According to an article in the New York Times, 95% of bloggers fail.
It’s evident that blogging advice doesn’t always lead to blogging success. And as the search engine landscape gets more competitive, it may seem like it’s too saturated to make money blogging today.
An expert blogger can grow his readership to thousands monthly readers and can earn in thousands of dollars per month in revenue — while spending $0 on advertising.
1. Focus less on writing and more on scaling
With limited time outside of a full-time job, starting and growing a side hustle can be challenging. Most of us have a stressful full-time job that take up almost 50 hours a week. We have to figure out how to scale our processes so we could spend our time in the most meaningful ways. Begin to outsource certain components of blog — hire a team to write first drafts and an assistant to help with link building and guest blogging.
It won’t cost much and would free you up to spend your time on building relationships and influence in the digital space.
2. Plan your monetization strategy from day one
Most bloggers are told to write about their passions and then figure out how to monetize their passion down the road. However, bloggers fail because they don’t know how to transition from writer to business owner. They start with a passion in mind, write for years, get burned out when it’s not working, and quit. If you flip the script and plan your monetization strategy before you even start, you’re much more likely to succeed.
Adam says that this planning includes three core components: keyword research, content, and affiliate marketing.
All three of these disciplines need to mesh. For example, before you even begin your keyword research to see if people search for your topic, you first need to ask yourself if your topic can actually make money. For example, if I’m a fitness blogger, I could rank for fitness tips but that post may be hard to monetize. What if instead I ranked for best fitness bikes and pushed people to my affiliate links? There’s a big difference in potential revenue.
How-to guides are the formats that are recommended to generate not just clicks and traffic, but blog revenue.
You need a mixture of posts that bring in high traffic and high-intent posts that generate revenue.
3. It’s okay to make mistakes
Although it takes grit to launch a side hustle that lets you quit your full-time job, its okay to make mistakes. Blogs are living, breathing things. It’s okay to experiment and fail; you just need to give yourself the freedom to pivot.
