How to blog about what you love and get paid to do it

Although there are many ways to monetise your blog, in this post I will be focusing on affiliate marketing through writing blog posts which is how I make most of my money online. I hope to open you up to what’s possible and show you that money can be made authentically as a by product of blogging about what you love rather than as the goal, and anyone can do it.

For those of you who have just started, stay with it, but bear in mind, making money from your site isn’t something that happens over night. More people than you think will give up prematurely. For those of you who have been blogging for longer, I hope this article gives you some ideas and a starting point to create a strategy for making money as a by product of all the hard work, love and energy you’ve already put in.

My blogging background

I started my blog Thought Brick almost six years ago with my brother Mike who owns vandogtraveller.com. Our blogs now make up a significant part of our incomes. I teach yoga and meditation alongside my blog whilst living in London, and Mike’s whole income comes pretty much from his website which he uses as a platform to promote two books he’s written and self published.

Recently, we thought we’d collaborate with the intention of sharing what we’ve learnt over the last five to six years as we’ve both discovered how much this can change your life and the way you view work and making money. I now really want to show you how to do it too.

This is my first blog post sharing tips and strategies for making money from your blog and I hope you find some if it useful.

Let’s get started.

Find your blogging why

If we want to feel an undying passion for our work, if we want to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY. — Simon Sinek | Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team

This isn’t an article to help you figure out your unique blogging niche, but I will be writing about this in another article as it’s so important, and something I really struggled with from the start.

To give you an overview, your blog’s niche isn’t just what you’re writing about; it includes why you’re writing to. This is what you must tap into and will make you feel so much more comfortable if you start to question your ability to write about something, or if you ever ask the question, but how will my blog stand out from all the many other blogs with the same niche? If you’re stumbling on this, you need to dig deeper into your unique reasons for being passionate about your subject.

So, assuming you have your site set up and you know what you want to write about, and why you’re doing it, you can move on to setting goals and a vision.

Set goals, write a story and have a clear vision

The next important step that I believe many bloggers might miss out on is having a vision for your blog. If goal setting makes you cringe, I’m with you one hundred percent.

I spent a lot of my twenties avoiding any kind of planning, preferring instead to be completely spontaneous. It’s only over the last few years that I’ve discovered that spontaneity, creativity, idealistic thinking, taking calculated risks and strategic planning go amazingly together and I have learnt to be a lover of the plan!

If you think planning is boring, I promise you, there are no SMART goals involved. I can’t stress to you enough how important this is though. It’s not about micromanaging your every step — think of it as creating a vision with a loose structure which will enable you to be as creative as you like within it. Without it, you’re just drifting aimlessly in space with no real idea where you’re heading, which is fine if this is your intention.

Here are three exercises you can do today to help create your blogging goals and vision.

Find your vision and follow it. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

1.  Write your blog story

You’re going to think several years into the future — three to five years — and write down where you want to be with your blog and what the outcome is. Write a descriptive story that you can really feel when you read it back. Talk about how visitors feel when they get to your site, how many people you’ve helped as a result of your work, where you might be living, how much money you’re making, what your day to day life is like…? Write at least a page for this and be as specific as you can.

2. Write out a list of clear goals

Once you’ve written your story, it’s time to extract some clear goals written in the present tense which could include things like My blog attracts over 20,000 unique visitors a month or I make $24,000 a year from my blog. Please don’t worry at this stage about how you’re going to achieve these goals — it’s just important to have them.

3. Write out some actionable steps you can take right now

We’ve gone way ahead into the future. Now let’s come back to the now. What small steps can you take right now that will take you in the right direction to fulfilling some of your goals? The key here is action. You need to take a little bit of action every day. Examples could be creating a freebie to give away when people sign up to your blog, setting up your mailchimp account, creating a schedule for future YouTube videos or writing a guest blog post. Revise your actionable steps weekly, but do not underestimate daily action.

What to do with your story, goals and actionable steps?

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. — Albert Einstein

The previous exercises are all about combining imaginative with strategic thinking. It’s very difficult to know all of the steps from the start, but writing out a descriptive story for where you want to be will provide you with a vision, plus it’s a fun exercise to do if you also like to daydream.

You can then focus for just a few minutes every day on your vision story. This could be reading back what you’ve written, visualising it in your mind’s eye, or creating a vision board to accompany it. Just get yourself very familiar with it.

The more you focus with feeling on this end result, you should start to see clues that will help bring you closer to your goals and story. With time, you should start to see, read, hear about things that are related to problem solving the goals you’ve set yourself. If this seems a bit ‘out there’, then it might help to see it like this:

Have you ever heard a word for the first time and then you suddenly start to hear it everywhere? Or maybe you’re looking to get yourself a blue Pashley bike (true story), and out of what seems like nowhere, you keep noticing people on blue Pashley bikes. This is the thought process to adopt when you’re starting your blog. Think daily about the story and goals you’ve written, and you should start to notice things that will bring you closer to where you want to be. Just remember to take action too! The key is to dream and do.

How to make passive income from your blog through affiliate marketing

It took several years before my blog made any money and I worked on it pretty much every day, so please don’t see making money from your blog as something that will instantly happen over night. With this in mind, you can absolutely make a decent money from your blog if you stick with it and remain passionate about your subject.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when you share a product or service usually through writing a blog post about it, social media, or through newsletters to your blog subscribers, and then make  commissions. You can then narrow affiliate marketing into low and high ticket affiliate marketing.

