“Expert” bloggers tend to give you generic advice like write about your passions, stay consistent, form good writing habits, and create great content.

Then, a few years from now, you’ll finally have enough website traffic to monetize your blog with affiliate programs, Google AdSense, online courses, podcasting, or selling digital products.

The hard truth is, it doesn't have to take you years – there's just a lot of bad advice out there.

To make life-changing money from your blog as fast as possible, you need to start thinking like a CEO and developing systems to scale your blog like a startup, not a hobby.

I’ve worked for high growth startups, and some of the best CMOs, VPs, and Growth Marketers out there. And what did I learn?

Most blogging advice is harmful, not helpful.

You’re sold the dream of passive income and the ability to make money online while you sleep, all while 95% of Bloggers still fail. And yet, these “experts” that started over 10 years ago are the only ones profiting the most from blogging.

So I started this blog in January 2019 to track my progress as a brand new blogger using everything I learned in the startup world.

Here's the first thing I learned – you need to focus less on writing and more on creating systems to scale your blog at startup speed.

Remember, you’re a business owner, not just a blogger.

There are a lot of things I wish I knew before I started my blog. I hope this post helps give you some fresh ideas.

And as you can see from my Blog Income Reports, I made $1 million in under two years without spending a dime on advertising.

This guide covers SEO, keyword research, content marketing, WordPress, and affiliate marketing so that you can make more money blogging this year. Let's get started.

How to Make Money Blogging in 2021.

Before anything else, you need to learn how to start a blog. The first step is getting web hosting and a domain name. I recommend Bluehost as it's the #1 recommended host by WordPress and has more than enough features to do everything outlined in this guide.

You can get started with Bluehost for $2.95/month (63% off) with my link.

This article is all about making money this year – I won't give you a vague list of options like affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, online courses, or advertising.

Instead, we'll focus on scaling your blog like a startup by choosing your Niche, scaling your content, and monetizing your blog to make $10,000/month in 90 days.

Let's scale your new blog like a startup.

Choose Your Blog's Niche Based on Market Factors, Not Your Passions.

There's a reason that 95% of bloggers fail, and it's not why you think.

The current myth is that bloggers fail because they aren't “passionate enough.”

“Push through failure to succeed,” they say.

Google “why bloggers fail,” and you get the same answer from the #1 result: bloggers fail because they aren't passionate enough.

I officially reject this notion.

The real reason bloggers fail is the same reason that any business fails: it's not profitable.

Take my passions, for example.

I'm passionate about a lot of things – drumming, flying airplanes, traveling, astronomy, distance running, personal development, Detroit-style pizza, etc.

However, if I wrote an endless amount of blog posts about one of these topics without making any money, I'd burn out 100% of the time.

Additionally, some bloggers claim, “I'm not in it for the money” or, “It's just a hobby.”

Hobby bloggers are just new bloggers that don't know how to make money yet. In any creative digital field – whether it's design, web development, photography, copywriting, or video editing – there are beginners and experts.

And since most bloggers start as beginners by writing about a passion and try to figure everything else out later, they're destined to fail.

Source: Google.com

Plus, blogging advice is outdated, written only to rank on Google, and encourages a generalized approach to appeal to the broadest possible audience.

Bloggers don't fail because of a lack of passion (they have that in spades).

Bloggers fail because they can't transition from blogger to business owner.

So they choose a non-lucrative niche targeting a low-value audience. New bloggers forget to leverage networking and connections to their strategic advantage. And they don’t have enough market demand to scale traffic.

I want you to succeed.

Before launching your blog, it’s crucial to choose your niche based not on passions, but three business factors: audience budget potential, professional leverage, and market demand.

Check out my guide to launching a blogging business for more blogging articles.

1. Audience Budget Potential.

To offer a valuable product on your blog, you need to solve a pain point for your audience. That's obvious.

As a blogger, you should deeply understand your audience’s challenges so that you can offer the most in-demand solution. Check.

Start by looking at niches where you’re a member of the target audience yourself. This way, your domain expertise shines through faster.

