It won’t be easy, but making money as a lifestyle blogger is certainly possible. Ditch the nine-to-five and earn a living writing about your hobbies.
Imagine being paid to sit at home and write about your passions and hobbies. It sounds like an impossible dream. However, there are plenty of people that are earning a living doing just that.
Blogging is no easy task. You will have to put in many hours and wait months, if not years, before your blog starts generating revenue. However, with enough patience and high-quality content, it is possible to earn a comfortable living. In fact, approximately 13% of bloggers earn over $1,000 a month, with 4% of those making over $10,000 a month.
It’s certainly a lucrative business if you have something interesting to share with the world. If you’re unsure what to write about (we’re not all tech experts or leading neurosurgeons), consider becoming a lifestyle blogger.
How to become a lifestyle blogger and make blogging your full-time job
Whether you’re looking to make it your job or make some coffee money on the side, lifestyle blogging is a great way to earn money by talking about your interests. These five steps will get you started:
Step 1: Find your niche
If you want to be a successful blogger, you need to choose a topic that you are happy to research and write about for years to come. It is important that you don’t let your desire to make money cloud your decision-making, as you will struggle to motivate yourself to produce content about a subject that you care little about.
Consistent content is key to a blog’s success. Therefore, make sure to pick a topic that you can happily write 2 or 3 pieces on each week.
If you are a frequent traveller, for example, you may wish to blog about the hotels that you visit, or the experiences and attractions available in different cities. While travel blogging is a saturated area, finding a more specific topic, such as travel accessories or airport services, would make it easier to attract readers.
Step 2: Choose a good name
A bad name will deter readers from your blog before they even set eyes on your content.
For best results, try to make your blog name something short, relevant and catchy. As a blogger, you are trying to build a core following of readers who will return to your site to read your latest post. Therefore, it is important that your name sticks in their mind.
Before you settle on a name, make sure that the domain name is available. You want your readers to see you as professional and trustworthy source. However, a free domain name (e.g. .blogspot.com) suggests a lack of quality.
Step 3: Provide value
Consider how business works. It is impossible to make money unless you’re providing others with something in return. A retailer provides consumers with products and a cinema provides entertainment. You will be providing information.
While browsing the internet, how often do you click on a link that offers no value to you? You don’t. Your potential readers won’t either.
In order to become a successful lifestyle blogger, you must provide content that offers information or insight that web users can’t get elsewhere. Likewise, it’s important that the quality of your content is high, in order to convince visitors to keep coming back.
Step 4: Monetise your blog
Traffic alone won’t make you money – you need to figure out a way to turn those visitors into cash.
The easy option would be to opt for an ad-serving service such as Google Adsense, which will present image or text advertisements on your website and pay you a sum of money for every 1,000 page views or click that your site receives. Using this method, it will take you a while before you’re pulling in enough readers to make a substantial amount of money. However, there are other options.
You could try affiliate marketing, where companies pay you to drive traffic to their own websites and sell their products. While the return will largely depend on the price of the products that you’re selling, if you can become an authority figure in your niche, customers are likely to trust your recommendations, pushing up your earnings.
Step 5: Network
Networking is an important part of business. It is essential to advancing up the career ladder and growing your company. It is far more likely that you will stumble upon a great opportunity through somebody you know, rather than the brilliant work that you do. As a blogger, things aren’t much different.
There is a wide community of bloggers to help you settle in. Set yourself up on social media and try to connect with as many fellow lifestyle bloggers as you can. Not only will they provide you with helpful tips and insights into what tends to work and what doesn’t, but they are also likely to promote you and your work to their own followers.
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