One of the common ways people make money online is through blogging. However, as there are many bloggers online, it is not so straightforward that anyone who starts a blog will make money. Also, there are many kinds of blogs you can begin with, and in my experience, an authority blog has the highest chance of success in generating profits!
An authority blog is a blog created by someone who is knowledgeable and experienced in a niche. This kind of blog offers trusted and sound advice for beginners on a specific topic. For example, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) can blog about how small businesses can do their accounting more efficiently and with easy-to-understand methods.
Not all authority blogs require you to have a certificate or formal education. You can also start an authority blog if you have experience in a subject and also the interest to share what you know with beginners in your domain area. For example, you may have grown indoor plants for several years and you know how to take good care of indoor plants. With this knowledge, you can start an authority blog to share how beginners can take care of their new indoor plants, how to prevent pests in plants, how to grow indoor plants healthily, etc.
Let’s look at several real authority blogs that are making money now.
The first blog is archeryandbow.com, it is created by Carolyn who wants to share useful tips for beginners starting out in Archery.
This blog generates most of its revenue from Amazon affiliate program. In the past two months (Dec 2022 & Jan 2023), it generates USD$300+ per month from the products Carolyn recommends on her blog. This means Carolyn does not sell anything in her blog, she just recommends a product, and when someone reads her post and clicks on the links to buy the products, she will make some commissions.
Notice on the blog itself has a page titled ‘Recommended Gear’, this kind of page has been proven to be very effective in getting conversations from your website/blog readers. Hence, I strongly suggest you should also consider creating such a page for your authority blog too!
The blog generates more than USD$300 per month for the past two months.
The second authority blog to learn from is the Making sense of cents finance blog. This blog is started by Michelle who shares how to save, invest and manage money.
Michelle’s blog is very popular in the finance blog niche and she has more than half a million page views every month from her blog.
In an interview featured in the book ‘The Essential Habits of 6-Figure Bloggers‘, Michelle mentions she is making more than USD$100,000 from her blog every month. Currently, the blog generates income via affiliate programs, native advertisements, and selling courses.
Continue to read on to find out what are some of the top revenue models that bloggers use to monetize their blogs.
Most authority bloggers started their blog with ads monetization and then slowly progressed to selling products or services/coaching.
During the first one or two years, it is common to use programs like Google Adsense that will help to display advertisements in your blogs to readers. How you will earn is that whenever someone clicks on the advertisements on your blog, you will make some money depending on how much the advertiser is paying for that ad.
The following is an estimate using Google’s revenue estimator to calculate how much a site/blog can earn if it is targeted to the U.S. readers in the finance niche and has slightly more than 500,000 page views per month:
Once you have more and more readers subscribed to your mailing list (or following you in social media), you can then start to create products or services and sell them to your subscribers and followers.
Depending on how you want to scale your online blogging business, you can go with the personalized approach or the mass approach.
Personalized approach
Personalized approach means you can create coaching or consultancy services to help your readers to achieve something they want. For example, if you are a relationship expert, you can provide marriage or relationship consultancy/coaching to newlyweds or people who are looking to have a relationship.
If you are a marketing expert, you can provide marketing consultancy to businesses that want to reach out to more people and increase their sales and client databases.
My website coaching service is also one example of a personalized approach in my authority blog.
The advantage of personalized approach is that you can make way more money than the advertisement income but the downside is that you need a lot of active time in order to provide services like coaching and consultancy. This shouldn’t be a problem if you do not have a full-time job, but if you are currently having other commitments, then the following approach would suit you better (mass approach).
Mass approach
The mass approach means that you create information products to sell in your blog. Some examples of information products are online courses, eBooks, software, graphics, music, and templates for specific purposes.
The main advantage of selling informational products is that you won’t be spending your time actively providing services. This will give you more time to create content for your blog or work on marketing your blog. The disadvantage is that you will need many visitors (100,000 pageviews per month at least) and subscribers (5000 subscribers at least) in order to achieve a 4 to 5-figure good income.
The following are some examples of eBooks that I have sold on my authority blogs:
Some ebook that I have sold in my authority blogs
Common mistakes people make
The following are some common mistakes people make when they first started on their blogs:
Mistake 1 – Start a niche without much knowledge of it!
The most common mistake in starting a blog is you lack the expertise and knowledge to share more in-depth about the niche. If your blog just shares surface and general information, chances are Google is not going to rank your blog at all. This is the reason why you need to choose a niche that you understand very well so you will have a lot of insights to share with your readers online.
Mistake 2 – Using AI to write your content!
One of the most recent technologies that some bloggers use to generate content is GPT 3. There are a lot of tools out there right now that you can purchase to help you generate blog post content that you can copy and paste. Such content has not been vetted and often contains false information. If you are using such a tool, you should rewrite most of the content to make it useful for your readers. Do not just copy and paste content from AI tool to your blog! Doing so will hurt your website’s trustworthiness and eventually suffer in search engine rankings.
Mistake 3 – Ignore Google’s search essentials!
If you have a good understanding of Google’s search essentials, you will have a better chance than most bloggers to get your blog ranked high and attract tons of traffic from Google. Always make it a habit to learn or network with people who keep themselves updated with Google’s updates. The Google’s search essential is a good place to start.
If you are keen to start your own Authority blogs, then you might find the following tips helpful!
Tip 1: It is better to start your blog using an authority domain name rather than just a normal domain name. The more authority score your domain name has, the higher chance and faster your blog will get ranked by Google. You can check for a domain name authority score using this tool before you buy the domain name.
Tip 2: It does not matter if you do not enjoy writing. But at least, do not hate writing! For me, I don’t enjoy writing blog post but the thought of thinking how my blog post can teach someone out there something that people don’t know, it motivate me to continue writing more and more blog posts these years!
Tip 3: In your authority blog, do your best to showcase your certificates (if any) or experience (on your ‘about me’ page) you have in the topic. Google will pick up these signals in your blog and increase your blog ranking when people are searching for the information that you have written!
I hope you find this post helpful and if you think you need some help from me to start your own authority blog!
Feel free to post any questions as comments below and I will answer them!
P.S. If you are not keen in creating an authority blog, then check out this blog post on creating an informational website for income!
waao! excellent I want to put it into practice from now on
All the best, Antony! May your authority blog be a great success!