But don't think that after you've gotten that far, you should open up a generic list of 100 niches and narrow it down that way. Watercolors? K-Pop? Travel? Good luck with that. 

What is the #1 most important factor when choosing your blog's niche?

How much your audience is willing to spend.

It's that simple.

Let's break it down.

So in this example, let's say you're planning to start a blog in the home design niche.

Your blog topics may pull in different readers. Visitors could include professional interior designers, college design students, and even stay-at-home moms who want the latest home decor inspiration.

To monetize this niche, you would create a new blog and move your readers down the sales funnel:

• First, you’d create content to attract an audience
• Then you’d build out a home design “freebie” to get email opt-ins
• Next, you could use affiliate marketing to promote home decor brands
• Finally, you would offer your email subscribers a $300 online course (with a money-back guarantee) about 10 Expert Interior Design Tips for the Perfect Home

Nothing is wrong with this approach – this tends to be what most bloggers do, and it can earn some passive income after a couple of years of building your audience.

But is it a lucrative audience? Stay-at-home moms, college students, and a few professionals with an average salary?

Here's the secret.

By changing just one word in your niche, you can increase your blog’s income potential by 200x.

All you do is change “home design” to “retail design.”

Let me explain.

By adding a B2B component, you just shifted your audience from individuals to businesses and increased your blog’s income potential by 200x.

Think about it this way. If you're selling to large businesses instead of individuals, you make more money for two reasons. The first is that they have more funds available. Second, it's not coming out of their own pocket.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that your blog launch, content strategy, and sales funnel are almost the same for both the B2C “home design” and B2B “retail design” niches.

Here's the good part: while the B2C “home design” monetization stopped at a $300 course, the B2B “retail design” niche doesn't just stop there.

After you build your professional brand, you become known as a B2B design expert. This influence allows your price to jump from a $20 affiliate commission or a $300 course – to a $5,000/month recurring consulting service.

Understanding your audience’s pain points isn't enough.

To 200x your revenue potential, your audience needs to be in a lucrative B2B niche and pay a monthly recurring basis.

To recap, when choosing your niche, rather than worrying about your passions and getting thousands of passive, low-value site visitors, focus on closing 2-3 high-value clients.

With this approach, I hope you’re beginning to understand why I truly believe you can make $10,000/month in 90 days with a new blog.

2. Use Your Professional Leverage to Choose Your Blog's Niche.

After uncovering a lucrative audience to provide value to, the next step is to discover the strategic advantages you may have over others.

Ask yourself:

• What is my current level of professional experience?
• What connections do I have in my industry?
• Can I leverage this experience into a profitable blog?
• If I could pitch any website in the world to contribute a guest post, who would take me seriously from the start?

To build a truly successful blog, you first need to build influence. And to build authority, you need to step outside of your comfort zone and leverage your connections, professional experience, and everything at your disposal like never before.

You will also be performing a lot of outreach to make new connections.

Outreach includes building relationships so you can guest post on authoritative sites in your niche. These posts give you get relevant, high Domain Authority (DA) backlinks for SEO, which is still one of the best ways to rise in the Google search rankings. And according to Broadband Search's recent Internet statistics from 2019, Google process 3.5 billion searches per day – or over 40,000 every second. There's plenty of traffic to go around.

And when you're just starting, you may not have many connections or published content out there. You might say: “Why would anyone feature me?”

Leveraging your background helps tremendously.

For example, if you're a photographer, you might have a base of clients, contacts from local meet-up groups, and even know photography influencers that you met in the past. If you can leverage these contacts in the future, you can accelerate the growth of your blog.

3. Your Niche Needs Market Demand.

Before you get started, you need to do some research and see if people search for the topics you want to write about – and they are monetizable.

The two main types of monetizable keywords are “best” list posts and “how-to” guides.

These two main types of keywords have the most affiliate marketing revenue potential.

For example, in the case of the “best” list posts:

• In travel, this could be “best travel insurance” or “best travel backpack.”
• In finance, it could be “best savings accounts” or “best Roth IRA.”
• In tech, it could be “best VR headset” or “best PS5 exclusives.”

