How to make a blog on BlogSpot and make money
I will go on a limb here but the odds are that you started blogging because you heard somewhere its an easy way to make money.
Start a blog. Get some traffic. Slap some ads. And voila you will be sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere. Not so fast.
The truth? Making money from a blog is an ordeal in most cases. I have been a blogger for nearly 9 years and speaking from experience blogging isn’t an easy way to make money.
That said it can be done.
If you are starting out Google’s free platform Blogger or Blogspot could be the right choice for you.
However, there are also disadvantages to blogging on Blogspot. Primarily, a BlogSpot blog means you look unprofessional. No one takes you seriously if you can’t invest in a domain and hosting. That’s one.
Also being on the Blogspot platform is also severely limiting. To which I will arrive later. If you want to be taken seriously by some of the better ad networks other than Adsense you need a domain and self-hosted blog.
Big ad networks like Mediavine or Adthrive may not approve your site if you are on a free platform. That said, being an online publishing space, Blogspot is akin to any other platform. There’s no reason why you can’t be successful with a free BlogSpot blog. And if anyone tells you that success comes only riding on a self-hosted blog, they only probably want to make some affiliate commissions selling you hosting.
As long as you’re steady putting out great content you’re off to a great start and making great money. The same guys who ask you to go to self-hosted blogs won’t tell you that having a blog on WordPress.org with a host is no guarantee that you will pull it off. The ingredient list is the same anywhere: a blog, consistent publishing and a knack at acquiring backlinks.
Since that’s settled let’s move to other things.
Creating a blog on BlogSpot is often lit with multiple questions and it’s something you need to know before starting your blog.
How to start a free blog on BlogSpot platform?
With the blogger platform creating a blog is definitely easy.
Here’s what to do
Step 1: Sign up for Blogger.com
Go to Blogger.com and then sign up.
To sign up you also need a free Gmail account.
Once you are logged in and inside Blogger click on the New blog button to get started.
Choose a name for your blog
See a title that fits your blog and name your blog in that manner. Next, add a short and sweet domain name to start your blog. Odds are” it’s already taken. No worries, choose another similar name or use a domain name generator tool to give you ideas.
Next once that’s done choose a template. You can also choose other templates and customize the blog as you wish.
This manner you will be able to create a blog spot blog. It takes a minute or so and not longer.
Here are the next steps after that.
Begin by creating new blog posts
Click on the button create new post on left side to start a new article. Enter the desired title and start by writing content around what you want. You can also write this is me or who am I blog post. In addition, you may want to create pages like Contact us and about us as well.
Set up Google AdSense
Immediately after writing your first blog post you shouldn’t go and apply to AdSense. Why?
Because you are most likely to get rejected on your application.
Once your free Blogspot blog starts attracting traffic and reaches at least 9-00 0 unique visitors a month that’s the time to apply for Adsense.
What are the next money earning steps on Blogspot blog?
Adsense income is directly proportional to the number of visitors you’re able to generate each month with your blog. Once the traffic goes high income skyrockets.
It’s also hard. Because you need a lot of traffic and its very difficult to handle the other SEO processes like link building and on-page seo when you are just getting started. Such effective SEO techniques only help you get more traffic.
So even if you want to earn with the AdSense the number 1 recommendation is to start creating more and more SEO friendly content on the get-go.
- Focus on internal linking. When you create new content don’t forget to link out to older blog posts you wrote before. This increases link juice flowing around and helps pass this on. This aids more visibility to your blog.
- The meta titles and meta tags should be within permissible limits if you want them to show up. The headlines should succinctly explain what the post is about.
- The first priority is readers and then second search engines. And the two are becoming one.
Can you run AdSense ads on BlogSpot blogs?
I have to tell you this: a successful blog doesn’t mean you need to be able to run ads. The truth is some bloggers call it a revelation being banned out of Adsense.
The reason being—ads are typically low income. They bring you the least possible return. No one’s running ads on your site because they like. They do it because they are able to convert those clicks from your site into more fruitful ventures, say get leads and sell them high-end courses, or run an affiliate program where they bask in commissions. The very notion that someone can run ads on your site and is profitable implies that you can do better than them.
There are several different ways to monetize a BlogSpot blog. However, the blogger platform being owned by Google is more receptive to being accepted at Adsense and one of the first few options that seem relevant.
That’s the reason I’m going to start with that. Also, note that you need a mind-boggling number of visitors per month to be able to earn $10000 a month with Adsense alone. That is perhaps around 1`5 to 20000 visitors a day. That translates to atleast 450000 visitors monthly.
According to a blog income report, bloggers making between $2000 to 7000 dollars earn 33% of their income from ads.
Again that is a misnomer because the entire amount isn’t from AdSense. In fact, Adsense makes up only a small part of the ads’ revenue. They use other networks like Mediavine.
It’s a bit difficult to be accepted by Adthrive. They are known to be picky and since their entire inventory consists of people who pay for ads on food blogs or parenting blogs, they only tend to pick bloggers from those niches. For you to be approved on Adthrive you need 100,000 pageviews a month.
