Making your Blog in the Make Money Online Niche
This is the second in my new series of posts about how to start your own blogging business. The first post touches on how to choose your niche. Please check out how to determine the best profitable niche for your blog.
This post talks a bit about the Make Money Online niche, and gives some recommendations for how to legitimately and honestly make money online.
It’s hard work trying to make a blog work. Anyone who’s tried to blog and to monetize their blog will have stories about how hard it was in the beginning. Being a newbie in this industry is really difficult.
Here’s how it goes:
You choose your subject (your “niche”). You make your blog. You write your heart out.
You go through a MASSIVE LEARNING CURVE and realize that THIS IS REALLY HARD.
You pray and hope and market and advertise to try and get traffic to your website. You pummel Pinterest, tweet till you’re exhausted, Photo-bomb Snapchat and the-other-one, G+, FB and every other imaginable Web 2.0 site you can manage, throw out comments on every forum and post you can find and you wait. You might even buy solo ads.
Then you try to convert these visitors to subscribers and hope and pray that you can make some money from this blog you’ve thrown your heard and soul into.
It doesn’t always follow that writing a blog will lead to sales. Sadly many bloggers fail terribly or never get their blog off the ground.
The Internet Marketing Niche
I’ve noticed that many Internet Marketers recommend starting out in your blogging journey by targeting the Internet Marketing niche or the Make Money Online Niche or the How to make money blogging niche.
These are huge niches, full of people trying to find the next big thing that will explode their blogs with internet millions.
And full of people trying to convince you that you will be able to explode your blog with internet millions.
You only have to look at the explosion of blogs which are writing about how to make money online or how to start a blog or how to start a money making blog.
My Pinterest account is overflowing with pins/posts on this same subject. So apparently it’s the easiest niche to make money in.
You create a blog, write some content, miraculously get traffic, get them on your mailing list and then you’ve sucked them in and you can sell them affiliate products that will “help” them in the Internet Marketing niche. And what are these affiliate products in the Make Money Online niche?
Shiny Objects.
Basically, once you have subscribers, the most common path is to sell to your mailing list more Shiny Objects. Because they’re gullible and they have Shiny Object Syndrome. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t really feel honest to me to be promoting things to other people who can probably not afford them, who are wanting to find something to help them make money, only to file the product on the computer and move on to the next product.
Sure… it’s a great way to make money. But I have more integrity than that.
If you’ve been around the Make Money Online niche for any length of time, you know about Shiny Object Syndrome.
It’s gripped just about every marketer who is starting out and trying to make headway by themselves in the internet marketing world. You think you’ve found something that will make you your first (or next) hundred (or thousand) dollars and you buy it, try it (or not, which is often the case), and then it either doesn’t work fast enough for you or you give up before even trying it, and you go on to the next thing – the next push-button software / automatic way to millions – and on and on and on it goes.
Suddenly, you’re gripped by the SHINY OBJECT SYNDROME.
Should you or should you not, get into the Internet Marketing or Make Money online niche when you create your own blog?
It’s a hugely competitive niche. If you’ve done your keyword research (like every good marketer will tell you), then you know that competition is fierce in this category.
And you’ve probably heard that you should (this old chestnut) target low competition keywords in order to get your webpages and posts noticed.
I don’t believe in targeting keywords or going after the low-hanging fruit (low-competition keywords / long-tail keywords). Heck, I don’t even believe in keyword research. I believe in writing from my heart, from my soul and giving my audience my authentic voice. Geez, if my audience doesn’t like me – the authentic me – then I won’t be able to sell them anything, will I?
So, if you’ve decided that you would like to get into the Make Money Online niche, please be a reputable marketer. Only recommend the products you have bought and tried yourself.
And then – you have all of that competition!
It’s the most competitive niche to try and succeed in, so why do you think you have any chance of success?
Below I’d like to share with you a quick video by Igor Kheifets – a very well known marketer in the Internet Marketing niche. I’ve known of Igor for about 4 years and I respect him. He is well known for his Solo Ads and his training and mentoring, but he also gives really great advice in this video and many others available on Youtube – that you shouldn’t try to compete in the Internet Marketing Niche.
You should ONLY try to “create content” when you’re dabbling in the Internet Marketing Niche, Igor recommends.
Igor thankfully also puts out a lot of videos about content creation.
I firmly believe that his idea (to make more and more good quality content for your website, supported by YouTube and Vimeo and all the other social media sites) is the way to go.
I admit that I struggle to put out the amount of content that I want to. I’m sure most bloggers do. Years ago I tried to “make it” in the Internet Marketing niche – it’s a grimy world, full of black-hat tactics and techniques. And Shiny Objects.
There are so many tricks you could use to make it in the Internet Marketing niche, but as Igor explains below, the most important thing you can do to stand out in your niche is to MAKE CONTENT.
Igor delivers yet another kick ass message. About how to succeed in the internet marketing niche, when there is such huge saturation.
He says you should breathe a sigh of relief as he gives you a great tip for any newbie marketer/blogger.
“You don’t
have to compete.
All you have to do
is create.”
For as long as you just remain a link in a marketplace festered with links you can’t succeed.
Make yourself stand out – Igor recommends you provide “infotainment” (love that word) – and by doing so, you become your own category! No one can do YOU as good as YOU.
Don’t worry about trying to get into the tiniest niche, or about using the longest tail keywords. Change yourself from being a competitor to being a creator and put out amazing value.
Put out information and value and you are now becoming a category of your own. No-one can do YOU. Wake up to the fact that there is no such thing as competition if all you do is CREATE.
So that’s his tip for making your website attract traffic and be loved by Google.
But…
There are many extra steps you have to take to make your blog in the Make Money Online niche actually make you money.
Please let me know in the comments.
I’d love to hear your experiences in the Make Money Online or Internet Marketing or Affiliate Marketing niche.
Until next time…. when I post Episode Three in my blogging series.
Where to now? Pick a page!!!!
I just started affiliate marketing a month or so ago, and have already made $400! It’s really easy to do, especially if you stay genuine and passionate about the products you’re sharing with your readers.
Alexis, you’re already on the right track, good on you for getting started. It amazes me that so many people think this is impossible and aren’t even prepared to try. Well done and thanks for stopping by.