When people are searching for the “best” something, they are looking for long-form guides recommending products that are written by bloggers. Most of these will have good affiliate programs to join and promote.

In the case of “how-to” guides, these could be:

• In marketing, how to make a website.
• In lifestyle, how to decorate your kitchen.
• In health, how to get rid of acne.

These how-to guides are long-form tutorials packed with high-quality content. These are also good for adding affiliate links.

Once you understand your leverage and passions, take your chosen niche, and come up with the top 10 keywords to target.

Next, use a keyword research tool like GrowthBar, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ahrefs and enter your keywords.

With GrowthBar, you can do your keyword research right while you're searching on Google.

Here are some strategies to keep in mind when it comes to keyword research.

If your top 5 keywords have search volumes of at least 5,000, this shows that there is interest in these topics. Here's an example of my target keyword in this blog post:

After that, look at the keyword difficulty score (a number from 0 to 100 on how difficult it will be to rank for the keyword).

If your keywords have difficulty scores of 80 or higher, the competition may be too fierce for you to make an impact.

Shoot for target keywords with over 2,000 monthly searches and under a 50 difficulty score so that you can potentially get more traffic with less competition.

Another way to view competition is to use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to see search engine results page (SERP) data. Specifically, look for the Domain Rating (DR) of the first page results and the SERP position history.

If the top 10 results all have a DR over 70, your new blog with a DR of 0 is not going to get on page one, thus getting no traffic.

However, if you see a website with a DR under 50 on page one, that's a good indication that you can outrank them over time with quality content.

Lastly, if the SERP position history hasn't budged over the last six months, that means that positions #1 – 5 have stayed in the same spot. In these cases, the competition may be too intense for that keyword.

To recap, when researching your blog's market demand, shoot for topics that have keywords with:

• 2,000+ monthly searches
• A keyword difficulty score under 50
• The first page of Google has at least one site with a DR under 50
• A SERP position history that has changed recently.

To summarize, focus less on writing and more on keyword research – every single blog post needs to target one keyword.

Make sure to choose your niche based on audience budget potential, professional leverage, and market demand.

Find an audience that you’re a part of and understand their challenges personally. Up-level that audience to make sure there’s a B2B component to 200x your revenue potential. Leverage your network, job experience, and everything else at your disposal. And make sure your niche has market demand.

Because in the end, passion doesn't create money; money creates passion.

Ready to get started? Try Bluehost for $2.95/month (63% off) with my link.

Scale Your Content Creation and Stop Writing So Much.

What if I told you that your blog's first 90 days has nothing to do with your blog and you won't write a single word?

What if the secret to scaling and making money blogging doesn't include blogging?

What if everything taught about growing a new blog has limited your growth?

Remember: you're a business owner, not just a blogger.

From days 0 to 90, you shouldn't be focusing your energy on writing first drafts. I won't give the same old, outdated advice. I refuse to talk about how to write about your passions, follow an editorial calendar, writing habits, writing consistency, (or anything about writing for that matter).

Instead, we're going to scale your blog like a startup and build credibility in your niche faster.

One big way to do that is to get writing help. Instead of writing every single first draft yourself, you can use a service like Fiverr to find freelance writers. There are plenty of writers that provide blog post writing services so that you can spend your time editing, publishing, and link building.

Overall, there are five main components to this process:

1. Outreach
2. Guest Post
3. Outsource
4. Backlinks
5. Repeat indefinitely

By using this system for the first year after launch, my blog received over 5,000 backlinks from 1,000+ domains and a +74 Domain Rating (DR) increase.

Most importantly, I continued to see huge year over year gain in traffic:

If you're a blogger that wants to focus on writing, consistency, passion, and habits, you can stop reading here.

But if you're one of the like-minded people that's serious about growing your blog like a CEO (and not a hobby blogger), let's start monetizing.

1. Relationships Are Your Foundation.

Before you start building relationships with other bloggers and influencers in your niche, you have to understand one central theme. You have to provide value to others. Don’t go into the process of building a relationship just thinking about what you’ll get out of the deal. First, you need to focus on the benefits you’ll give others.

