How to Start a Blog That Makes Money (And Gets Free Traffic)

 

Reality check: Not all bloggers earn money.

Of those who make money, not all make a living. And not even all make a decent side income. 

But what’s also true is that a lot of bloggers succeed. 

The opportunity you’re looking at is: 

  • Joining 31% of bloggers who make a decent side income of $6K a year.
  • Joining the 15% who make at least $30K a year. 
  • Joining the 6%–10% of bloggers who make over $10K a month. 
  • $100K a month? That’s also possible with blogging, but only the most hardworking and patient bloggers get there.

 

Without further ado, let’s get you started in creating a profitable blog. We’ll also look at some ways to attract free traffic from search engines.

1. Find a profitable niche 

Here are some niches proven to be profitable:

 

Is your ideal niche not on the list? Check these things:

  • Search for affiliate programs in your niche. A simple search like “board games affiliate program” should do it.
  • See if there are enough products on Amazon you could recommend through an affiliate program (that are not excluded by the program).
  • Look at other blogs in the niche and see if they run ads. If they do, check their organic traffic with our free website traffic checker. Their income will range from $0.01 to $0.25 per pageview from organic traffic per month. If they’re active on other channels, that’s additional pageviews. 
  • Go to a similar product in your preferred niche and use a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to see sponsored links—these will be the deals you could potentially get as well. 

You can look for affiliate programs used on any site with these four steps.

But what about blogging about something you’re actually passionate about? 

Obviously, the best scenario is that your interests or hobbies match a profitable niche. Otherwise, it’s easy to lose interest in your blog. 

But you can also look at it in a different way. If you treat your blog merely as a business, you don’t need to be passionate about the niche in order to succeed. You can, for example, set up blogs in all of those niches and hire someone to create content.