First of all, if you’re reading this website you deserve a big THANK YOU. You’re serious about blogging and more importantly, you’re serious about writing, and that gives you a special place in my heart.

I LOVE writers, and I love you because you’re a writer. Don’t ever stop being a writer, no matter what anyone says. Keep writing, keep striving to improve, and one day you’ll have an audience that loves you too.

And what happens when an audience loves you?

The Money comes rolling in.

Earn over $100,000 Monthly

Matt Marshall took his passion for technology and started a blog called VentureBeat. It paid off because now it brings in around $50,000 – $100,000 per month.

Gina Trapani started a simple blog about making life easier. Her passion for life hacking was once a hobby, but now ‘Lifehacker’ nets in around $110,000 per month.

Collis Ta’eed had a passion for blogging and started Tutsplus to inform readers about software and design tools. It now brings in a healthy $55,000 – $120,000 per month.

Jake Dobkins started a blog about New York City. He worked as an amateur photographer and wrote stories about places to see. Now the Gothamist pulls in around $80,000 – $100,000 per month.

Vitaly Friedman started a blog highlighting web designs, and offered tips and advice to other designers.
Smashing Magazine now pulls in a fairly substantial $150,000 – $190,000 per month.

Perez Hilton started a gossip blog with a unique style that pokes fun at celebrities. He lives and breathes his blog, and pulls in an estimated $200,000 – $400.000 per month.

The beauty of blogging is anyone can do it.

Are you a stay at home parent? Retired? Bored of a 9 to 5? Do you want to earn thousands millions by doing something you love? If so, your dreams can come true.

This study will take you through the whole process of finding your niche, building your blog and attracting an audience that’ll bring in enough money to last a lifetime.

So make a coffee, sit back and enjoy learning how you too could earn $100,000 per month, simply by blogging.

Find Your Niche

Before you do anything, and I mean anything.

Before you register a domain, build a blog, write some content, before you do anything, you need to think very carefully about your niche.

Which Niche Am I?

This needs rephrasing:

What Do I Love?

That’s better. What are you good at? What do you know? What would you be happy to write about daily, weekly for the next 5,10,15 years?

If you can answer this question, you’ve found your niche.

Some Ideas To Get You Started

Lifestyle – This popular niche can easily bring in 100k+ per month if done well. Are you a parent? Do you enjoy life and living? Then you might want to start a lifestyle blog.

Fashion – We all wear clothes right? You’ll never be short of things to write about in the fashion world.

Entertainment – Who doesn’t like a gossip? Celebrities are the most searched for people on the planet, and entertainment will always have an audience.

Food – Food has massive place in the blogging world, and there’s lots of areas to explore.

Tech – Gadgets and technology are fascinating areas of interest, and provide an ever growing market for your blog to explore.

Travel – We all like travel, we all like learning about the places we’re travelling to. This profitable niche will give you plenty of ideas to blog about.

Profitable Niche Ideas

The main thing about any niche is to fill it with passion. Be your biggest fan. Absorb yourself in all there is to know about your niche. There’s literally hundreds to choose from and there’ll be something specifically for you.

More Ideas

• Health and Fitness.
• DIY and Home Improvement.
• Love and Relationships.
• Shopping.
• Cars.
• Books.
• Architecture.
• Music…

I could go on and on, but the point is to find something you ENJOY.

Get Specific

When you’ve found your niche, be it fashion, entertainment or food, then it’s a good idea to pick one specific area within your niche to become an authority on.

Say you’re a fashion blogger. You’re not going to be an authority on fashion. But you might be an authority on shoes. More specifically, you might be an authority on American designer shoes.

Plant your flag in the sand and be an expert in one specific area. You can use your authority as the lead content driver for your blog. Write about everything there is to know about American designer shoes and you’ll carve out a specific niche in that area. This’ll be a huge benefit when it comes to making money, which we’ll learn about later.

