Single Grain

“But dude, how can you make money with a blog? By the way, what’s a blog? Is that some kind of Internet thing? That sounds so stupid, it’ll never work!”

What you see above is a probably a common response from your friends and co-workers when you talk about the possibility of someday making enough money from your blog that you won’t have to report to the hellish cubicle you are enslaved in every day.

Sometimes it is hard to explain all the opportunities that a successful blogger can take advantage of to make a viable income from a blog. But when you start dropping numbers, the conversation quickly changes to “how can I do that”! As soon as you tell them about the people that are pulling in several thousand dollars per month from their blogs, then the ears start to perk. It’s so fun to see that. Money gets people listening and motivated, and fast!

The first thing they ask after you go over the very basics is, “how much does it cost to start a blog?”, and, “is it hard to maintain?”

Your answers to those questions should be:

1. Little to no cost.
2. Not if you’re passionate about your niche.

It’s best to mention Blogger and Wordpress as their starting points, as they are both very user friendly and there are tons of tutorials and help forums for each platform. So after you get done explaining the “getting a blog started” part, and then prepare for the next barrage of questions which are the most exciting - the ones where they ask you how they can actually make money online with a blog.

Right off the bat, I refer them to the “A-Lister” blogs, which can be very motivating. The best thing to tell them to do whenever they have time, is to research the heck out of the popular blogs, to get a feel for what people want. There is so much valuable information on these blogs, that it’ll keep them busy for a few days. They’ll soon learn to appreciate the hard work, passion, and dedication it will take to make money with their blogs.
After they have their blog up and running, the first thing you should recommend is for them to create some quality posts and content (pillar articles) to sort of “jump start” the blog, and then sign up for a Google Adsense account. A good thing to explain to them is how Google Adsense is an easy entry into the advertising revenue world, and signing up can be done pretty easily in less than five minutes. As most of you know, Google Adsense is one of the most common ways to monetize a website or a blog.

One disclaimer you should always throw at them is that “this is not a get rich quick scheme”. You have to be passionate about your writing, and the only way to become successful and gain more traffic is to write creative, informative, interesting and unique writing. Without that, a blog is nothing. They might earn a few bucks here and there, but it won’t even be enough to buy that Mocha Latte that they get every morning at the coffee stand. If they have a decent amount of quality posts that people want to read - rinse and repeat for months on end, then someday they might be lucky enough to brag about their earnings. Making a steady income from their blog won’t happen overnight. It’s taken most successful bloggers at least a year to start bragging about anything. Once they hit that mark, and then once they hit their goals, then its time to push for more!

But it’s not easy. And it takes dedicated, hard work to get the ball rolling. You need to tell them that they’ll need to make a commitment to deliver on promises to their readers every day. Let them know that they’ll need to keep writing until they think it’s a hit, and then drive some more or they’ll quickly fall behind. Research and networking are highly important and should be part of the daily routine. The more people they know the better off they will be! Having quality backlinks from high ranking blogs and websites is one of the key aspects to their traffic and visitor success. Start small and set goals. Tell them to think of it as a game – after each success, pretend that you move to the next level. Then do it again, and again, and again….