I’ve had this question asked of me quite a few times and in all honesty, I think I’ve given different answers each time.
The trouble is blogging and the online world change so much that it is hard to give a consistent answer to what the fastest way to make money blogging is.
I decided a while back to try and come up with a framework that would be evergreen, simple and would almost guarantee success.
The almost part is not because of the framework, but because of the unknown element: the person in charge of bringing about that success.
The real answer to ‘What is the fastest way to make money blogging?’ is very simple.
If you are committed, consistent and focused then you will find success coming to you readily.
The framework is simply a way of showing your focus where to be.
Oh, and I did come up with that framework of course! I’ll take you through it right now.
The Fast, Robust Framework for Making Money Blogging
I’ve added ‘robust’ in there because it’s a nice word to describe the fact that this isn’t a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants strategy that could fall apart at the drop of a Pinterest administrators hat.
This is a framework that gets results quickly but lays the foundations for those results to keep coming.
Blog Blast is all about fast results in blogging though, so we always look at the short and medium-term future. The aim is to build an income quickly and robustly, automate it and then move on to the next one if you want.
Why Blogging?
Firstly, I want to explain why it’s making money ‘blogging’ and not just generally making money ‘online’.
Blogging is so much more accessible to anyone than the idea of starting an online business. That’s not to say that there is actually any difference in difficulty, in fact a blog that makes money is an online business. But if I asked you which would you rather do, you’d probably say ‘blogging’.
So, I call it blogging because it’s a far easier concept to grasp than making people think they are starting a complex business.
The fact that they are building an online business creeps up on them unexpectedly until it just becomes what they are doing.
Where Do I Start?
This is always the biggest stumbling block. How do you start blogging the right way to make sure you succeed?
It all starts by making the single biggest decision in the whole process:
What is your niche going to be?
But just because it’s the biggest decision you will make, doesn’t mean it has to be difficult.
You have to do your due diligence. You have to make sure of two things:
- You will enjoy working in this niche for the duration of the project.
- The niche will make you money for the duration of the project.
Finding a niche can be an in-depth process or it can be quick. It depends on whether your priority is to get to the money stage quickly or to create a business for the long-term.
On point 1. above, I specifically say ‘for the duration of the project’.
Let’s be honest with each other. Do you just want to start making money with a blog ASAP?
The fast way to find a niche, that I’ve used for several projects, is this:
- Sit down and answer these five questions:
- What are you really, really, really good at?
- What do you really, really, really love to do?
- What do you really, really, really want to learn about?
- What do people always, always, always ask you for help with?
- What or who do you really, really, really care about?
- Check out this list of most profitable niches, look at each one in turn and see if it fits with any of your answers above. Try to come up with a few ideas in each area.
- Fitness and Weight Loss.
- Health.
- Dating and Relationships.
- Pets.
- Self-Improvement.
- Wealth-Building.
- Make Money Online.
- Beauty.
- Gadgets and Technology.
- Personal Finance.
- Check feasibility by doing the following:
- Go to Google Trends and enter your idea into the search box. Compare it with ‘beekeeping’ which Ryan Levesque found to be a sweet spot for a good niche in his book “Choose”.
- Search on Google for “best [your idea] blogs” and see how well other people are doing with it.
- Try to think of at least 50 ideas you could write about around this topic. If you can’t do that then you don’t have much to work with.
Sometimes, this simple process is all you need to do to get started. If you like your idea and it is possible to make money from it then you can run with it for now.
Further down the line, you will be able to change direction or start something new. But you’ve made a start, you’ve learned the skills to be successful and you’ve proved to yourself you can do it by then, so it will be a lot easier.
Building Out Your Idea
Now you know what your blog is going to be about, you can start growing it.
Start with some research. You already did a bit of that earlier to check what other people are doing, but go further.
- Find your platform. What social media platform is most suitable for what you want to do? What platform is already popular for your niche? This platform is most likely where you will find your competition and allies.
- Find your competition. These are the people doing almost exactly what you want to do. Gather them together in a spreadsheet with links to website, social media, emails. Note down what is good about them and what you can do better.
- Find your allies. These are people doing something similar to what you want to do, but not in direct competition. These people will be very useful to help promote your brand if you treat them well!
- Find your keywords. There are three types of keywords you need to find to help you grow quickly in your niche:
- Pinterest Keywords – Terms that are popular on Pinterest.
- Hub Keywords – Terms that are popular on Google.
- ‘Keyword Golden Ratio’ or KGR Keywords – Terms that your competition is not writing about, but that you can dominate to build trust with Google.
