I know how it feels.

I know how it feels when you try hard to get every single visitor to your site. You thought it was all easy when you first started your blog, right?

But soon you realized building a profitable blog is NOT easy.

To build a profitable blog;

• You need more traffic
• You need more sales
• You need qualified email subscribers
• Social media fans and the list goes on.

Did you know that 81% of the blogs NEVER make even 100 dollars? Yea that sounds hard, but that’s the truth.

Almost 2 million blog posts are getting published every single day, so it’s NOT so easy to turn your blog into a money-making machine in 2017.

So if you’re finding proven ways to build a better blog that makes money, this post is for you!

Let’s dive into the details to see what you can do to turn your blog into a profitable one.

Build an email list

Money is on the list they say.

But do you know how much money can you actually make from an Email list?

Top bloggers like Derek Halpern, Pat Flynn, Ramit Sethi makes 80% of their income from their email lists. That means they are literally making millions of dollars by using their email lists. That’s the great thing about building an email list – it helps you make passive income even while you sleep.

But here’s the thing.

Building an email list is NOT enough.

You need to build a hungry group of people who are ready to buy whatever you sell. That’s the whole idea behind building a profitable email list.

So how you do you build an email list that makes money?

Here are few proven ways to build and grow a profitable email list.

• Make sure to create a bribe for your audience. No one wants to give their email address for free. So make sure to create a freebie such as an eBook, plugin, video or anything that is valuable for your target audience.
• Use email optin forms at most visible places like top notification bar, popup, footer, end of the post, sidebar, etc. to collect as many emails as possible.
• Running giveaways can quickly help you build a bigger email list. People love giveaways, and you can easily spread the word about your blog by running frequent giveaways.
• Always focus on writing great email sequences. There’s no point in creating a dead email list. Create an autoresponder email series to educate your audience about the products and services that you promote to make money from your site.
• If you want to make money from affiliate marketing apart from using an email list, you can also create deal pages by offering discounts and coupons to turn normal website visitors into buyers. Most people would love to give a try to them instantly when they see stunning offers or deals.

That being said, if you want to turn your blog into a money-making machine, make sure to study top blogs in your industry. I’ll tell you how.

Read and analyze successful blogs

You’ve seen their posts on their blogs.

They literally received thousands of shares and hundreds of backlinks.

Yes, I’m talking about the content that gets published on authority blogs.

Almost every top blog gets thousands of social shares, comments, links as soon as they publish. When you try to analyze how they are attracting so much attention with their content, you will start finding clues.

That’s the reason why you should always study successful blogs in your industry.

Here are few simple tasks you can do a study and analyze top blogs so you can easily figure out how to create a money-making blog.

• Create a spreadsheet and list at least 10 to 20 top blogs in your industry. You can easily use search strings like “top marketing blogs” (replace marketing with your industry) to find out all the authority blogs in your niche.
• Once you have a list of top blogs, try to analyze their content. Try to replicate the same by using unique angle (to attract more traffic, shares, and links). This is also known as Skyscraper technique which was coined by Brian Dean from Backlinko.
• Analyse all the top blogs monetization strategies. See how they are promoting their products or services using their blog, content and email lists. Subscribe to their email lists to see how they are using their email sequences. This practice can quickly help you come up with a profitable business idea for your own sites to monetize later.

Focus on SEO

What’s the ultimate goal of any blog? Getting more sales, right?

But do you know what’s more important than sales?

It’s your website Traffic.

Website traffic is the lifeblood of any successful blog that makes HUGE money in the long run. That too search traffic is the KEY. So how do you get more search engine traffic?

Firstly, increasing your search traffic is NOT easy as you think. It takes a lot of time to actually start getting visitors from Google to your sites (especially when you have a new blog with less domain authority).

So the first step should be focusing on your blog’s Domain authority (in other words your DA). The best way to increase your DA is to attract as many quality links as possible.

Focusing on SEO can help you quickly increase your website sales. So here are few quick SEO tips that can help you get more traffic.

• Use WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you’re a WordPress user, this plugin is a great weapon. It helps you easily optimize your blog posts for particular keywords. Just install the plugin, insert a keyword while writing a post and it will give you suggestions on how to optimize your blog posts to get more traffic from Google. It’s as simple as that.
• Focus on keyword research. Finding and using the right keywords is the key to getting more search traffic. Always focus on finding long tail keywords as they tend to send you high-quality traffic with less competition.
• When you’re just starting out, make sure to leverage other traffic sources such as blogging forums, guest posts, social media sites, etc. to get visitors to your sites (search engine traffic usually takes time).
• Attract as many links as possible. Backlinks are golden!

Learn the art of selling

Selling is hard. Especially selling online is REALLY hard.

If you don’t know how to sell online, you can never build a profitable blog that makes money.

There are no secrets about how to sell online. You need to experiment a lot. You need to know how to persuade your blog audience to take action.

You need to learn how to write captivating content that sells itself. If you can build trust and authority with your blog’s content, selling becomes so easy.

That’s the reason why you need to learn the art of selling. Read as many marketing books as possible. Listen to podcasts. Watch TEDx videos to know how to persuade your audience to buy your stuff.

Here’s a quick tip for you.

Observe and analyze Facebook ads. See how the ads are written. See which headlines are used. Once you learn how to create powerful headlines and copy, you can replicate the same thing on your own sites while writing product reviews or selling your own products or services.

Harness the power of social media

Social media is the quickest way to generate a lot of buzz.

Justin Bieber went from an unknown kid to a popular celebrity by using YouTube. And there’s Gangnam style. So there are a lot of things you can do with social media to become popular and really make money from your efforts.

If you’re running a blog, make sure to create social media accounts across all platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Provide easy links (on your sidebar or footer) to let your blog audience easily follow on social media.

Make sure to use social sharing buttons within your blog posts and regularly engage with your audience on social media sites.

Instead of promoting your blog across all the social media networks at once, focus on one platform at a time. That way you can quickly harness the power of social media.

Over to you

Building a profitable blog that makes huge money is NOT hard as you think.

You just need to have a solid strategy, study successful blogs and learn the art of selling, and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors.

Did you like this post? If yes, share it with others so they can benefit. If you’ve any tips on how to build a money making blog, share them in the comments below.

The post How to Turn Your Blog into a Money-Making Machine with Ease appeared first on Tricky Enough.