How to Earn Money Blogging in 2021 (Ultimate Guide For Beginners)

Want to know, how to earn money blogging?

Ever wondered, how can someone make money from a blog? Is it even possible to make money blogging online?

Well, this is something everyone wants to know, especially the beginner bloggers.

If you’re about to start your online journey with blogging, knowing this can help you plan your success story.

So, let’s start.

There could be two possible reasons you’re asking these questions;

Either you’re a beginner who wants to start your own blog and make money blogging online, or
You have already started your blogging journey but could not monetize your blog the right way.

Whatever the case may be, you don’t need to worry.

Because in this article you will learn everything you need to know about making money with a blog.

For making money through blogging, you need to start a blog by getting a domain name and web hosting.

I always recommend Bluehost, because this is the best web hosting provider and the most recommended host by WordPress.

If you have already created your blog on WordPress, congratulations!

You’re ready to make money blogging in 2021.

Still haven’t started your blog?

5+ Alarming Reasons, Why Bloggers Fail to Earn Money From Blogging

Before we learn how to earn money blogging in 2021, we need to understand why bloggers are not able to monetize their blogs.

What mistakes a newbie blogger is making that makes it difficult for him to earn money from blogging.

1. Not Finding the Right Niche

Finding the right niche is extremely important for creating a successful blog.

Wondering, what is the right niche for blogging and how to find one?

The right niche is obviously the one that offers tons of opportunities to earn money with blogging.

The best approach to find the right niche for your blog is considering two important things while selecting your niche; One is your passion and the second is profitability in the niche.

While considering passion you should note all those topics which make you happy to talk about, about which you have a lot of ideas to share and about which you’re always ready to learn more.

For Example, I love talking about money, keep learning, and implementing different methods to make and grow money. That is the reason I have started Plant More Money to share profitable ideas with you so that you too can start earning online.

However, there are many things that people are passionate about but can not be selected as the blogging niche because it could be very difficult to monetize the blog.

Suppose someone is passionate about sleeping but maybe there are not enough ways to monetize this passion.

So, you need to add the profitability aspect in your passion to make it the right niche.

While checking the profitability of your blogging niche, you need to consider two basic points:

Market demand for your niche (more demand => more money), and
How much money people are ready to spend.

When you combine your passion with the profitability aspect, what comes out is the right niche to make money blogging.

2. Not Creating Useful Content

You are into blogging and it is quite important to provide regular content to your readers. Most bloggers know this and so they start creating content without understanding the need for the content. What happens next? Nobody read that content.

Stop creating useless content just because you need to create some.

How will you decide whether the content you are producing is useful or not?

Well, the best way to decide on the usefulness of content is to get the information from your readers which eventually are your potential customers.

Understand the problem (s) or the pain point (s) of readers and create amazing content addressing them.

Community engagement is further discussed in our fifth alarming reason for blogger’s failure to earn money blogging. (Make sure to read thoroughly)

But before that, we need to reach the readers and bring them to our blog.

And, how can we do that?

3. Not Targeting Right Keywords

Now you’re working in the right niche, you’re creating super useful content for your readers. But still, you are not getting enough traffic to your blog.

Oh, Man! What the hell is happening?

You might be wondering, how come people are not finding my content?

And, this is a very serious issue.

Because if no one finds your blog, there is no chance you can earn money from blogging. So, here comes a very important part of blogging, SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimizing your content for search engine ranking.

The first and most important aspect of SEO strategy is finding and targeting the right KEYWORDS.

Dare to ignore the importance of finding the right keywords and you will find yourself nowhere.

How to find the right keyword to rank in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)?

The easiest way to find the perfect keywords for SERP ranking is by using the keyword tools. The best keyword tool that I recommend for bloggers, who really want to earn money blogging online, is SEMrush.

Along with keyword research, this keyword tool also helps in tracking your competitor’s keyword strategy and SEO audit of your blog.

This way SEMrush helps you to create better & more effective content than others and rank on the first page of search engine results.