Setting Up Your Blog

Setting up your blog is the easiest part of blogging. There’s lots of platforms to choose from, and all are free, but there’s only one blog that counts (for me) and that’s WordPress.

WordPress is massively flexible, hugely supported, and more importantly SEO friendly.

You can head over to WordPress.com now and within minutes you’ll have a WordPress blog. But I don’t want you to have a WordPress blog, I want you to have your own blog, which uses WordPress. There’s a difference.

To have your own blog you need your own domain name. This can be anything (as long as it’s available) and you should pick a name that suits you best.

Ideally it’ll be memorable (the shorter the better) and descriptive about what you represent. Unless, like me, you’re using your own name, which you can if you like.

Ideally your domain will be memorable (the shorter the better) and descriptive about what you represent. Unless, like me, you’re using your own name.

This guide will show you how easy it is to register a domain, find hosting and install your blog. Have a read, setup your blog, and when you’re done come back and we’ll continue.

Style and Design

Welcome back! So you’ve set up your blog. What’s next?

Design

I can’t stress this enough. Take some time and make sure your blog looks professional. First impressions can make or break your blogging career, and if your blog looks amateur, people will see you as amateur, and that’s the last thing you need if you want to make money.

Themes

WordPress works by themes, and each theme offers a different design for your blog. There are plenty of nice looking free themes to use, but if you want to look professional you should either spends some cash and buy a theme, or get a theme professionally built.

Where To Get A Professional Theme

Theme Forest have thousands of themes to choose from, at a range of prices.
Elegant Themes have some great looking designs.
Template Monster has a nice selection of WordPress themes.

Don’t scrimp in this area and make sure your blog looks great before you show it to anyone. You only get one chance of a first impression, so don’t blow it.

Essential Tools

Okay so now you’re cooking. You’ve got your niche, you’ve setup your blog and you know exactly what you’re
blogging about. But before you start there’s a few more things you need in place.

Plugins

Plugins are tools that add functionality to your blog, and WordPress has thousands. You’ll have lots of fun trying out different plugins, but here’s some that are essential.

Google Analytics

To know who’s visiting your blog you need to have Google
Analtics installed. Anyone can create an account for free and it’s simple to set up.

Just go through the process of adding your website and it’ll give you some code you can add to your theme. You can either do this manually by going to the WordPress Dashboard and selecting Appearance/Editor then finding Footer (footer.php) and adding the Analytics code
before .

Or, if you’d rather use a plugin there’s one by Yoast that can add the code for you here.

Yoast SEO

Although WordPress is excellent for SEO out of the box, Yoast offers a free plugin called WordPress SEO that allows you to do lots of things to improve the SEO of your blog. This includes adding custom titles, meta-descriptions and noindexing pages, which we’ll talk more about later.

To install Yoast, simply go to Plugins/Add New in your WordPress Dashboard and do a search for WordPress SEO. You’ll see the plugin by Yoast, which you can install and
configure in minutes.

Contact Form 7

If you run a blog you’ll need a contact page, and the best plugin for contact forms is Contact Form 7. Simply go to Plugins/Add New, do a search for Contact Form 7 and install it. While you’re at it, install Really Simple Captcha, which is an anti spam plugin that stop spammers sending you emails.

Crafty Social Buttons

You also want your content to be shareable. To achieve this you want some fancy buttons that’ll allow people to click and share content. There’s many available, but the best in my opinion is Crafty Social Buttons. It’s easy to set up and configure and covers most social platforms.

Zero Spam

Zero Spam is a great plugin that cuts out all types of spam. Without this plugin I used to consistently get spam comments, but it lives up to its name, as since I installed it I’ve had Zero Spam.

There’s lots of plugins that’ll help your blogging career, but these are the bare minimum I’d call essential. You need these installed before you can think about….

Approach Your Content The Right Way

Okay, so now you have everything in place, you can start thinking about adding some content. But before you do, there’s some things you need to do.

To have a blog working in the best possible way you need to approach it the right way. This means thinking carefully about every single post you write.

Every post on your website should serve your visitor. You need to write what they want need to read.

How do you find out what they need to read? There’s lots of ways, including:

Forums

Joins some forums and study what people are talking about. Forums are great for getting ideas for content because people go to a forums to ask for advice. Lurk around a few threads and see what people are talking about. Jot them down in a notepad, and save them for ideas to blog about.

Social Media

Head over to Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ and listen to what people are talking about. Specifically look out for questions, and find out what people need to know about your niche. Jot them down and add them to your list of ideas.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most comprehensive way of finding out what people are searching for on Google. There’s an in-depth tutorial on my website here, and we’ll learn more about it later.

Research some of the topics and questions you’ve gained from studying forums and social media, and run them through some keyword research. When you’ve got some posts outlined, the next thing you need to think about is how you’re going to write them.

Finding Your Voice

So now your blog is setup correctly, you have your niche and you know what your blogging about. But before you start writing you need to think about one more thing. Your voice.

Just about the most important thing in blogging is to find your voice, and is often overlooked in blogging tutorials.

Just like creative writing it’s your voice that stands out the most. Your voice is the only thing that makes you unique. If you have a unique voice in your writing style, you could write about subjects that have been covered a thousand times, and it’ll still seem fresh.

Before you put pen to paper, or keyboard to screen, think about the style you want to write in.

Do you want to be fun and casual? Serious and factual? Crazy and offbeat?

Whatever style you pick you need to be consistent and only write in that style from now on. Cultivate your voice, and think about what’s unique to you. Some people like cranky metaphors. Others like factual comparisons and compare statistically proven facts.

If you’ve honed your voice enough then people will know your style before they even see your name. Try it out, practise, have fun with it, but make it different.

When you’ve got a handle on how you’re going to write, you can start thinking about adding some advanced copywriting skills into your writing.

Copywriting Techniques

So you’ve found your voice, but how are you going to use it?

Copywriting is not just for adverts and sales, it’s a scientific method designed to get people to pay attention.

Getting people to pay attention is an essential skill when it comes to writing articles.

There’s a lot that goes into copywriting and it’s not just a form of writing, but a highly skilled job.

But, you don’t need to be an expert, you just need to know some basic
fundamentals.

Know Who You’re Writing For

You’ve done a lot of thinking about your niche and should have a great idea of what you’re going to write. But it’s worth taking some time to think about who you’re writing for. Who is your ideal reader?

Professional copywriters do serious amounts of research at this point, right down to what their annual salary is, how many pets they have etc. You don’t need to do all that, but you should have a picture of what your ideal reader looks like. Is it a man or a woman? Are they a business owner? Do they like going out, if so where to? The cinema or the theatre? Spend some time thinking about this, and you’ll be surprised how it can affect your content.

For example: Say you’re a food blogger and your target audience is a female, aged around 30, with 2 small kids. You might want to include healthy recipes, and ideas to get kids to eat healthy food. Your reader probably has her hands full, so you might want to include recipes that are simple and quick to make.

See how it can affect your content?

Write With Persuasion

Another form of copywriting that’ll come in handy when writing content is persuasion techniques.

Ultimately, if you want to make money you’re going to need to persuade your readers to do things. Whether it’s sign up to a newsletter, buy a product, or take part in a survey, it’s all persuasion.

A large part of copywriting is the art of persuasion, so it’s worth bearing in mind when you’re writing your articles.

Persuasion Techniques

Write directly to your reader by using words such as ‘you’’, ‘we’ and ‘our’. This develops a level of trust between you and the reader, and makes for a more intimate experience.

Repeat words or phrases that ‘stick’ in your readers mind. For example: Remember what it was like at school? Remember how difficult it was to be yourself? Remember the time when… etc. This is great for when you want to focus your readers attention and make a specific, important point.

Empathise with your reader and understand how they feel. This can only be used if you’ve really thought about your reader. But if you have a good picture of them, you can imagine what it’s like in their shoes. Building empathy is a great way to build a connection with your reader, and if done well, they’ll love you for it.

Of course there’s much more to effective copywriting, but even these techniques can give you a better understanding of how to approach your content. With all this in mind you should be set to write some fantastic articles that’ll resonate with your readers.

What do you need to do then?

SEO Your Content

You’re almost ready to write your first post, but before you do there’s one last thing you should know, and that’s how search engine optimisation works.

There’s lots of ways to get your content read, but the best method for the long term is by using SEO, so your posts will get found on Google.

How Google Works

To understand SEO you need to understand how Google works.

Google has a tracker called a ‘bot’ that goes from website to website, all around the world, working out what web pages are about.

It puts all the pages into a database and when someone searches for a particular keyword, it delivers the most relevant results.

How Does Google Know The Most Relevant Results?

It starts by reading the page itself. So for example say you search for: ‘Nicky Minaj’s Fashion Designer’. This is known as a keyword phrase.

Google finds all the pages that include the keyword phrase and delivers them in the search results.

Now there might be a million pages that contain the phrase ‘Nicky Minaj’s Fashion Designer’, so it puts them in order of most relevant first, and this is where ‘on page SEO’ comes in.

If you know a few simple SEO tricks you can make your page more relevant, and give it a much higher chance or being served up in the results.

On Page SEO

The first thing Google looks at to decide which web pages to display for the search ‘Niky Minaj’s Dress Designer’ is the text on the pages themselves.

It looks at which pages are the most relevant to the search. If you write a post about Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer, you would think your page is already relevant. But you need to know what Google looks for on the page, and this is where we use our on page SEO techniques.

Making Your Page Relevant

Google starts by looking at the top of your page and working its way down. So it looks at:

Title:
Description:
Headings:
Content:
Images:
URL:

So to make your page the most relevant for your keyword phrase, it needs to be in all these areas. For example:

Title: Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Description: A page about Nicky Minaj’s dress designer.
Headings: Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Content: Content that includes the phrase Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Images: Images that contain ALT tags saying Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
URL: yourdomain.com/nicky-minajs-dress-designer

Having all this in place will make your page the most relevant it can be for the phrase: Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer. But beware!

On Page Penalties

Google’s been in the search business long enough to know that people will ‘stuff’ their keyword phrase everywhere they can. So if they think you’re gaming the system they’ll punish you for it.

Panda

In 2011 Google introduced an algorithm that looks for people cheating, and they called it the Panda.

Panda looks for websites trying to game the system by adding too many keywords, having low quality pages and generally trying to get an unfair advantage.

The Panda algorithm is all about site quality, and Google has human quality raters to help them determine the difference between high and low quality.

So What Should You Do?

Always write for your audience first. But keep in mind what Google wants. It makes it more complicated, but it’s worth spending some extra time to please both your audience, and Google. First you want a potential reader to click your link, and secondly you want Google to see your page as the most relevant for that phrase.

So This is How I Would Do It

Title: 10 Secrets About Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Description: How Nickly Minaj’s dress designer dreams up her amazing creations.
Headings: The Wacky World of Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Content: Enjoyable content that includes the phrase Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer
Images: One images that contain an ALT tag saying Nicky Minaj’s Dress Designer. All other image ALT tags to be different.
URL: yourdomain.com/nicky-minajs-dress-designer

See how I’ve made each item different, and targeted them towards the reader, and I’ve included our keyword phrase?

It isn’t rocket science, and I’ll be adding more SEO tricks on my blog.

Get Readers For Your Blog

So by now you should have an awesome new blog. You have amazing content, directed towards information that people are looking for. You’ve used SEO to

enhance your chances of getting found on Google. But how do you get readers, right away?

There’s multiple ways to get readers, and you should use each one to maximum effect. We’ve already covered some SEO, so Google will start ranking your posts, but that’s going to take some time.