Ask yourself: what value are you providing in the relationship?

• Could you provide content because your expertise matches their audience’s interests?
• Is their blog currently in need of content to fill their editorial calendar?
• Can you leverage link building for them in other guest posts you’re writing?
• Is there a topic that you’re well versed in that doesn’t exist on their blog?

The first step in pitching is understanding your value and what you can do to help. This information will be vital in your initial email outreach strategy.

First, create a targeted list of sites.

Once you understand the value you can provide, it’s time to start building your blog outreach list. This list should be a simple spreadsheet with five columns: Website, Name, Email Address, Status, etc.

To begin populating your spreadsheet, look up the target blog’s monthly site visitors and Domain Authority (DA) by plugging their URL into an SEO tool like Ahrefs. Aim for blogs with a Domain Authority of 50+.

Remember, the higher the DA, the stronger the partnership potential, and the more SEO impact you’ll receive from the relationship. To save time during your search, find an article like this one with the top blogs and websites accepting guest posts, with Domain Authority scores.

Once you've pared down your list of blogs based on the criteria above It’s time to find the right person to contact.

First, use LinkedIn.

Start by filtering your search results by the blog’s company page, then within the company, search for people by using terms like: “Content Manager,” “SEO Manager,” “Editor,” or simply, “Content.”

After you find 2-3 potential contacts, connect with them on LinkedIn. 2nd degree LinkedIn connections are better than 3rd – and if you have a mutual contact, even better. Don’t spend too much time on your connection message either, often your text gets buried or comes off as spammy.

Once you’ve reached out on LinkedIn, use an email tool like Hunter.io to scan the blog for email addresses. Even if you can’t find the contact’s exact email address, Hunter.io shows your email structure, such as [email protected] or [email protected]. Add this contact information into your spreadsheet.

2. Start Relationships & Pitch Guest Posts at the Same Time.

Valuable blogging relationships provide content and links. Once you have a list of 50-100 potential contacts and have reached out on LinkedIn, it's time to start your email outreach.

You can scale your guest blogging strategy by using an email template to start the relationship while asking to guest post at the same time.

Here's a sample template that I've used:

Hey (First Name),

My name’s Adam and I’m the (Title) at (Blog).

I’m reaching out because I love (Target Blog) and am interested in collaborating on content with you.

I was curious if:
1) You’d like to participate in link building. I write (X-X) guest posts per month and would be happy to link to your site in my content.
2) You allow guest posts on your blog.

I’d love to contribute to your (awesome? informative? useful?) blog and can pitch some topic ideas that I think your audience will enjoy. Here are some recent samples from me:
(Sample 1 URL)
(Sample 2 URL)
(Sample 3 URL)

Please let me know if you’re interested and I look forward to hearing back from you soon!

Thanks,

Adam

That's it.

By using a guest post email template and knowing how to start an email greeting, you save time and scale your process by starting a relationship and pitching a guest post at the same time.

Once your contact responds to your email and says they are interested in a guest post, you need to pitch the perfect topic.

There are four main criteria for the perfect guest blogging topic pitch:

1. Your content doesn’t exist on their site yet. When you have a topic idea, go to Google and search “site:blog.com topic” to scan their blog to check if it already exists.
2. Your topic and target keywords have SEO value. Go back to Ahrefs and input the blog’s URL. View which organic keywords are driving the most traffic to see if you can find gaps in their content that you can fill.
3. The topic matches your expertise. You should be able to write intelligently about the subject and use the guest blog to build more influence in your niche.
4. The topic matches the audience’s interests. Check their editorial guidelines, look into how they write their blog posts, and try to match their blog's style.

Once your topic is accepted, you can move onto the heart of your guest blogging strategy.

3. The Importance of Guest Blogging.

In January 2019, I conducted a guest blogging experiment. My goal was to contribute as many guest posts as I could within 15 days to measure its impact on my site's SEO metrics and traffic.

Here were the results after 15 days: