• A Domain Name
• Blog Hosting
• Start Building A List
• Successful Blogging E-Course (FREE)

I am starting to get this question a lot, and it is becoming more frequently from my offline friends as they see my Facebook status’ and or ask me what I do to make a living.

When they hear that I am making about $3,000 a month blogging I always get two questions:

1. Is It Hard To Make Money Blogging?

This is probably the hardest question to answer because it is different for each person. But my answers is always that to start blogging for money it is not HARD it is just A LOT of work.

Blogging for money is not a get rich quick scheme, it is like anything, if you follow a proven system then work the system and you will get the result – but a lot of people think they know better or give up before the results start to show.

2.  Can You Teach Me How To Start Blogging For Money?

If you want more personal teaching from me then make sure you are signed up for my ‘7 Traits Of A Successful Blogger e-course‘.

This is something that really irks me. You see, I run a blog about building a successful blog and people come to me personally and ask if I can take the time to teach them how to start blogging for money. How about you just start reading my blog?

You see, the reason I don’t personally teach individual people is because then I am only helping one person – and I don’t see that as a good use of my time (don’t get me wrong, I really do want you to start blogging successfully). But I can reach so many more people through my blog and my email list – so that is how I choose to teach people.

Now that doesn’t mean don’t contact me. If you have a more specific question in regard to your blogging – I’d love to hear from you. But if you are just starting out, all of the answers are in my free e-course and in this blog – so just start looking.

I’m No Overnight Success

How I Started To Blog Successfully

Are you willing to blog for a couple of years with no profit?

Ever since I recently made public how much money I make from my blogs, a lot of friends are asking me how quickly they can make $3,000 a month – almost as if it is going to happen overnight.

Blogging has been a massive journey over more than 3 years (and the majority of those 3 years I was working about 30-40hours a week on my blog for pocket money (about $50-100 a month) – but no one wants to know about the hard times.

The Steps That I Took To Start Blogging

You don’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars on blogging books, I never did. For me my blog training was ‘on the job’.

I wanted to learn how to make money online so I purchased a domain name, got myself some blog hosting and then started writing – and to be honest, looking back at some of my early content, I was terrible. But enough people started to subscribe to my blog and I made the odd small affiliate sale, that I knew that this could work – now I just had to work out how to turn my little blog into an influential platform and start make more money blogging.

I Became A Student To Those Already Doing It

Watch bloggers that are where you want to be and ask yourself what are they doing differently? Do that!

Now I never made contact with any of the bloggers that I looked up to, but what I did was watch everything that they did. I wanted to know what worked for them and the things that they were doing to to gain influence, traffic and money – because if I could just duplicate a small percentage of their success, then I would have been happy.

I Implemented What I Saw Was Working

The majority of bloggers know exactly how to start blogging for money- it really isn’t  a secret code. As I mentioned earlier, blogging is a system and all you have to do is work the system and if you are stick around long enough, you will start to see the results you were looking for.

The problem with most people is that they know what works, but they do the opposite (I was exactly the same), but once I started to put all the elements of a successful blog into play, I started to get ‘successful blog results’.

Here is what I did…

How To Start Blogging For Money

I Focused On Search Engine Traffic

Don’t get me wrong. I love social media traffic as much as the next person. But the one thing I have found is that while the majority of traffic had been coming from social means (Twitter, StumbleUpon, blog commenting), the majority of money was being made from my older posts that were starting to get good ranking in the search engines.

So I started to optimise my posts for search engine traffic.

I Focused On What Worked For Me Personally

The best products to promote are those that you actually use yourself. There is much more integrity in this

Have you ever noticed how the majority of blogs have the exact same ads and promote the exact same products (and we wonder why most blogs make no money).

Instead of following the crowd, I decided to test promoting different products to see which ones converted best for me – and I still do this. The funny thing is that the products and services that convert the best for me are products that rarely see promoted by other blogs in my niche (funny that!)

The main marketplaces that I use to find products to promote are:

• Clickbank - Mainly information products
• Commission Junction (CJ) – Products & Services

But don’t just scour these marketplaces for products. The one thing that has worked for me, is to promote products and services that I actually use. There is such an integrity when you can post screenshots and results from your actual use of a product.

I Focused On Building An Email List

A quality email list is like money in the bank. If you can start to capture the visitors of your blog and funnel them into your email list using a quality free product then eventually this is going to be earning more money for you than anything else on your blog.

I am actually working on a new blog that is solely based around it’s email list and I can see it quickly stealing the largest percentage of my blogging income. Start building an email list!

I never really took this point seriously and it showed in the profit that I was making from my list. I wasn’t converting effectively, my free product was poor and not monetized correctly – I was a complete mess!

But recently (after watching another of my blogging mentors), I have started to see once again how effective and important your email list is and COMPLETELY REWORKED my ‘7 Traits of a Successful Blogger‘ e-course which now is extremely professional and has some fantastic content (oh, and it is well monetized – signup to check it out!)

I Utilized Social Media

Now I know that I said at the start that search traffic converts better than social traffic, but that doesn’t mean we should ditch social media at all. Any traffic is good traffic!

Social media in reality is just networking and all about building and nurturing relationships.

Here are some of the social media tools and strategies I use:

• I Comment When I Have An Opinion

  There are millions upon millions of blogs in existence and I am sure that you are probably following a few of them. One of the best advertisements for your blog is an intellectual and ‘value adding’ comment on another blog.

• I Make Use Of Twitter

  Twitter has become extremely spammy and the majority of people just use it to promote, promote promote. The problem with this is that people start to ignore your tweets like a kids blocks out a constantly nagging parent.

  The best use of Twitter is what it was created for – to network. So ask and answer questions, sprinkle links in from time to time, but focus on relationships and people will search your links out.

• I Use Facebook To Funnel Traffic & Subscribers

  Did you realise that Facebook was bigger than Twitter? Most people do. So why do most bloggers have a Twitter account but not a Facebook fan page?

  With the use of facebook landing pages and the viral effect that groups and fan pages can have, you would be crazy not to set up a fan page for your blog.

Those 4 things are what took me from an average blogger to a profitable blogger, so if you are wondering how to start blogging for money then start putting these 4 steps into practice and you will be well on your way!

Download a free trial of Market Samurai the product that I use to find and rank my niche sites!