Blogging is more than just writing. It’s also about marketing and promotion. There are several ways to promote your blog, but we recommend using social media as it allows you to promote your content on a global scale without having to spend money or take up much of your time. You can also use paid advertising like Google Adwords if you want to target specific users based on keyword searches rather than just general demographics (age range, gender).
In this post, we review the Best Books On Blogging For Money, the habits of highly successful bloggers, and what percentage of bloggers are successful.
Best Books On Blogging For Money
If you’re looking to make money with a blog, there are plenty of options out there. However, not all of them are created equal. Some techniques might be easy to implement but don’t generate much revenue. Others take more time and effort, but have the potential for greater returns. In this post I’ll walk you through some of the best books on blogging for money so that you can find what works best for your unique situation and needs!
The Secrets of Blogging by Paul Birch
The Secrets of Blogging by Paul Birch is a book that teaches you how to make money blogging. It’s written in a conversational style and reads like a friend telling you their story of how they became successful online. If you want to learn the secrets behind generating income from your blog, this is the book for you!
The first thing I noticed about this book is its conversational tone; it’s as if Paul Birch were sitting across from me, talking me through every step of setting up my own blog and monetizing it with affiliate marketing strategies. He includes examples throughout chapters that show how he started making money with his blogs and provides worksheets at the end of each chapter so readers can jot down notes or try out some tips before moving on to the next section. The entire process (from start-up to monetization) is outlined clearly and concisely—even beginners will be able to follow along easily!
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse
[ProBlogger](https://problogger.com/): Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse
If you’re looking to get started with blogging, the first thing you need is a blog. This book will teach you all about setting up your site and how to use it as an online business. It goes into detail about how to make money on the internet through paid advertising and affiliate marketing in addition to selling products directly on your own website.
Blogger to the Max: How to Build, Write, and Run a Profitable Weblog (And Make Lots of Money) by Lawrence J. Danks
Blogger to the Max is a step-by-step guide on how to start a blog, attract traffic and get subscribers. The author uses real life examples of his own success stories, as well as other expert’s tips and tricks.
The book can be read in 1-2 days and it has a lot of relevant information that will help you get started with your own profitable blog. Blogger to the Max covers all topics related to blogging: from finding ideas for posts to making money from your blog (AdSense).
Knockout Blogging Strategies for Indies by Bob Mayer
- Make Money Blogging: How to make money blogging and monetize your blog
- Traffic Generation: Learn how to get traffic from search engines and social media
- Subscriber Acquisition: How to get people to subscribe, follow, and like your blog so you can grow a bigger following
- Making Your Blog Stand Out Amongst the Crowd: How to make your blog stand out amongst the crowd in order for it to be successful
Bloggertunities by Kelly James-Enger
Bloggertunities is a great book for beginners. It’s very easy to read and understand, and covers everything you need to know about blogging for money.
- How to find the right niche market
- How to build your following
- How to monetize your blog
The Everything Blogging Book: Publish Your Ideas, Get Feedback, And Create Your Own Worldwide Network by Adam R. Bienko
If you want to learn about blogging for money, this book is for you. The Everything Blogging Book starts off by explaining the basics of blogging and what it can do for you. Then it goes into how to start your own blog and make money from it. It also covers marketing your blog, getting traffic to your site, and much more.
Making Money with Google AdSense (Making Money with Google) by Joel Comm and Mack Collier
Google AdSense is one of the most popular ways to monetize your blog. It was first launched by Google in 2003 and has since become one of the largest ad networks in the world. Today, it serves ads on over 2 million websites (including this one).
In Making Money with Google AdSense, Joel Comm and Mack Collier explain how to set up your own AdSense account, choose ads for your blog, and make money with Google AdSense.
Blog Marketing: The Revolutionary New Way to Increase Sales, Build Your Brand, and Get Exceptional Results by Jeremy Wright and Paul M. Robinson
Blog marketing is a way to increase sales, build your brand and get exceptional results. Blog Marketing: The Revolutionary New Way to Increase Sales, Build Your Brand, and Get Exceptional Results by Jeremy Wright and Paul M. Robinson is the go-to book for anyone who wants to learn the ins and outs of blogging for money.
The book covers everything from choosing a blog topic that sells to using social media marketing tools like Twitter and Facebook. It also has sections on email marketing campaigns and optimizing websites for search engines such as Google.
Blogging is more than just writing.
- Blogging is a business.
- You need to be able to market yourself, your ideas and your products.
- You need to be able to sell.
the habits of highly successful bloggers
One question I have seen many times is, what does it take to be a successful blogger? Is it luck? Is there something they are doing that maybe I am not?
Find out the traits and blogger habits the successful people you know and trust have in common. You may even be surprised at what you learn and can apply to your site today!
Successful bloggers all have one thing in common – they implement and follow specific habits. Just because they have figured it out doesn’t mean that it came easy for them.
Research shows that it can take more than two months to automatically turn a new habit into something you do. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it too! In as little as 30 minutes a day, you too can develop9 the same habits bloggers have used to achieve their success.
What are they? Below I’ve got 14 of the most powerful bogging habits to implement — sooner than later if possible.
Struggling to know what to focus on with your blog?
What to focus on, and the mistakes to avoid making, to turn your blog from a hobby into a business.
HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL BLOGGERS
1. Bloggers set goals
The most important way to become an effective blogger is to set goals.
Without them, you don’t know where you want to go. For example, it is one thing to say, “I want to make more money.” But, if you change that goal to “I want to make at least $1,000 a month and do this six months from now”, you’ve got an actual purpose.
Your goal needs to be SMART. That means it should be: Specific. Measurable. Attainable. Relevant. Time-Bound.
When setting your goals, make sure that you include all the requirements to turn a goal into a SMART goal.
2. They plan ahead
Successful bloggers know what they will be posting tomorrow, in a week — and even in a month. They plan, so they know exactly what they will need to do every single day. This comes back to reaching those goals.
When your goal is defined, it helps you determine what you need to do to reach them. The content you put onto your site is what it will take to help you not only achieve but even surpass the goals you have set.
Create a content calendar, so you know exactly what you will post and when you do it. This will help establish your consistency and set you up for success.
3. They follow a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule
One of the most important habits of effective blogging is to create a regular blogging schedule to know what you will need to do every day of the week. It will include writing and understanding where to focus your time and efforts to get the greatest ROI.
Consistency comes from publishing your posts on a specific day of the week. It also includes your social media sharing schedule and even when you send your newsletter.
Create a regular schedule, so you know exactly what you need to do every single day of the week.
4. They monitor what works (and what doesn’t)
Part of being a successful blogger is knowing what to continue doing, but even more, knowing when to stop. The simple way to do this is to watch your analytics.
Once a week (or even a month), dig into your Google Analytics. Learn what posts have done well and those that did not. If it performed well, come up with other ideas using the same format or concept as they will probably provide positive results.
If an article is not doing good (i.e., no traffic), maybe you need to change the title or the graphic. It may require updates to include better keywords or content. However, it may also mean that you should not do that again.
It is also smart to check the analytics of your social sharing accounts. For example, what had a good reach on Facebook? Which articles were pinned the most? Did you get many retweets on that recent post you made?
It takes time, but it is essential always to monitor what works and what doesn’t and then shift your goals or strategies to ensure that you are on the path you want.
5. They market themselves
You can’t hit publish on that new article and hope that someone will read it. That is not what professional bloggers do.
To get people reading and interested in what you write, you have to market yourself. First, it means pushing out your post on all your social media accounts. Second, it includes networking with others and sharing content. Finally, it may mean sending a new email to your subscribers.
The marketing of your content is almost more important than the content itself. If people don’t know it is there to read, they won’t find it on their own.
6. They know their audience
Effective bloggers also know who it is they are writing for. They know their audience.
You may think that you are appealing to 39-year-old work-from-home moms, but the truth is, more 25-year-old stay-at-home moms read what you have to say. That means you need to change your focus and know the person for whom you are writing.
The simplest way to find out your audience is through your Google Analytics. That site has so much juicy goodness in it; it’s amazing!
First, log into your Google Analytics account.Next, look at Audience and scroll down. You will see demographics, interests, geo, behavior, and technology.Now comes the fun part!
Demographics – This is the age and gender of your reader.Interests – Learn if they are into recipes, family, etc. This helps you know what your reader loves (so you can push out more of that type of content).Geo – Learn where your audience lives and the language they speak.
Now, you can better understand who is reading your blog, so you can create content that works for those already following you (even if it differs from who you thought your reader was, to begin with).
If you are trying to blog about blogging because you think it will make money, it may not. Not if your readers are there for fashion tips. Successful bloggers only blog about the topics they know their audience wants to read.
7. They never stop learning
The minute you think you’ve got it all figured out, and you don’t need to learn from anyone else, you stop growing. There is always something new that you can learn, whether social media, SEO, writing techniques, or monetizing.
Successful bloggers know this.
That is why they are always finding new people to read and follow. They are willing to invest in courses and books to continue to learn and grow.
8. They don’t compare themselves to others
There is a saying, “Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” I love this because it is true. Successful bloggers never compare themselves to others.
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When you start to do this, you begin to lose a piece of yourself. Instead of being genuine, original, and authentic, you will often find yourself doing what everyone else is doing. What makes your readers love you is YOU.
While following others can inspire and encourage you, never allow what they are doing to change what you do. Instead, take a new angle on a topic or go in a different direction. Whatever you do, don’t try to be someone else.
9. They treat their blog as a business
Successful bloggers want to continue to grow and make money. Therefore, they treat their blog as a business. However, when you change your mindset from being a hobby to making an income, your attitude and how you look at your blog also change.
10. They know their limits
Every time you blink, it seems there is a new social media platform popping up. It can be tempting to jump in and try to market yourself through all of them. That never works. All it does is stretches you too thin, and you fail.
what percentage of bloggers are successful
Years ago, in 2014, we set out to answer some basic questions about blogging, so we set up a survey. That project grew into a long-term gathering of blogging statistics, tracking the ever-changing trends of content marketing.
Welcome to the 9th annual blogging survey.
Each year, we ask 1000+ bloggers 20 questions about their process and their content. Then we analyze, make a bunch of charts and add input from a dozen content marketing experts.
This year we had 1016 survey responses. What follows are 26 charts based on those responses, input from the top industry experts and a set of blogging statistics that reveal some fascinating insights into an industry in flux, now more than ever.
We’ll start with the general success rate of bloggers.
Blogging is effective, but it isn’t getting easier
We’ll start with the general effectiveness of blogging. Because bloggers have a wide range of goals, we don’t define success, but rather simply let respondents report on their results at a high level.
Here is the answer to the big question, does blogging work in 2022? Yes. 80% of surveyed bloggers report that their blog delivers “some results” or “strong results.” The effectiveness of content marketing has remained steady since 2016.
But content marketing remains challenging. Most bloggers struggle to find time to create and promote their content. For many of us, blogging is not our only (or even primary) responsibility. Finding time to write and promote blog content competes with our other priorities.
In the last section of this report, we’ll look at differences in the challenges faced by B2B and B2C bloggers.
The time that bloggers invest in their content has increased dramatically over the years, bringing us to the question, how long does it take to write a blog post? In 2022, bloggers spend an average of 4 hours 10 minutes writing an article. That’s 74% more time than in 2014 when we first conducted this research.
For years, as we watched the rising time to write blog posts, we also watched the rising word count and blog post length. But the growing size of blog posts has finally leveled off. How long is the typical blog post in 2022? The average blog post length is 1376 words.
On average, blog posts are 70% longer than they were in 2014. But they are a bit shorter than last year, as if content marketers have finally decided that blogs are long enough.
But some bloggers write longer than others. While most bloggers produce articles in the 500 – 2000 word range, a small minority of just 4% of bloggers write long-form posts of 3000 words or more. These tend to be B2B bloggers. More on the B2B and B2C differences in the final section below.
So it’s easy to understand why most bloggers say that finding time is their greatest challenge. Here we see the ever-growing efforts required to maintain a successful blog. Bloggers are spending more time writing longer posts than in years past. How do bloggers find this additional time? A content strategy has to adapt. Something has to give.
For many bloggers, the answer is to blog less often.
More time spent writing longer articles less often. That is the context and the current situation for bloggers.
As time-per-post goes up, posts-per-month goes down. Bloggers are making a quality-over-quantity decision. It makes perfect sense. But is this the best approach? What does the data say? Which content strategies and activities correlate with results?
Let’s take a close look at the blogging statistics and see what’s working now…
Blogging strategies that are working in 2022
In this section we’ll look at how certain strategic approaches correlate with results. Each of the items here are aspects of content strategy, including content formats and promotion channels.
We’ll group these into six general content marketing strategies. These are all examples of successful approaches.
1. Gated guides & long form lead magnets
We’ll start with a look at content formats. The data reveals which are the most common formats and also which formats correlate with and self-reported success.
Not surprising, how-to articles are by far the most popular (76%). Most blog posts and content strategies are focused on practical utility and blog posts are intended to be useful resources to their readers.
Guides and ebooks are also a common format for content (43%) and around one in four bloggers use gates, requiring blog readers to enter an email address to get access to the second piece of content, usually that guide or ebook, often called a “lead magnet.”
But which content formats are the most effective? Of all the formats included as possible responses, guides/ebooks and gated content are the top answers among bloggers who report “strong results.”
This is clearly an effective strategy. Gated content is the key feature of marketing automation and PPC landing pages. These are systems that measure results so it’s not surprising to see these at the top of this list. This data also aligns with the trend toward long form content. Guides are usually long.
Obviously, gated content isn’t the only approach. We’ve never gated anything here at Orbit and we’re pleased you can read this report without sharing your email address. But we should all at least consider using gates and guides.
2. Consistent collabs with influencers & experts
This strategy centers on content that has multiple points of view. We see it’s effectiveness in the same data above. When we look at the formats that correlate with success, not far behind guides and gated content are interviews and roundups.
These collaborative formats for content involve working with influencers and subject matter experts. They require networking and outreach. They lead to content with multiple points of view. Collaboration makes for compelling content. No surprise, it’s effective.