Low ticket affiliate marketing

An example of low ticket affiliate marketing might be promoting a book you loved reading through the Amazon Associates affiliate scheme.

For example, I’m going to share with you the first ever book I read on blogging and making money online called Laptop Lifestyle (this is an affiliate link), which I received as a Christmas present from my brother back in 2012. If anyone buys this book through clicking on my Amazon affiliate link, I will make a very small commission.

High ticket affiliate marketing

At the other end, you have high ticket affiliate marketing which would include products or services being sold for hundreds or thousands of pounds or dollars. Max Bounty is an example of an affiliate network that offers affiliates high payouts and commissions of over 50% on some items.

I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for several years now through writing about online courses that I’ve done that relate to the niche of my blog — personal development, meditation and life in general. The first course I ever did, I stumbled across it completely naturally because I was about to buy it and then realised the organisation had an affiliate programme and subsequently was given the course for free in return for writing about my experiences, which was great.

You can find affiliate products, courses and services in pretty much any niche if you start looking. Some organisations have their own affiliate programme and others use specific networks. ClickBank, for example, is a network that hosts many low and high ticket affiliate products.

While some affiliate programmes convert well, I do believe that a good affiliate programme is one that you love that relates well to your blog’s niche.

Why affiliate marketing?

When done authentically, affiliate marketing is an amazing way for you to make a decent passive income — which means making money while you’re asleep potentially. You spend time with a course, product or service that you love, write about it, and if others then buy it as a result of what you’ve written, you make a commission.

If what you’ve written about is timeless, you could still be reaping the commission’s years down the line.

As a result of affiliate marketing, I was able to fund my second yoga teacher training and live in India for three months whilst studying and get paid to do it. Now I’m expecting a baby, I will be able to continue making money when the baby is born which is great news as I miss out on things like maternity pay from an employer. If travelling the world and blogging is your dream, affiliate marketing is a great way to make this happen, and it’s not as far away as you might think.

How to do affiliate marketing through article writing?

This strategy relies on you having a decent amount of traffic, and ranking relatively high on a Google search. For example, let’s suppose you are writing an affiliate post about a horticulture course you recently did — people would find your article by typing the name of the course plus review after it, which would then ideally lead them to your site.

You might struggle to rank high in Google if you’re just started your blog but with time, if you keep at it, it’s very possible to occupy No 1 on a Google search for some of your articles if they’re well written and you’ve had your blog for a while. No one knows exactly how Google’s algorithms work, but I started to rank pretty well after a year of blogging back in 2013 and each year I see my traffic increase.

Here are some things to consider when you start writing affiliate articles

If you’re going to do affiliate marketing, make sure you have a real relationship with the product or service you’re sharing and that it’s really helped your life in some way. You’re more likely to rank high in a Google search when people click on your article and they actual spend time reading it, so your ranking will go down if Google see that loads of people have just clicked on your article and then clicked straight off it.

Creating your own videos is an additional way of holding people’s attention. Videos are also easy to share as you can embed them and other people’s videos in your articles.

For example, here’s a video I made a year ago which I use on one of my affiliate posts.

I’m not going to go into masses of detail about SEO because these days when it comes to good SEO in terms of content, it means — write naturally and well! I’ll write another post on affiliate article writing another time but I want to stress here that the days of keywords and keyword phrase stuffing are over.

There are other things that still apply such as relevant backlinks from other websites. Again, this should be a natural process. If someone likes an article or video you’ve shared then they might link to it from their site. Instead, you could try guest blogging as a way to naturally build relationships with other bloggers and build backlinks authentically.

Don’t let SEO overwhelm you. Google have got amazingly complex and sophisticated with their algorithms over the years which will work in your favour if you produce content people like to read. This is a beautiful thing because it means that you as an individual could rank higher on a Google search than a global company employing loads of staff.

How to find affiliate progammes?

I’ve mentioned two affiliate network sites earlier on in this post — Max Bounty and ClickBank which host a lot of different products in a very diverse range of niches. However, I strongly advise you to approach the world of affiliate marketing naturally. What have you done already? Which products or courses do you really want to do yourself? What works for one blogger, might not work as well for another.

You can then see if the associated company happens to have an affiliate programme associated with it, or whether they’re willing to give you the course for free in return for writing about it. I do think quality is better than quantity with this, so don’t just go out there and promote anything and everything, it has to have made an impact on your life somehow in order for you to write in a heartfelt way about it, so choose things that you genuinely like.

This of course is just my take on it, but the point of having a blog for many of us is because we are enthusiastic about a particular subject and want to share it with others. What we do in affiliate marketing is a nice way of reflecting this. So, to conclude, I believe a good affiliate programme is one that you love, have spent time with and will be able to write an amazing review article on. Searching your niche followed by affiliate programmes will help to give you some ideas.

Final thoughts

I hope this answers some questions you might have been trying to find answers to. It’s been hard trying to condense sooo much information but hopefully, it’s given you some inspiration and a drive to keep going with your blog. I’m hoping this will be the first of more articles (and possibly some videos too about blogging, making money authentically from your passions online and how the world of work and career opportunities are changing.

Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try to answer them, and as I am essentially moving into a new niche myself  — sharing my knowledge of what I’ve done over the last six years — I’d love your input. What else do you need help with when it comes to blogging about what you love and making money from it? Are there any tips you’d like to share with others who are starting out?

Thanks for reading and I wish you all the success you deserve with your blog, and would love to hear how you get on.