How to Make Money on the Side – Start a Blog

If you want to learn how to make money on the side then you should start a blog. Blogging is the perfect side hustle and can be started with very little effort and money.

In fact, you should start a blog the moment you start to really hate your job because it’ll take some time to get established and it’ll also give you the motivation to hang in there until your blog starts making money.

Now I’ve already talked about starting a blog so I won’t go over this again, just read it here – How to start a blog and make money in 2016.

How to Make Money on the Side with a Blog

When you start a blog or website, over time you’ll find people will find you through Google Search, and this is called organic traffic and it’s FREE, yay!

Of course, you don’t just start a blog and then wait for the traffic to arrive. You need to put in the work and write blog posts that are interesting and engaging.

And more importantly, you’ll need to use keywords and phrases that everyday people use. This is called keyword research and you can learn a little more about keyword research here.

Just so we’re clear, before you can start your side hustle, you need to attract web traffic to your blog. This is your primary focus when starting a blog.

At this time, you’ll also want to start a social media channel, as this is an easier way to reach new followers when you’re just starting your side hustle.

And keep in mind you don’t sell on social media, you build trust on social media and then use your blog to sell something. Got it?

OK, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed already, because that day job is probably taking up too much of your time, so let me break it down for you.

When you have spare minutes in your day, you work on your social media following.

And once or twice a week, you set aside an hour or two to write and publish a blog post.

It’s that easy.

OK, in reality, you’ll find plenty of excuses that’ll stop you from starting or doing the work, and this is exactly why not everyone is suited to a side hustle. Or that’s what they think.

Anyway, just by starting a blog you’ll be streets ahead of the pack who are just too lazy to spend any time on a side hustle. And you’ll usually find those people searching for ‘get rich quick’ schemes which almost always end in disappointment.

The only solid way to ‘get rich quick’ is to do more work.

If you want to learn how much work, then check out the King of Hustle, Gary Vaynerchuck.

And it takes work to become an overnight success.

Make Money from Blogging

So you’ve started your blog and are starting to see web traffic coming to your blog. What next?

This is where it starts to get interesting.

The easiest way to make money from a blog is to put up ‘display ads’ but you are only making money when people click on the ads. Which isn’t going to make much money on the side.

A better tactic is to sell other people products as you’ll get a better commission. This is called affiliate marketing and can sometimes result in a 50% commission depending on the products you choose to promote.

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing then check out this free course.

And if you’ve been hustling for a while selling probably comes easy to you, but as a blogger, you can make it even easier.

You see earlier I mentioned about using keywords or phrases in your blog posts and if you do this, the traffic that reads your blog post is already qualified.

So your tactic is to sell something specific to help alleviate the problem you were addressing. Yep, you now give them an opportunity to solve their problem and hopefully make a few extra bucks on the side.

This is called the call to action and can be made specific to every blog post you write.

In fact, that should be your starting point.

1. Find a product you want to promote
2. Identify the problems this product can solve
3. Do some keyword research to find questions people are asking about these problems
4. Write a blog post to solve that problem
5. Include that product in a call to action

Rinse and Repeat.

Best Affiliate Products

If you are just starting out with Affiliate Marketing then join Amazon Associates and promote products that people are buying anyway. You can earn up to a 6% commission which is great if you are promoting high priced products, so keep this in mind when choosing products to promote.

And when you’ve made a few dollars promoting the easy stuff, then consider promoting digital products where your commission can be around 50% or more.

Although selling digital products is a little harder sell, they are usually the best affiliate products to sell because of the healthy commissions.

So your job is to write compelling articles on why they can solve someone’s problem.

So hopefully, you’ve learnt a little more about how to make money on the side and are already considering starting your own blog.

I use a few different hosting companies for my blogs but have been using Bluehost for over 10 years now, so it’s hard to recommend anything else.

If you need step-by-step instructions on setting up a Bluehost Blog then I’ve done all the hard work for you with this simple guide.

But more importantly, you just need to get started, as it’ll take some time to build your blog. And you’ll need web traffic for your side hustle.

Good Luck!

And leave any questions you have in the comments below, and I’ll try to answer them, the best I can.