The more often bloggers collaborate with influencers, the more likely they are to report success. The correlation is strong. Bloggers who “usually” or “always” collaborate with influencers are 70% more likely to report strong results.
How does a content program “always” collaborate with influencers? This blog is an example. Every article on this website is either a guest post or an article by us that includes at least one contributor quote from an expert. Journalists don’t write articles without sources; why do bloggers write articles without contributor quotes?
Quotes are great for content, but the data specifically suggests including roundups and interviews in the content mix.
Beyond content quality, working with influencers is often good for traffic as well, as the collaborators are motivated to share on social media. These social shares may attract real visibility.
For the last five years, we’ve added influencer outreach as a possible response to the question “how do bloggers drive traffic?” It is the least common approach to driving traffic, but it is the most effective.
Ironically, the two most effective traffic strategies, influencer outreach and paid ads, are the least popular. For years, they were on the rise. Then in 2017, they started becoming less popular. The most effective content promotion strategies are still in decline.
3. Evergreen, optimized & up-to-date
This strategy centers on SEO and ongoing updates of content. It’s evident in several data points in the survey. First, when we ask bloggers which sources of traffic are important to success, the top answer is organic search, year after year. Search engines are a powerful source of blog traffic, no question.
This does not mean that all bloggers are focused on search. 17% of bloggers never research keywords and only half of all bloggers research keywords for most of their content. Maybe these bloggers aren’t comfortable with SEO or don’t yet know how to research keywords.
But there is a strong correlation between more keyword research and better results. Bloggers who are the most focused on search (researching keyphrases for every article) are the most likely to report success.
Search optimized content tends to be evergreen, as in, the content stays relevant over long periods of time. Evergreen content often has keyword opportunities, unlike news, which is ephemeral and becomes dated quickly.
Content marketers who publish search optimized content are actually building libraries. Content marketers who cover the news are running publications. These are the two types of content strategies: libraries and publications.
So the keyword-focused, evergreen content marketing strategy has big organic search traffic advantages. But it also has one big implication. These articles need to be maintained, updated and sometimes, rewritten. So to capture the full potential of the approach, these bloggers need to go back and update older content.
Those that do are more successful. Bloggers who update old posts are 2.8x more likely to report strong results. That may explain the rise in popularity of updating old content.
It is a strategy that combines several effective approaches: evergreen topics, optimized for search and updated over time.
4. Research reports
There are really two kinds of websites. Those that are a primary source of new information and those that are not. The decision to publish original research puts the blog in the first group. It’s a content strategy that instantly creates differentiated, authoritative content.
It’s very effective. Bloggers who conduct and publish original research are 41% more likely to report strong results. This likely explains the rising popularity of this approach since 2018, although it’s leveled off in recent years.
The success of this strategy is easy to understand. Not only is original research automatically differentiated, but it has some specific digital marketing advantages.
This survey is one of many examples. The blogging statistics here have been cited by hundreds of publications around the web. Here you can see other examples of original research for marketing.
5. Super visual content
This is another way that some bloggers are differentiating their content. Like original research and long form content, it requires significant investment. Visuals are usually custom content, so adding a lot of them is not a common strategy. Most bloggers include an average of 1-3 images in a typical post. But a tiny minority are creating highly visual articles, with 10+ images per post.
Beyond images, video is the other visual format that can set a blog apart from competitors. The use of video content among bloggers has increased over the years, but not recently. That may be because it’s often a serious time commitment.
Is more visual content more effective? Yes. When we tracked the impact of videos on content engagement, we found a 4x lift to many of the engagement metrics for posts with added video.
The survey data supports this finding. The more bloggers add images and videos, the more likely they are to report success. Bloggers who use 7+ images per post are 2.3x more likely to report strong results. That’s a huge advantage.
One more data point that supports this strategy: the use of infographics as a content format correlates with strong results, as we saw above. Ironically, infographics are among the least popular content formats.
6. Ultra-high frequency
Another uncommon blogging strategy is to maintain high levels of output, publishing several times per week or more. The term “blog” sometimes applies to actual media websites that publish articles daily. We see these bloggers in the dataset.
Most bloggers (66%) publish weekly, monthly or somewhere in between. But a small percentage (15%) publish more than weekly. The data shows a close correlation between blogging frequency and success. The bloggers who publish 2-6 times per week are 50% more likely to report strong results.
Of course, high frequency isn’t a sustainable strategy for everyone. For many corporate and small business blogs, it’s just not necessary to have a high-frequency inbound marketing program. No surprise it’s not a popular approach. The trend is toward lower-frequency publishing.
But as more bloggers focus on quality-over-quantity, it creates an opening for the counter-competitive approach of high-frequency and “flood the zone” strategies. The correlation between frequency and results is clear.