How to Make Money Blogging (Free Guide for 2019)

There are lots of guides about how to make money blogging, but here’s what makes this one different:

I’ve taken three different blogs to over $1 million per year. In fact, the blog you’re reading right now has made a total of $5.3 million.

And in this post, I’m going to give you a step-by-step case study showing you exactly how I did it, starting from nothing, along with my step-by-step playbook for beginners trying to get started.

Let’s jump in.

How to Make Money Blogging in 2019 (Step-By-Step for Beginners)

1. Choose a Profitable Blogging Niche
2. Level up Your Content Skills
3. Figure out Which Traffic Sport to Play
4. Grow Your Email List with Pop Ups
5. Begin Monetizing with Affiliate Offers
6. Develop a Unique Mechanism

If you’re starting from scratch with no traffic or influential friends, it’s easy to wonder…

Is it reasonable for you to believe you can make money blogging?

For that matter, how do blogs even make money? Ads? Or something else?

Well, let’s take a look at exactly how I did it at Smart Blogger. Here’s my complete step-by-step process for how to make money blogging:

1. Choose a Profitable Blogging Niche

Let’s start with a little brutal truth, shall we?

• Passion does not equal profit.
• Neither does expertise.
• Hard work doesn’t guarantee anything either.

For example:

You can be the world’s foremost expert on square-shaped tomatoes, wake up every morning with a burning passion to educate the public on their vast superiority to normal-shaped tomatoes, and work until your fingers bleed and your eyes fall out of your head, following all the right tactics for growing a popular blog, and…

You’ll never have a chance in hell at making any money.

Here’s why:

1. Nobody but you gives a damn about square tomatoes
2. Even if they did care, they wouldn’t spend any money

In other words, you need a large audience who buys things. Without that, nothing else matters. It’s a prerequisite for everything else.

In the case of Smart Blogger, I noticed early on that bloggers buy lots of different things:

In fact, there are companies with $10 million+ per year of revenue in most of those categories. It’s also a growing space with millions of people: