Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
For years we’ve all heard about blogging and how it’s a great way to make a living online. However, very rarely do people explain exactly how blogs make their money.
So today I wanted to break down the blogging business model and how it should really be done.
Fundamentally, blogging can be broken down into three core components: driving traffic, creating community, and generating income. You can’t just start a blog, start writing, and expect to become an overnight millionaire via Google Adsense.
The model is simple, but it never fails. Building a successful blog is as simple as producing great content, driving traffic, retaining visitors, bringing them back often, building a tribe, and monetizing it.
Ultimately, your ability to make money with a blog will depend on three steps. Each step is just as important as the other. Here is a breakdown:
1. Driving Traffic
Before you can start driving traffic to your blog, your blog needs to be worthy of traffic. That means it must be user-friendly, attractive, and full of useful information. Driving traffic can be broken down into four steps:
- Guest posting
- Social media
- Referral traffic
- Search engines
The easiest way to drive traffic to your blog is through guest posting. Guest posting is when you publish a blog post on another person’s blog. Guest posting puts you right in front of the exact readers you want for your blog. People who are reading blogs similar to your own. For a complete breakdown, read The Ultimate Guide To Excellent Guest Blogging.
To quickly grow your blog, you should guest post at least once a week. (Time required: 2 hours)
Next is social media. You can start by sharing your blog posts on your most active social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn are all good. Display one or two social profiles on your blog so your readers can follow you. Lastly, engage with your readers via social media. Build a presence. (Time required: 1 hour)
Referral traffic is traffic from other websites. To build up referral traffic, you can comment on other blogs, participate in forums, write articles for sites, encourage readers to share your content, and link to it. (Time required: 2 hours)
Search engines are the ultimate traffic source. To start generating search engine traffic, you need to optimize your blog posts to rank for keywords.
To learn about on-page SEO, read The Ultimate On Page SEO Checklist. Next, read 4 Stupidly Simple Link Building Techniques For 2012. (Time required: 2 hours)
For as little as 7 hours a week, you can start seeing rapid growth.
2. Creating Community
Community is arguably the most important component of a highly successful blog. Why is creating a community so important? When you have a community of people who know, like, and trust you, you can sell anything to them.
That doesn’t mean you can manufacture some garbage product once a month and launch it out to the suckers who trust you. It means you can create a valuable product that your community will happily purchase from you and thank you for. A product that makes your community trust you even more and respect you.
You build community by building an email list and encouraging readers to return regularly. You can install a forum, encourage readers to communicate with each other, and start discussions. If you want to build a community fast, build a list of loyal readers who actively engage with your content.
It’s that simple. For more information, read How To Build A Community And Get More Blog Traffic.
3. Generating An Income
Generating an income is really the easy part. Driving traffic is basic. It requires hard work, patience, a lot of time, and often money. Building a community is far more difficult, as it requires gaining trust. Once you have your readers’ trust, you can sell them anything. It’s as simple as creating an information product, having a sales page written, and putting it online.
You can monetize your blog via sponsored ads, Adsense, Amazon, affiliate products, and more. But if you get it right, if you really build a community…
…you have one obvious choice: create your own product. Monetizing via advertising and affiliate links is for rookies. Only use those methods when you struggle to gain trust.
While affiliate marketing works and is an essential piece of the online marketing puzzle, creating your own product provides you with far more control and leverage. Plus, your income will be limitless.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
MarkR
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Great post, David! I’ve always struggled to find the balance between creating content and driving traffic. Your breakdown really helped me understand how to structure my efforts. Thanks!
SarahC
I never realized how crucial building a community was until I read this. I’m definitely going to focus on engaging more with my readers. Do you have any tips on the best tools for managing a blog community?
JacobW
I’ve been blogging for a year now, but I haven’t seen much success. Do you think it’s possible to monetize a niche blog, or is this strategy more suited for larger markets?
EmilyT
This is such a helpful breakdown! I’ve been blogging for a while but wasn’t seeing the growth I wanted. Your tips on guest posting and driving traffic really gave me a new perspective. Thanks for sharing!
JohnB
I’m not entirely convinced about the effectiveness of guest posting as a traffic driver. Do you have any case studies or proof that it works? It seems like a lot of work with little return.
AnaL
Thank you for this informative post! I’m curious, how would you recommend balancing content creation with promoting your blog? It’s hard to do both well.
MikeV
I enjoyed reading this post, but I think it would benefit from more detailed strategies on SEO. The section on traffic was great, but I feel like SEO could be explored more in-depth for beginners.
LauraP
Hey David! It’s been a while since we last spoke. I’ve been working on my blog but struggling to build a community. Would love to catch up soon and maybe collaborate on something!
ChrisK
This post hit home for me. I’ve been trying to monetize my blog for months, but I think I’ve been missing the community aspect. Thanks for shedding light on that—it’s something I’ll focus on more now!
SandraM
I found a great tool called Buffer that helps schedule social media posts, which aligns well with your advice on engaging via social networks. It’s been really useful for me to stay consistent with my posts. Maybe others will find it helpful too.
PaulH
I’ve learned so much from this post! I was always confused about how to drive traffic to my blog effectively. Your emphasis on guest posting and social media really opened my eyes. Thanks, David!
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Tried the seven-hours-a-week version of this exactly as laid out: two hours guest posting, one on social, two on referral traffic, two on SEO. Weeks one and two felt fine. Week three was where it fell over, because guest posting takes longer than two hours once an editor asks for a rewrite. Budget more for that step than the post suggests.
At sixty-one I read posts like this asking whether the seven hours a week assumes a kind of stamina I no longer have in one sitting, and I was pleased to find the answer is generally yes, but the hours can be broken into smaller pieces across a day without losing the effect, which is a relief to a man who naps.
Boiled down to the load-bearing points, since Arthur’s question about stamina made me want to lay the whole thing out: 1) traffic comes from guest posts, social presence, referral links and SEO, roughly seven hours a week combined, 2) community comes from an email list plus regular, honest contact, not just broadcasting at people, 3) income comes last and is described as the easy part, ideally from your own product rather than ads or affiliate links. What’s missing, and it’s a real gap, is any timeline for how long step two actually takes before step three starts working at all. The post treats community-building as though trust arrives on the same schedule as traffic does, and anyone who’s actually built a list and waited to see whether people would buy from them knows those two clocks run at very different speeds. That gap is where most people quit, right before the second clock finishes.
Trust is a resource you spend, not one you keep drawing on forever. The post treats it like the latter.
Very useful breakdown, thank you. I am wondering how this applies outside of the platforms mentioned, since Facebook and Google Plus are not always where my customers are, in Turkey many buyers are on WhatsApp groups and local forums instead. Does the traffic and community idea still hold if the channels are different, or does the model assume an American audience specifically?
The strongest case against Elif’s worry is that the model doesn’t actually depend on any specific platform, it depends on there being a place where the audience already gathers and trusts each other. If that’s a WhatsApp group instead of Twitter, the same three steps should map onto it. I’m not certain that’s right, but it’s the best argument I can build for the post as written.