You want readers now right?

Do You Post or Promote?

To Promote

Some bloggers say they spend 20% of their time writing posts, and 80% promoting them. This is solid advice and lots of successful bloggers follow this rule. BUT, your blog is new. I would advise spending more time writing content, to begin with. This way when you do start promoting your posts, there’ll be lots of meat for readers to get their teeth into.

To Post

Other thoughts, which I tend to agree with state that to begin with you should be a content machine. One case study showed that by posting 50 posts in 25 days it increased their visitors by 438%. Another study shows that once you accumulate 51 posts your traffic increases by 53%, then goes up a further 3 times after 100 posts, and 4.5 times after 200 posts. By posting quickly you’ll get more traffic and have a bigger site to impress readers with.

The posts need to be top quality remember. This means minimum 1000 words, but ideally more. Write them and share them on all social platforms, but leave the serious promoting until later.

Then you can move on to the next stage, which is…

Social, Social, Social

Look At You Now!

Wow, you’re awesome at this point! You’re blog is amazing and filled with rich, enticing content. Readers are itching to discover you, so what do you do?

Go into social overdrive.

This is where you can implement the 80/20 rule we discussed earlier. You can write a post on Monday morning, promote it Tuesday Wednesday, write another Wednesday afternoon and promote it Thursday, Friday, and take the weekend off!

You should have lots to discuss on social platforms and build as many friends as you can. Use all platforms, but stick to one or two ‘pile drivers’. These are the platforms where you’ll spend most of your time. It might be Facebook and Twitter, it might be Pinterest and Instagram, but whatever it is you need to be seen and heard regularly.

Platforms That Drive Traffic

Which platforms you use most depends on your niche. There’s lots to choose from and if you use them well, you’ll get you a ton of readers for your blog.

Here’s some of the best.

Facebook

Facebook is a universal platform that’s great for all niches. At the time of writing there’s 1.49 billion active users on Facebook, and no doubt this is higher now. With that many people there’s niches enough for everyone. Search out groups that are relevant to your niche. Get involved, make friends, offer advice and promote your blog.

Twitter

Twitter is another phenomenon with 316 million active users. Follow and engage with people in your niche. Advice, chat, make jokes, and share your content.

Pinterest

There are 100 million users on Pinterest, and if you have images to share then it’s a great way to drive traffic. This is especially effective for food, fashion, and design related blogs. Get involved, Pin people’s images and Pin your own. Use it daily in sporadic bursts for maximum effect.

Instagram

With 300 million active users Instagram is a giant, and great for image based blogs such as food, fashion and entertainment. Get involved, follow others in your niche and get sharing.

LinkedIn

With 380 million users LinkedIn is great for business blogs. Make connections, share content, join groups and get involved.

This is just a handful of platforms you can use to promote your content. Pick two wisely and spend the bulk of your time on those, but use all platforms where possible.

Check out my blog for more social media tips, but this will give you a great starting point.

Finding Influencers

So now you’re cooking eh? You’re making friends, you’re getting content shared and picking up traffic. Hopefully by now people are commenting on your posts and getting involved. So where do you go from here?

The Next Level

To take your blog to the next level you need to find influencers within your niche and cultivate some relationships.

An influencer is someone with a huge following in your niche. If you can get them to notice you, and start sharing your content, your blog will go into the stratosphere.

How To Find Influencers

There’s lots of ways to find influencers in your niche. You should create a list and work out who are the best to interact with. When you have 3 or 4 of your top influencers then you can follow them, engage with what they say, and politely share your content.

Klout is a website that finds influencers and gives them a Klout Score based on their social media presence.

Buzzsumo orders content by social shares. You can click on Sharers and see who’s been sharing. Take a look at their reach, and it might be worth connecting.

Topsy uses Twitter to find influencers, and even has an option to filter by influencer. Make a note of the top influencers.

