Updated on July 17th, 2022
You might ask “what are the benefits of having a blog” in this age of media overload? We live in an age that’s already saturated with information.
Well, the answer lies in the huge quantity of online searches every day. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second. These searches are often on super-niche questions and topics. With your blog, you can target these search queries or “keywords” in blog posts and get traffic to your site. Many of these keywords are extremely niche in nature and have been overlooked by the large media blogs.
So the answer is that with 3.5 billion searches per day, there’s always space for more blogs and new voices on every topic imaginable. They have so many uses.
In this article, I’ll highlight the 3 key benefits of having a blog that nobody tells you!
Genuinely Passive Income
It takes time and hard work to build a successful blog. This is especially so in the beginning when your page views are low and the search engines aren’t ranking your posts. It will take months of concerted effort posting content to see any headway.
However, if you keep publishing quality content you’ll slowly start to see an uptick in visits to your site. This is when the magic starts to happen as a “snowball effect” slowly builds.
So how is blogging truly passive if you’re writing a lot of content? Well, there’s no doubt that you’ll write all of your own posts in the beginning. It’s likely that you’ll be bootstrapping in these early stages to save money. Consequently, as your site starts to gain traffic and starts earning income, you’ll be able to hire content writers.
From this point you’ve got a fantastic asset which is still growing with little actual work from you. As the writing work is outsourced, your role becomes one of owner and manager.
Successful blogs are fully capable of earning six figures per month. There are many examples out there and this is something that you CAN achieve. And this can be achieved with VERY low running costs.
To reiterate, a successful blog can be the most truly passive and profitable online business that you can find.
So how do you monetise your blog to earn this income?
1. Benefits of Having a Blog – Affiliate Income
If there are products that you love using yourself, you can make money by endorsing these products using affiliate marketing. For example if you have a hiking blog, you might promote camping products that you already love and recommend to friends.
You can do this by signing up as an affiliate to a retailer such as Amazon or Home Depot.
There are many articles out there on how to do affiliate marketing effectively, but here’s a quick summary of the process:
Affiliate Marketing Steps
- You identify products or services which you believe in and which are related to your niche.
- Then visit the website of these providers (affiliates) or call them to find out if they have an affiliate program. Not all companies have affiliate programs.
- Sign up as an affiliate with that company. There is usually an approval process which may take a few days to get approved.
- Once approved you will be given a unique affiliate code. This code will be used to track any referrals that you make to the affiliate and can be used in place of links on your blog. It can also be used in the description of YouTube videos etc. It’s possible to cloak the link on your website to hide the affiliate details. This can be achieved using a plugin such as Thirsty Affiliates.
- A reader of your blog will then click a link on your site and be taken to the affiliate’s website. The affiliate will automatically recognise your code. If the reader proceeds with a sale at the affiliate’s website, you’ll be paid a commission based on the affiliate agreement.
- It’s a win-win situation for everyone. The buyer doesn’t pay anything extra, you get a commission and the affiliate gets the sale.
The advantage of affiliate income on your blog is that it’s easy to scale over time by building organic traffic.
2. Advertising Income that Keeps Growing
A side benefit of having a blog is due to its increasing traffic. It means that you can start placing advertising blocks on your site. This has become more possible in recent years for even the smallest blogs. The advertising providers include Ezoic and Google Adsense amongst others provide this service.
It really is so easy! It just depends on your website attaining a certain level of traffic. For example, Ezoic requires 10,000 visits per month. So this isn’t something that you would start with. But once you reach the benchmark level of traffic you can apply to join this platform.
Thankfully, Google Adsense has no minimum traffic requirement, but you won’t make any money if you have no traffic.
Once you’re approved, the advertising provider will supply you with code for the advertising blocks which you can easily add to the sidebar of your post.
From there you don’t have to worry any more because the provider automatically serves up the ads. It’s very set-and-forget.
You just have to continue writing content.
You’ll start receiving monthly payments and they should just keep growing over time. Display advertising is a numbers game and tends to require higher levels of traffic than affiliate marketing.
Many people choose to run both affiliate marketing and display advertising on their sites. The mix is something that you’ll need to work out as you see the analytics of your site.
3. Benefits of Having a Blog – Build a Valuable and Saleable Asset
What nobody tells you is that online assets can be just as valuable as real world assets. Furthermore, the best online businesses are those that:
- Have predictable income streams
- Are largely passive
- Have low running costs
A blog can match all of these requirements.
It costs hardly anything to get started. Fast WordPress hosting plans start from under $10 per month with Siteground. This is all you need to spend in the beginning as long as you’ve got a computer and internet. There are free options for everything else you’ll need.
If you take a look at some of the recent transactions, the numbers can be eye-watering.
- TechCrunch (a tech blog started in 2005) was sold to AOL in 2010 for around US$25 million
- In 2011, AOL also acquired Huffington Post for US$315 million. The blog/news site is now part of Verizon Media.
- Wirecutter was started in 2011 as a product review site. It was purchased for about US$30 million in 2016 by the New York Times
- in 2007, French group Hi-Media acquired Fotolog for US$90 million.
What boggles the mind is that all of these blogs were started with NIL readers and NIL traffic only relatively a few years earlier. Yet they were sold for astronomical values.
Lastly, I just came across this video from Neil Patel, in which I found some interesting tips that I hadn’t thought of. I hope you find it helpful too!
Conclusion – Benefits of Having a Blog
So what’s stopping you from starting a blog? All it will take is an investment of time and energy to build it up. Think of how you’ll feel in a year from now if you spend some time to build a valuable asset such as a blog.
Blog Websites have the capacity to grow into hugely profitable and valuable assets which provide value to so many people.
One of the other main benefits of having a blog is that it will become a central hub for all of business activities in your niche.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can a blog give you passive income if you have to write all the time?
It’s true that you may do most of the writing at the beginning of your blogging journey. However, if you keep relentlessly adding content, your blog will eventually reach a tipping point. At this point you’re getting more traffic and earning larger revenues. From here, you can start scaling your blog by employing writers for new content.
At this stage your blog is becoming truly passive. It’s still growing but your role is becoming one of managing your writers and future direction of your website.
What’s the best domain extension for my blog?
In most cases .com is still the benchmark. It’s so well recognised. This recognition has major advantages over other domain extensions.
This recognition leads to better SEO outcomes as search engine users are more likely to click on a .com compared to an extension that they’re not used to.
Feature Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash
