How to Start a Profitable Blog

2015.07.21

Nancy Ryan

(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Before choosing some business idea for development, it would be great to analyze what profit it can potentially bring and how you can fulfill your financial expectations. If you are open for suggestions how to start a profitable blog, our short review of capabilities and a few statistical insights will help you to choose your own direction.

If you have a common blog, where you share your thoughts with readers, it also can become a great “rocket site” for earnings. You just need to apply the proven tools for blog monetization. Let’s find out how to turn a standard blog into a profitable online business. A single blog can bring up to millions of dollars every year, and the owners of such blog use the instruments, available for anyone. So, why not to try to achieve the same results?

Factors that influence on blog profit

There are dozens of factors that influence on the income from blogging. All they come down to the one, the most important factor in any online activity (we will talk about it later). Starting a profitable blog requires research and preparations. Here are the major aspects to consider:

The blog topic

In all other things being equal, the popularity of specific topic in Google is proportional to potential income from blogging in this topic. The first tip of how to create a profitable blog is to analyze the number of searches for specific queries. The more people are interested in the topic you cover, the more readers your blog can potentially attract. Therefore, the more views and clicks on ads you may get.

But it’s not as simple as it seems. No matter what topic you choose, you must be able to generate high-quality content on the chosen subject. Therefore a lot of beginners choose the topic they are interested in or the one that is their professional area. For instance, a doctor will definitely write better about medicine than automobiles. That is why the right choice of the topic for profitable blogging should be a compromise between popularity in Google and the author’s capabilities, as it directly defines the quality of content.

The content quality

To make a reader visit a blog regularly, a blogger must generate interesting, unique content on the topics popular among online users. And the quality must be stable to enlarge the number of readers. Good content helps to build a profitable blog at the very beginning, when a blogger needs to gain popularity among online users. Content becomes ‘good’ when it gives readers what they want, when it is interesting for potential advertisers and other partners for earning money.

Users’ behavior

Let’s consider you want to earn money from standard ads on the blog. The more banner views your readers make, the more income you get. To gain maximum income from blogging of such kind you need to make a reader visit as many blog pages, as possible. So, the behavior of a standard blog user should be the following: he reads some blog post, then moves to another one, and one more, etc. Your task is to keep a user on your blog site for as long, as possible. How it can be achieved? First of all, you need to have handy blog navigation. Blog usability and smart innerlinking are vital in this aspect.

Depending on the sources of income you select for your blog, you need to adapt the website for the users’ behavior you need. If you sell some e-book, your major purpose is to make a reader click on purchase button. The content elements, the blog design must be adjusted for this properly. If you want to sell individual fitness programs, you also need to develop featured subscription on the blog with access to some paid content. You are the one who chooses how a reader can behave on the site. And you can make him behave the way you need.

Traffic amount and quality

This is what all SEO is about. Traffic in its general meaning is an amount of information transferred via some data channel. In case of a website or blog traffic is a number of visitors, number of their clicks and views. Let’s see an average blog income from, say 200 visitors per day:

You have 200 people coming to your blog pages per day
10 visitors per day subscribe for your email newsletter (intended for making users buy some of your product)
1 of 10 newsletter subscribers buy some of your basic products that cost $20.
1 of 500 buyers becomes your regular customer spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars for your premium products. Let’s say they spend $1,000 on buying some premium products.

Okay, so there are 30 days in a month, 6 000 visitors per month. 300 of them become newsletter subscribers, 30 of them buy a basic product at $20. So the monthly income from basic product sales is $600. 3 of your 30 buyers spend $1,000 each. So, your monthly income is about $3,600. And this is $155,520 per year! Actually, this income is built mostly on 3 regular customers per month, i.e. 36 regular customers per year.

This is just a rough sample of potential income from selling products via a blog. The amount of income and profit directly depends from:

Amount of traffic
Quality of traffic
Traffic sources

Let’s consider another situation: you have huge traffic, thousands of visitors per day, but these visitors are not likely to be interested in buying anything. They just use your blog to extend their knowledge in the area of their interest. A good sample of such kind is a blog about celebrities life. People from different age categories, status and income like to read about celebrities, but they do this for entertainment, without any intention to buy anything. The service they can potentially pay for is a meeting with some pop star. But who can provide such service except actually a star and his team?

However, such traffic is a great way how to start a blog for profit from ads.

The quality of traffic means the chances to convert your blog views and readers into a real income. To be a high-quality audience for blog, the readers must be highly interested in your topic, and the topic itself must be suitable for selling products (e-books, featured content, coaching sessions, etc.).

The quality of traffic directly depends from its sources. You can spend huge money on backlinks to attract more users, but if these ads are located in websites from completely different areas, not related to your own topic, it would be hard to turn such traffic into the real blog revenue. That is why you should work not only on enlarging traffic, you should be attentive in choosing the sources of traffic to increase its quality and potential profitability.

How to calculate the blog income?

No matter whether you are only planning to start blogging for profit or already do this, the plan of calculation is the same:

Define the revenue-oriented behaviors on the blog
Define the financial value of each behavior
Calculate how many revenue-oriented actions are performed by blog visitors per month
Calculate the total value of all actions by all revenue-oriented behavior directions.

Okay, seems here we need a clear sample. Say, there is a blog that earns by selling some software program and showing Google AdSense. The average revenue from every program sale is $10. The average Google Ad revenue is $6 per 1000 impressions.

The blog has 20,000 visitors per month that generate about 50,000 impressions per month. The revenue from Google AdSense is $300 per month. Approximately 100 of 20,000 monthly visitors purchase the program, so the income from product sales is $1,000. Totally our sample blog earns $1,300 revenue every month.

This is a very basic sample to demonstrate you the mechanism of calculating revenue. When you plan how to make a profitable website, you can make the same prognosis for your future earnings. It helps to find out how many visitors you actually need, and what sources of income you need to switch on to make the expected earnings.

How much bloggers actually earn?

Looking at our basic calculations you might think that blogging isactually not as profitable as you expected. And this is partly true, because blogging is MUCH MORE PROFITABLE THAN YOU EXPECT.

As a proof of this idea check the numbers in modern bloggers’ revenue report.

The HuffingtonPost blog brings its owner, Arianna Huffington about $30,000 per day. The total value of the site is $21.82 million. The major source of income for this blog is Pay Per Click ads.

Mashable blog earns about $15,800 per day, and its value now is $11.52 million. The major income is made on banner ads, as well as in Techcrunch blog that makes $14,800 per day.

Don’t listen to people who say that SEO and online ads are dead. They will never be dead, they will only evolve. Millions of dollars are made by a single blog in the area of advertising and affiliate sales today, and there are completely no signs that tomorrow the blog ad revenue will disappear. Neither tomorrow no in the far future.

An anonymous polling shows that the average income of a blogger with 100,000 of visitors per month is $2,000 – $3,000. But according to the diversity of potential income sources and tools for blog optimization, the amount may greatly vary.

How to earn profit from blogging?

There are two major types of money made from blogging: How to earn profit from blogging

Passive income
Active income

Passive income is the one that doesn’t require a lot of your time. For instance, for creating a profitable blog, you can subscribe for various advertising services selling them the space for ads on your pages. This can be banners or text ads that are placed on the blog. The money can be either earned from ads impressions (each time the ad is shown to your website user, you get some money) or from clicks (you get money only when your reader actually clicks on the banner or text advertisement). The blog advertising revenue is the most popular and the most profitable among all income sources for bloggers today.

Active income is made on the things that you actually do yourself. For instance, a lot of bloggers get money from sponsored posts, when some advertiser orders to write a review about his product in your blog or simply tell about some service. Advertising

There are also some hybrid types of earnings that combine both passive and active manner, depending on the approach you choose. Being a partner in some affiliate program means that you need to sell affilator’s services or products on your blog. And you are fully free to do anything you want to make your earnings. You can simply put a form to subscribe for the affiliator’s offer, and it will be a passive income, if someone goes there from your blog. Or you can create posts that promote these products to attract more sales. And it becomes an active income, if people purchase the affiliated products based on your posts. It would be great to check the information about the most profitable affiliate programs in your blog topic and choose among them.

You can combine various income sources in one blog to get maximum of potential profit from your readers. When starting a blog for profit, first you need to develop its popularity and gain enough traffic, and this is when the blog becomes a tool for earnings.

While you only gain popularity and spend much time on making high-quality, unique content, start with some simple tools for passive income. Earn from your first visitors with the aim of ads. There are many plugins that help to fill blog pages with ads. There is no need to search for advertisers, spend time on negotiations, etc. These plugins work automatically. One of such solutions for WordPress is MageNet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb65NtqPHX0

One of its greatest advantages is that it provides contextual ads related to a blog page topic. This means that a person who came to read a specific blog post is already interested in the advertised product. The ads is directly oriented at your audience that is a perfect approach in blogging for profit. An interested viewer is much likely to click on the ad and bring you some income. The plugin is free, so just install and use it!