Other Ways To Find Influencers

You can find more influencers by simply doing a Google search for your keywords, and see who ranks the highest. Have a look at their content, see who writes for them and how many shares they get.

The same applies to social media. If you’re active on social media you should be able to see who’s popular in your niche. Make friends, share their content, make thoughtful comments. Hopefully they’ll notice you, and share your content.

If they do share your content, then you’ll have a reach far beyond what you can expect on your own. You can then take this a stage further and start looking at…

Guest Blogging

Be A ‘Guest’ Expert

Blogging for other websites can increase your reach even further. Find out the big players in your niche and read their blogs. Work out what they post about and what you can offer that’s different and unique to you. Then write a fabulous post, give it a killer headline and pitch it to them.

By now you’ll know that writing fresh, regular content can be exhaustive. This goes for all blogs. There are blogs that would love you to take some weight off their shoulders by providing fresh content that their readers will love. Use this to your advantage.

Research thoroughly and only pitch to blogs that have a huge, relevant following, and are trusted by Google.

TIP: You can find out a blogs Trust Flow by adding their URL into Majestic SEO.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

• A whole new audience to discover you.
• New shares on social media, further increasing your reach.
• A link back to your website.
• Credibility and being recognized as an authority in your niche.

Become an Authority

If you’ve been putting into practise everything discussed in the book, by now you should be on your way to becoming an authority in your niche.

If you have informative articles, posted on major websites within your niche via guest blogging, then people will start to view you as an authority. Couple this with your own blog, filled with amazing content, your presence on Google and your social media
following, you’re now starting to look like a powerhouse.

If you’ve followed this advice correctly you’ll have picked one specific area in your niche to be an expert at. The example I used was American designer shoes. If you did this then it’s at this stage you’ll be recognised as a specific authority on American designer shoes.

You’ll be known and respected for your comments and opinions on fashion, but when it comes to American designer shoes, you’d be the ‘go to’ resource.

People will want to interview you and ask opinions on the latest American designer shoes. You’ll be sent free samples to review. Further down the line you’ll almost have the power to make or break a start-up company.

This is what authority is all about. Then you can really look at…

Monetize Your Blog

Money Time!

The Promised Land is here guys, and it’s green and pleasant. It’s taken a while, but we made it! Some have made it in a year, others 5 or more, but when you’re here your life will never be the same again.

You can literally turn on the tap and the cash comes pouring in. But where does it come from?

Adsense

Adsense is Google’s advertising platform and can be setup within minutes to start monetizing your blog. Well, not exactly minutes. First you need to verify your address and bank account, but when you’ve done that you can place adverts around your blog and start earning money instantly. There’s opportunities out there to make more money than Adsense, but it’s an easy way to start.

Banner Advertising

The real money to be made online is via banner advertising. This is where companies pay directly to advertise on your blog. I’ve personally worked in niches where we’ve generated £15,000 (approx $28,000) per month through banner advertising, and that’s on traffic of 50,000 per month. If you’ve followed this study and built a huge following you should be much more than that.

Think about it. You have a fashion blog. Thousands, if not millions of visitors come to your blog every day to check out the latest fashion news. How much is that worth to an advertiser like Vogue or Debenhams?

I F*cking Love Science

Have you heard of the Facebook page I F*cking Love Science? It was started in 2012 by Elise Andrew. Roll forward 3 years and her page has over 22 million Likes. That’s an impressive stat for 3 years on Facebook, but not as impressive at the $30 million she was offered to sell her page for. And she turned it down!

The point is when you’ve built up a large audience you can pretty much print your own money. $100,000 per month is easily achievable if you write with passion, write consistently, and promote your blog in the right way. If you follow everything in this book you’ll get there too. It does take time. Some say it takes 2 years for your traffic to take its first massive leap. Maybe it’ll take 3 years, maybe 4 or 5. But if you stick at it you’ll be set for life, and 5 years doesn’t seem too long a time when you look at your whole life.

Remember, the only way is up.