Don’t Feel Bad if You’re in the Blogging Game for the Cash

Money is the great motivator

Don’t start a blog if you’re only in it for the money.

I guess this is good advice.

It takes a lot of time and dedication to make money writing on the internet. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

But if you want to be a professional writer, having your own website is a great way to generate passive income.

Making a living is important.

We all like having a roof over our heads and a belly full of food.

And while a lot of people are happy to get a job in an office, or a cafe or an oil rig, some of us would like to make that living by sitting at a laptop, in our pj's, at home, thanks.

How we make a living is how we in the western world like to assign value to one another.

I worked as a waitress for years, and I noticed a juxtaposition between my blogging and my restaurant jobs:

Waitresses work for the money, but shouldn’t enjoy their job.

Bloggers should blog for the love of blogging, but shouldn’t make money with display ads (yet selling crappy course is being an entrepreneur #bossbabe). They’re being too ambitious.

You wouldn’t expect a waitress to work for free, so why must I blog for free?

Perhaps we should concentrate on finding jobs that we enjoy, or that allow us the free time and flexibility to pursue our interests?

All those people that work 60 hour weeks and then carve out the time to write are superheroes. It couldn’t be me.

I purposely chose to work in catering because I could pick my hours and there was no option to take my day job home. Once I clocked out, that was it.

Anyway.

Years of overinflated income reports and sketchy affiliate plugs have given blogging for money a bit of a bad name. Blogging became synonymous with work from home scams like MLMs.

It’s a shame because I firmly believe that the best way for writers to make money is to start a niche blog.

You note that I say writers, not everyone. The bare minimum you need to make money blogging is a love for writing and about $75.

I’m 100% not saying that it’s easy to make money blogging, or that everyone has the ability to blog.

But if you love to write, and you want to make an income from home within the next few years, start a niche website.

I started a blog because I wanted to make money

But I didn’t think it would be quick or easy, and I wanted to be a writer.

So don’t listen when people tell you that making money is a good enough reason to want to blog.

And, full disclosure, it took me YEARS to learn how to blog in a way that both suited my talents (95% writing, no photography or coding) and that generated enough traffic to make an income from affiliate marketing and ads.

So, you want to start a money-making blog?

Here’s what you need:

• A domain name
• Web hosting
• A niche — something you’ll enjoy writing about
• Time to learn new skills
• Time and motivation to write a hell of a lot of content
• Patience

I’d recommend that you assume you can make money within two years MINIMUM.

It really depends on your niche and how much time and effort you put in, but if you don’t want to spend all your time on social media, it’ll take a few months to get your first clicks.

Oh, and then when you start making money, you’ll need to add on at least two months, because most ad and affiliate networks pay on a 60+ day lead, so if you make money in June, you won’t be paid until September.

They never seem to mention that in those income reports. Or the $100 threshold a lot of networks require that you hit.

Traps to avoid when blogging for money

• Time saps

You don’t need to use any social media to promote your blog.

I do use Pinterest, but it drives less than 1% of my traffic and probably isn’t worth my time — I’m only doing it as an experiment that’ll eventually be turned into an article

If you like social media, cool, but if you just like writing, put your effort into creating new content and learning on-page SEO, rather than sharing the same content over and over again.

Yeah, the initial few months of having zero pageviews is difficult, but you have to just deal with it. Writing a hell of a lot of blog posts is your ticket to passive income.

• Trying to make money too quickly

Build your traffic first. Forget about affiliate marketing and ad networks until you have traffic for a couple of reasons:

1. If your monetised site makes $0.01 per month it’s really unmotivating, especially since adding affiliate links can take up a lot of time, and then you have to change them all if you get rejected for lack of sales. An unmonetised site making $0.00 is far easier to live with.
2. If you only have 10 pageviews a month, monetising your site could potentially damage your site. Crappy Adsense ads that slow your site aren’t worth the $0.01. Wait until you have enough pageviews for Ezoic. My first ad network was Mediavine, and it was definitely worth the wait.

• Trying to do everything at once

Blogging is still a new industry, despite many experts claiming that it's over.

There are a million and one different ways to find success.

The only thing I can tell you for sure is that the more content you have, the more pageviews you could potentially garner, and the more money you can make.

You don’t need an email list. You don’t need a lead magnet. You don’t need a fancy theme or logo. The only money I make is from ads and affiliate sales.

All you need is a fast, clean, website and a lot of information that people are looking for.

I wanted to create passive income

Isn’t that the dream? To have enough income to be able to pay your bills so that you can work on your current WOP in relative peace?

I have no interest in flogging courses, or paid products (excluding books — I am a writer). I don’t want to moderate Facebook groups or flood people’s inbox.

Ads have a bad rap, but the company I use allows me to control where my ads are and how many my viewers see. I saw no change in traffic after I added them, no change in site speed, and I've had no complaints.

We’re writers, aren’t we? We want to make money from people reading our writing.

The idea of being able to provide people with valuable information in exchange for looking at a couple of ads sits well with me.

A decade of being inundated with sponsored Facebook posts promising skyrocketing Pinterest stats has made me jaded when it comes to paying for blogging advice.

Most of the information you need can be found on the Income School YouTube channel. You can Google the rest.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t make 6 figures a year, and if those sponsored posts are to believed, I could easily be making 6 figures a MONTH if I were to take that course (lolololollolol).

All I needed was for my blogging income to replace my day job. Now I can use my time to work on my other sites. More sites = more opportunities to make money.

Wanting to make money from a blog almost seems taboo

It shouldn’t be.

We should all strive to be paid for the things we love to do and are good at.

I love to write about a lot of different things. I’m writing a fantasy novel, I write on Medium, and I have four niche websites.

All of these projects have the potential to make me money, though I only have plans to monetise the niche sites.

Those sites only exist because I want to monetise them.

They’re not some passion project AND THAT’S OK.

I picked topics that I’m interested in and I know a lot about and write about them.

Will they make a lot of money? I don’t know. There are no guarantees. There’s no get rich quick scheme here. I'll have to write dozens of articles and wait months before I can tell if there’s any potential in the niche.

I just know that it’s worth taking the chance to have the opportunity to do what I love, where I love to do it.