4. Underestimating Blog Promotion and Community Building

Promoting your blog on various platforms and building community is one of the most popular strategies to take your blog in front of a huge audience/readers.

Those who underestimate and do not follow this strategy barely make any money through blogging. The reason behind this is very simple.

No doubt, SEO is the best strategy to grow your blog but it takes time.

If you want to grow your blog at a much faster rate, you need to promote your blog and build communities on various platforms.

Examples of most popular online platforms for community building and blog promotion are:

Facebook
YouTube
LinkedIn
Twitter
Quora
Pinterest

5. Not Engaging With Community Readers

I have already stated in the second point that how you can use the blogging communities to create useful content on your blog. The risk of not engaging with your blog community readers is simply not getting the blog community benefits like getting more shares, getting more views, building more authority, and many more.

These benefits are directly related to the money-making potential of your blog. If you do not engage yourself with your community readers, you clearly leave a lot of money on the table.

So, be engaged with your readers through different platforms available. Try to add them to your email list so that they can receive your valuable content and recommendation directly in their mail.

6. Lack of Consistency

Lack of consistency can be a big hurdle between you and your success. May it be your blogging journey or your life journey, you need to be disciplined and consistent in your efforts.

In order to make money with blogging, you have to provide regular content to your readers. Otherwise, they will forget you or ignore you and start following someone else who is providing quality content to them, consistently.

Generally, beginner bloggers make these types of mistakes and got stuck. However, top money making blogs use them as their weapon to grow their online earning from blogging.

If you’re really serious about earning money through blogging, you must know about all these mistakes that can ruin your blogging career. Always keep them in mind and avoid as much as possible.

Proven Ways To Earn Money By Blogging In 2020

1. Advertising

Advertising is one of the easiest ways to start monetizing your blog. Most of the bloggers start earning money from blogging by displaying ads on their blogs. Here, you as a blog owner give some space to advertisers to show their Ads on your blog and earn money.

There are two types of Ads that you can show on your blog; Direct Ads and Ads through Ad networks.

Direct Ads are those where you directly make a contract with the advertiser and charge a fixed amount. However, it takes more effort as you have to make an agreement and negotiate for the price.

Ads through Ad networks are easier to manage compared to direct advertisements.

The popular Ad networks mostly used by bloggers to earn money from blogging are:

Google AdSense
Media.net, etc.

However, Advertising is a great way to start earning money from a blog but you need good traffic for the same.

If we talk about Google AdSense, they can accept you in their program even with fewer visitors on your site but they pay very less.

On the other hand, Media.net pays you a comparatively good amount but getting accepted is tough, as they approve a website with decent traffic only.

Want to monetize your blog even with low traffic?

Try affiliate marketing.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money by blogging online. This is the method that enables you to earn money even with less traffic on your blog website.

Here you promote third party products through affiliate links and when someone ends up purchasing the product through your link, you earn a commission. The good thing is that you don’t need to create your own product to make money blogging.

Affiliate marketing is among the hottest passive income sources for most intermediate level and pro-level bloggers.

You can easily find the affiliate products in your niche by searching in Google for (your niche) affiliate programs. This will show you all the affiliate products that are being promoted in your niche.

You can select a few of them which are most relevant to the content you’re sharing on your blog and promote them.

Another option to find the best affiliate products to promote is by joining different affiliate marketing marketplaces.

Some of the most popular affiliate marketing marketplaces are:

Amazon Associates Program (Beginner friendly)
Click Bank
CJ Affiliate
ShareASale
JVZoo

3. Sponsored Posts

A great way to monetize your blog is through sponsored posts.

Wondering, what is sponsored blog post and how to earn money blogging with sponsored posts?

Well, a sponsored post is basically an article and you get paid to publish it on your blog.

You can either outreach the potential sponsors (generally required when you have fewer visitors on your blog) or let them approach you (usually happens when you’re popular and getting good traffic).

In order to earn money from your blog through this opportunity, you need to create a media kit and publish it as a blog page in the main menu.

The media kit should include important information like;

Blogging Niche
Traffic Stats
Price Package (if any)
Acceptable Payment Methods and
Contact Details.