Mediavine
25,000 monthly sessions
Most bloggers who apply to Adthrive won’t get in. That’s the truth. Instead, apply to Mediavine which only requires 25000 monthly pageviews. They are a better network than AdSense.
The report also shows that the vast majority of bloggers earn less than $25000 a month from their blogs. Only 12% of bloggers make more than $25000 out of their blogs consistently.
Also, again if you’re trying to build a brand, a site cluttered with ads removes the focus from the brand. So it generates a bad user experience. Also, there are more avenues. That said if you want more ad revenue here’s what you can do.
Focus on upping Ads revenue
Once you have been approved for Google Adsense the next logical step is to get high earnings from the same. Ideally you’d want to maximize the earnings you score from AdSense, Adthrive or mediavine.
When placing ads the steps are to maximize the ctr and the number of people who view the blog.
What are the other available options to make money off your BlogSpot blog?
Tons.
Truly.
But it might take a few years of consistent blogging to get truly eye-popping numbers.
Michelle Gardner, behind Making sense of cents gets $126.000 per month with her blog.
A big part of that income is from the services she offers. She offers services like blog maintenance and content posting to other bloggers and business owners.
Most people fail at blogging because they are not able to devote time day after day to run their blogs. In fact 59% of bloggers throw in the towel after running a blog for a few months.
So there’s a secret behind people who make it and those that don’t. What? Consistency.
Brands that publish 16 or more articles a month see 3.5x as much traffic compared to peers that just publish around 4 articles a month.
The posting frequency also gets you more number of leads.
Two, what should be the length of the blog posts. The blog post length should be at least above 1100 words and ideally around 1800 words. Most blog posts at the top serps regularly are longer.
Write sponsored reviews on the blog
You can get more money on your blog by connecting with like-minded companies who are eager to pay you for sponsored reviews about their product on your site.
- Write an article that includes a link back to their site.
- Write about a specific they sell in an in-depth manner.
Lou martin on her mom blog gets around $400 to $500 for a review.
This is something that makes up her full-time income.
When the audience grows you become a hub of people who are receptive to what you are selling and talking about and without advertising not being all that effective one way to turn up the volume is by targeting an already engaged audience.
Her audience is so big that brands like Disney and Nickelodeon want her blog.
Affiliate marketing
In a poll, it was seen that annual affiliate revenue ranges from $2000 to 2 million dollars or more.
Based on the industry you’re in, what you do and what the audience is you’re going to get paid more.
- Industry – Vitamin shoppe pay one time 9% commission which seems tiny compared to the huge recurring 40 percent commission that Semrush gives. It’s also way harder to sell semrush subscriptions too.
- Lower priced products have higher commission rates. Higher priced have a lower commission. For digital products you might get up to 80 percent commission.
The numbers tend to vary. By blogging about WordPress tools and tips you can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. You can make north of 10000 to 10000 a month. Ryan Robinson too does the same and he primarily sells hosting.
Sell courses online
Almost all the bloggers top of their income have one or the other course that makes them recurring revenue. Some of them have membership programs as well. These programs help you scale a lot.
Once the course is done and uploaded there’s no more work to be done. Just get better with marketing the product and you will make more and more.
Michelle Gardner gets 63% of her blog income from her course that her affiliates sell. She regularly makes 100k or more blogging.
The inventory is unlimited as its a digital download. There are no problems with supply. You only need to pull in enough people. Just create a downloadable guide and you can write that from experience on how you started a blog and became successful with the same.
It doesn’t matter what the industry is. There will always be students.
Sell services
Only a few bloggers at the top of the game really sell services. Because they don’t see it as scalable I guess. But when you are starting out there’s definitely a way for you to make money selling services. I write about WordPress and can attract like-minded people who need services around WordPress.
Probably help with a design element or help to install WordPress itself. John Chow still offers his free WordPress installation service if you purchase hosting through his link. And for my first blog, I chose that because I didn’t know how to install WordPress. Back then I used to blog on Blogspot.
Based on the niche of your BlogSpot blog you can choose one form of monetization over the other.
Marketing blogs
Marketing blogs tend to run joint ventures with other partners and sell courses at high price points. Courses can cost around $3000 or more. It’s easy to create joint venture courses and promote them on each others’ email lists and make money. You can get 30 to 50 percent with this.
Finance blogs
They tend to make a lot of their money from survey sites and partnering as an affiliate with paid to do and paid to click sites.
Food and health blogs
For these blogs, the majority of what they earn tend to come from advertising networks since they have high RPM. AdThrive serves its ads to 96 million unique visitors a month. And at least half that is 49 million of these visitors are from food blogs. They have many food blogs and that’s the reason for higher competition for food bloggers to get into the network.
The competition increases for ad placements which improves their RPMs dramatically pushing up revenue much higher.
How much money you get from a Blogspot blog is directly dependent on your niche.. Some niches pay better than others.