- Find offer ideas. What is your competition offering as services, digital products, physical products? Start generating ideas for what you can offer to your audience when they start coming to you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just think about how you can be a better option than the others.
Once you have all this research done, you can start planning content to write posts or create videos.
Use your competition as inspiration for content. You don’t have to be completely original, you just can’t copy them!
Use the keywords you have found as a starting point for structuring a piece of content.
But don’t simply rely on what’s out there already. If you have good ideas on your niche that nobody is talking about, write about them too. But initially, you also want to write about the popular topics so that you can gain traction in areas you know that there is an audience for.
Create Your Brand
From the beginning, treat your blog as a business. This is going to be an income for you and, as such, is a business venture.
A business needs a brand to maintain consistency, present a clear message about what it does and to draw people in by the way it looks and feels.
But creating a brand doesn’t need to be difficult. I hope you’ve realised by now that I like to find simple, but effective ways to achieve what you need to do.
Start by creating your brand message.
Brand Message
Your message is simply why you are the person to help your audience with whatever it is they need.
What is the major problem or need that you are attempting to solve or provide in your niche?
For example, on my houseplant blog: House Planty, I help beginner indoor gardeners care for their plants in a simple, effective, science-based way.
What do you want to help your audience with?
Brand Colours
Once you have this message sorted, you can start thinking about how your brand looks. This is where you can use your competition as inspiration. What sort of colours are prevalent in your niche already?
Us some of these, but then add in something complimentary that stands out against the others. After all, that is exactly what you want to do with everything about your brand.
Use Coolors.com to find colour schemes that work well together.
Brand Name
What are you going to call your business? This doesn’t need to be as complicated as you might think.
Gather together a selection of words that relate to your niche. Then use one of these two methods to generate ideas:
- Use your own brilliant brain to mix and match, add in power words, play with your imagination.
- Go to Business Name Generator and enter some fo your niche words to come up with ideas.
Perhaps a mix of the two will be your best bet!
The key here is to not spend too long on it. Your business name is not going to make or break you, just find something you are happy with and pass it by one or two other people.
Is House Planty the best name I could have come up with for my houseplant blog? Hell no, but it’s not going to be the reason I succeed with that brand, it’s just a label.
The only other thing to keep in mind as you come up with a brand name is that it is available as a ‘.com’ domain and that you can claim the accounts on your main social media platforms.
Brand Logo
Next on the list is a logo. This will be handy to have so that you can set up social media profiles, forum profiles and more with a consistent visual brand.
The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool: Canva.com.
- Sign up for an account and log-in.
- Click ‘Create a Design’ and select ‘Logo’.
- Scroll through their templates to see if anything good exists that you can turn into your own logo (you can search for terms related to your niche).
- Alternatively, use the ‘Elements’ option on the left-hand menu to find illustrations to use in a logo by searching for terms related to your niche.
If you’re really stuck, head over to fiverr.com and get someone to create a logo for you cheaply.
Set Up Your Business Hub
This is the part that nobody looks forward to, even I find it pretty dull.
Setting up a website doesn’t have to be complicated though.
You need two things:
- A domain.
- A hosting company to give your domain a home.
The easiest thing to do is to get both of these things in one place. You might have seen a lot of people recommending Bluehost in the blogging world. There’s nothing really wrong with them, but they’re not the best option when it comes to service. Siteground is a company that is much better on the support side.
Bluehost are cheaper though, so it’s up to you which you go for.
- Bluehost for low cost, decent domains and web hosting.
- SiteGround for slightly more expensive, but well-serviced domains and web hosting.
For Bluehost, check out this video to take you step-by-step through getting set up.
Here is the equivalent video for SiteGround.
That’s all you need to do to create a website. Make a choice. Follow a video.
After that, you can start making your website look a bit better, but I have a nice, easy guide for that coming up.
Now you have a business hub, you can create your distribution points, your social media profiles.
Start with your main platform, found earlier, ad well as a Pinterest account.
Just get them set up and then you can busy yourself with about what to do with them later.
But first, let’s get creative!
Start Creating
Once you have your business hub – your website, it’s time to start creating content.
Use that list of content ideas you created earlier to start writing posts for your site.
The key to getting started is to…. just start. You’re not going to be great right from the beginning, but you will be eventually. That comes with practice.
Just believe in yourself that you can become a good writer and get into a routine of writing every day.
Keep hold of that belief, keep hold of that routine and you will get good. There are no two ways about it. I’ve seen tons of people make that transformation every time.
To help you out, make sure you invest in your development with some of the best bogging books for beginners. There are three ‘writing’ books among these as well as recommendations to help with creativity, standing out, marketing and more.
You don’t have to create a post every day, but if you can work towards the goal of doing this then it will speed everything up.
The sooner you create a library of content based around your three main keyword areas: Pinterest, Google and KGR, the sooner you will start generating traffic from these sources.
The best content strategy to use is the ‘hub and spoke’ method. Within your niche, there will be key ‘hub’ topics categories. Underneath these hub topics will be clusters of smaller topics to write about. These are the spokes.
Stick to one hub at a time and complete it thoroughly, then move onto the next. Each hub should have a main piece of content that links to all the spokes pieces of content.
This post is a hub piece that, as you will have seen, links to lots of other pieces of content within this ‘blogging’ hub.
Promoting Your Brand
You can’t just create content and let the wind distribute it to the world, you have to actively push it out there.
Earlier, you found your main platform that your audience hangs out on most of the time. Start with that, master that and then move on to build up your presence on another platform.
All you need to do to begin with is talk about your niche. Provide lots of really useful or entertaining information for your audience, even if it’s only your friends that are seeing it to begin with.
Every now and then, throw in a link to a piece of content you’ve created, with a little intro to the topic.
At the start, it’s just about growing a presence gently.
Use your allies to help promote you by offering to do the same for them. This is why you chose people that are similar to you, but not in direct competition. It makes it a no-brainer for people to help you and for you to help other people.
At the same time, begin creating pins for your account on Pinterest. This is quite an easy process if you go back to your Canva account and click ‘Create a Design’ then select ‘Pinterest’.
There are loads of great Pinterest pin templates you can use in there. Start with them, making a few adjustments to fit into your brand. You can get more creative later.
Plan Your Offers
This is where I differ from a lot of other bloggers.
Actually, I differ in MANY ways to other bloggers, but that’s another story!
If you want to get to a point where you are making truly good money from your blog, you need to be offering something of valuable.
It’s in your best interest to start early with this. Then you can refine, test and experiment.
You did some research earlier on to determine what your competitors are offering and what you can do. Now it’s time to make a proper plan.
Start with something small. What can you create that will be really useful in a small way to your audience? What would they pay just $5 for?
Think of things like:
- Planners.
- Templates.
- A cheat sheet guide.
If you can create something of value at this scale, then creating something bigger is simply a matter of increasing the impact of the outcome you offer. Think of it in small steps. You can start with the small offer at around $7. Then something that is worth $17, then something that is worth $47, then something that is worth $97. And so on.
Don’t think ‘why would somebody spend this much on something’. Instead, think ‘what can I create that someone would spend this much on?’.
If you offered a complete course to take someone from beginner to expert on a topic in your niche, what would that be worth to your audience?
For now, start with the small stuff, but always keep in mind that increase in scale. What are you working towards?
Offers don’t always have to cost your audience money though. As a business, you want to start attracting repeat customers as a priority. If you can offer your audience something valuable for free, in exchange for their email address, then you immediately have direct access to their inbox to build a strong relationship with them.
In future, this will be the method you use to make the majority of your money from your blog.
Adding a way of capturing their email address for a freebie to your website is a simple task.
I use Convertkit for this which you can use for free initially until you need more complicated email marketing functions.
Monetising Your Blog From The Start
Creating offers is a sound basis for making money from your blog, but it’s not the only way you can make money right from the start.
A lot of what you talk about, the content you make, the recommendations you offer will provide you with the opportunity to send your audience to other people’s products and offers.
If you do this, you can often make a commission on anything that your audience buys from other people.
This is known as affiliate marketing and it gives you a great way to start making money on your blog without having to build a huge amount of traffic or create any of your own offers right away.
The key to doing this successfully is to create content that really helps your audience and if there are products that you can recommend naturally within this then do that.
The easiest way to find these products is to search on Google for: ‘[product/company/service] + affiliate program’.
Summary
This is an overview of the framework I’ve used for my own blog projects as well as helped other people build an income through blogging.
There are obviously a few details that need to be covered in more depth and you will find a lot of it on this site.
If you want a thorough, step-by-step, easy to understand guide to get you earning money from a blog super-fast then I offer exactly this as an online course. It’s called the Beginners Blog Blaster and it has been developed to be an evergreen method to make money from blogging.
I am constantly testing and implementing my own methods, which means I know they work. Within the Beginners Blog Blaster I use my own projects to show you exactly how I’ve done things in real time.
If you want the fastest way to make money blogging, this is it.
Hit me up with any questions or even stories of your own blogging journey in the comments. Be great to hear from you!