This way you can direct anyone interested, to this page, where they can get an idea about your blog before getting into any further discussion and negotiation.

4. Selling Products

Selling your own products is yet another way to earn money from a blog. You can sell both physical as well as digital products on your blog.

However, it will take some extra work to create a product but once it is ready you can earn a good amount of money on the side as passive income.

Examples of products that you can sell to make money online;

Physical Products: Books, Merchandise, Teaching material, etc.
Digital Products: eBooks, software, online courses, apps, and so on.

Among all these products, selling eBooks and online courses are the most popular methods to earn money blogging online.

5. Offering Services

In order to earn money from a blog, you learn a lot of things in the process. You apply these learning in your blog and make money from it.

But what if I say that you are leaving a lot of money on the table. What if I say, you can make a lot more money from your knowledge that you have acquired in your blogging journey.

Yes, you heard that right.

Offering various services is another great way to make money from a blog. Based on your skills, you can offer services like:

Content Writing
Copywriting & Proofreading
Logo Creation
Website Audit
Email Marketing
SEO services
Consultation Services
Training and many more.

These are some of the best ways that are being used by bloggers to make money from blogging. If you desire to be a successful blogger, you should apply as many of these options as possible, to diversify your source of income from blogging.

FAQs About How To Earn Money Blogging

Is it possible to make money blogging?

Yes! It is definitely possible. If you’re ready to put in your valuable time in creating great content and money for purchasing the right tools and resources, you will definitely make money in blogging.

What is the best blogging platforms to make money?

WordPress. Without any doubt, WordPress is the best blogging platform to make money from a self-hosted blog. Even top money making blogs like TechCrunch and Microsoft News use WordPress as a blogging platform.

How to make money blogging for beginners?

A beginner needs to, first, start his own self hosted WordPress blog with Bluehost. If you have read this article you already know, how a beginner can make money blogging. For those, who have directly jumped to this point, I suggest you read this article from the start and implement the ideas shared in this.

Can you make money blogging in 2021 or is blogging still profitable in 2021?

Yes, you can. Of course, there are more than 600 million blogs and over 1.7 billion websites in the world and you might be worried about the competition in the market, but trust me, blogging is still profitable in 2021.

Rather I would say it is much more profitable these days than ever before because of the use of more internet users in 2020 (59% of the global population).

It is probably one of the most popular ways to earn money online. I have never heard of any business that you can start with so little investment and earn such huge revenue.

How much money can you make from a blog?

It totally depends upon your hard work, smart work, and your skills. However, to get an idea about the money-making potential of blogging, you can read an awesome article from BloggersPassion.

How long does it take to make money blogging?

Again it depends on your skills and the monetization methods you use for earning money from a blog.

There are some bloggers who make their first dollar after six months and there are those who struggle for pennies even after a few years of blogging.

However, there are also some bloggers like Adam Enfroy, who started making more than $35k per month within 9 months of blogging.

Can blogging make you rich?

What do you think? Make it clear in your mind that blogging is an online business with huge earning opportunities. If people can make more than $100,000 per month (refer FAQ: how much money can you make from a blog) from blogging, you can too.

So yes, blogging can make you rich for sure. However, this is not a get rich quick scheme. This requires your time, money, and hard work to make money from a blog.

How to receive blogging payments?

So finally, its time to receive your online income. There are many popular payment gateways you can use to accept online payments. I personally use Payoneer, PayPal, and Skrill. You can easily create a free account on these platforms and start accepting money without worries.

Final Words About Earning Money From a Blog

Earning money with a blog is possible if you use the right strategy, right tools & resources, keep learning, and implementing. It may take some time to start earning, don’t feel bad, believe in the process, and give your best.

Every successful blogger has started his blogging journey from zero. If they can earn money from blogging, you can too. So, don’t delay creating your success story. Be an action taker and start your blog today with Bluehost.

I have shared a lot of information about how to earn money blogging in 2021. If you think something is missing, write in comments and I’ll try to include that.

What strategy do you use to make money from blogging?