SEO for Blogspot blogs
The SEO tips are equally relevant to any other blog on any platform there is. That said meta tags and descriptions are tuning down in importance from the past few years.
Here are a few SEO strategies that should work well with you.
Focus on on-page SEO
The first thing is on-page SEO isn’t hard to learn. With correct SEO you get more traffic flowing to the site. This requires that you do on page SEO optimization.
It’s simple really. Use keywords in title tags, on alt tags, internal anchors, and also throughout the body copy and meta tags. If your content doesn’t have the focus keywords that means you are destroying your chances of ranking high. Use synonyms of keywords throughout the copy on your blog posts. These are also called LSI keywords.
Do proper keyword research
The best way to win at the game of SEO is by doing keyword research and following through the steps to find keywords that have the highest earning and traffic potential. But often keyword research can be a big misnomer. Search engine indexes like Google don’t always have the correct metrics around search volumes. For instance, Jon Dykstra focuses on a low competition, Ahrefs KD 5 keywords that have a search volume of 10 but often result in thousands of visits.
With sEO tools like semrush its easy to find such keywords and discover the top most keywords in any niche.
You also need long-tail keywords to be able to drive more traffic.
Long-tail keywords generally have no one focusing on them and by virtue of that get more traffic potential as well.
Get more links to your site
There’s no doubt to the fact that links drive traffic up. Link building itself is tough and often requires outreach and is one of the clunkier parts of the entire process. That said, when you do get the hang of it, building links comes easy.
Use the blogger outreach technique to maximize the odds of getting more links as you drive more and more traffic back to your site. For instance, Shoutmeloud has been in the scene for nearly a decade and a majority of the links he got were naturally acquired.
Don’t copy
Since its low risk and low investment, Blogspot blogs tend to be a hub of plagiarized content. The Idea is to see if blogging works for them And they adopt the quickest path towards it.
The algorithms are going to penalize this act as they can detect these dirty tricks. The direct impact is an eventual fall in traffic. That’s actually better than worst-case scenarios, where they tend to delete such blogs.
Image optimization is must-have
Optimize images with anchors. Its easy to rank on Google images. Google images can drive a lot of traffic for you, but only if you put in the effort to put the alt tags and descriptions correctly.
FAQ section
- How does Blogspot blog different from the WordPress blog.
The free version of WordPress. WordPress.com is where you can start blogging for free.
However, there are quite a few differences on a blog on WordPress and blogger.com/
- With blogger.com, the site is something owned by someone else.
- Fully secured
- Customization options are limited
- Software is always up to date.
- The open-source platform gives over ownership of the site
- Manage site security and malware attacks as well.
- Updates from WordPress
Is starting a blog on Blogspot free?
Yes— starting a blog on Blogspot is absolutely free. There’s no cost around starting a BlogSpot blog. No need anything to start it. Just get started with your Gmail id.
How can I make my blog’s look appealing to the readers?
There are hundreds of free templates available on the Blogspot platform and without that help, you choose the kind of design you need.
All these templates are free to use and make your design great and unique.
With these free templates, you can start your blog.
How to grow your blog traffic with Blogspot?
Increasing the traffic on your blog and improving its success bringing traffic, links and shares on blog posts to increase the authority of your domain.
Engage them on different social media sites and post in a relevant manner to increase both followership and increase the number of social media followers.
What is the best blog site to start blogging
There are several blogging platforms out there. Your question is which one to choose.
There are free platforms that let you manage your blog for free. However serious bloggers all tend to favor WordPress.org.
Tools to decide on the name of the blog
Here are effective ways to name your Blogspot blog.
- The first way to determine the name is by thinking about what your blog is about. What broad niche does it fit in? Decide the name of the blog based on this.
- There are several synonyms or long-tail combinations you may be able to use as the name of the blog.
- Also, use blog name generators.
How to make money from a Blogspot blog
With traffic from UK and other western countries, the CPC value will be high and you will get paid more per click than otherwise.
On addition, you need to be consistent with your efforts in blogging and creating content.
\When you are finally making some money move your blog to WordPress on a self-hosted site.
To generate more traffic the content needs to be very well written and in depth.
- The content should be useful for readers.
- You need to be a frequent publisher of articles and that means your rankings will go high as a result of those efforts.
The efforts need to continue for a year or so before you start seeing results and real growth in search engine traffic. That’s the reason why most bloggers fail. They don’t have this consistency in their efforts.
- When applying to Adsense you need to post at least 30 to 40 articles to your site.
- If your site has 100 visitors a day that’s good threshold to apply for this program.
Starting a free blog on the BlogSpot platform and making money with it
Blogspot is one of the biggest platforms that a lot of people are using everyday to make money. Once you begin the journey there’s no stopping you.
There are several things you need to understand around blogging to make the most use of it. SEO, backlinks and optimization a few of them.
Once you are making money move to a self-hosted platform to generate more visibility and establish yourself as an earning blogger and someone who understands the nuances.
The detailed guide is set to help you create a free blog on Blogspot and make money primarily with Adsense among other options.
Do let us know in the comments below what you think of the guide.