
The main thing you should remember is to just keep going.
I will publish some month by month case studies really soon, so you can follow along.
