“My ‘Big Why’ was freedom. I wanted to choose how I worked, when I worked and with whom I worked. I woke up one day, and I was living the life I had always dreamed of “
– Lori Ballen
If you found this guide, you are probably searching for how to do affiliate marketing to earn additional income. Affiliate Marketing is when a blogger, content marketer, or influencer sends a customer to a product or service and receives a commission. This is most often done through web links and coupon codes.
If you are looking to build a course to sell online, finding a platform that works for you is essential. In this guide, we will compare several platforms and show Teachable vs. Kajabi vs. Thinkific, and Ontraport course platforms. One of my income streams, is course sales. You might be surprised at how you can turn a blog into a course.
Make more money as a travel blogger. Monetize your blog with ads, sponsorships, courses, affiliate income, or through one of the many other ways.
By the time we’re done with the comprehensive guide to starting a blog -you’ll have the tutorial to make it happen! From choosing a blog platform, to content creation, to making money with your blog, it’s all here.
Let’s do this!
“I didn’t even realize what I was building at first. I taught my favorite tech tools, and had a few affiliate partnerships. One day, I realized it was a 6-figure income. That was the day my life changed.”
– Lori Ballen
My income streams are primarily affiliate models. In a nutshell, it means that I generate the traffic that influences a buying decision, and I make money. I don't meet with clients, or team members, or have a staff. It's just me, with some quality strategic partnerships.
My name is Lori Ballen, and I'm a Blogger.
In this video, I share how I took 2 months off and still earned $50,000. No Employees, No BS. My name is Lori Ballen and Own 2 distinction businesses. One focuses on real estate, and the other on making money from affiliate marketing through blogging, videos, courses, and webinars.
“I credit my success to focus, discipline, and to honing my craft. “
– Lori Ballen
Learn SEO by diving into the SEO glossary with links to learn more about each topic.
Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by the SEO company Moz. The score, which ranges from 1 to 100, predicts the likelihood of the pages of a website ranking on Google.
When developing a website, you should plan an internal linking strategy so that visitors can easily access all of your site’s pages. It's good for your visitors, and for Google. This guide explains how it's done.
Hi! I’m Lori Ballen. I teach bloggers how to make more money online. If you have the desire to start a blog, grow a blog, or monetize a blog, this website is for you. If you are a content creator, looking to monetize a podcast, Youtube Channel, or start your own business, this blog is for you. I enjoy marketing, and love to poke the box, test and measure, prove strategies, and then teach them. Welcome to Ballen Blogger.
Hi! I’m Lori Ballen. I teach bloggers how to make more money online. Subscribe to get my guides to generating more traffic, more leads, and more revenue.
Make More Money Online
If you are learning how to start a blog, you are in the right place. Here, you’ll learn how to start a blog, how to grow the blog, and how to build a tribe that follows your blog and supports your brand and business.
This beginners guide to Affiliate Marketing will teach you how to make money online by referring customers to affiliate offers. This guide is great for bloggers, creators, and influencers who can influence buying decisions.
Meet Jarvis. He's an AI writing assistant that is here to guide you as you create blogs, product descriptions, blog headlines, respond to reviews, create Facebook Ads and more. Here's your complete guide.
Best of Ballen Blogger
Our list of 75 Podcast Topics for this year is filled with fresh and engaging topics that are sure to keep your podcast audience coming back for more.
Enjoy.
Check out our list of the best free and paid teleprompter apps for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac so you can speak with confidence while appearing spontaneous!
We dig deep into the ins and outs of creating and selling no content books, and low content books through Amazon via the KDP program.
This vs. That
Today, earning revenue from your website through ad networks is easier than ever when you compare ad networks like Ezoic vs. Monumetric.
While StreamYard and Zoom are online video software services, comparing them is not exactly apples to apples. Today we're going to pour over their differences.
You can expect to generate more sales for products that feature an Amazon’s Choice badge. For any given search query, Amazon will award a Choice badge to a single product. The selected product will outrank most or all other products for the search query, resulting in more views and sales.
To convince prospects to act, you must be creative. The CTA is your closer. So, here’s a brief on how to use Instagram CTAs for massive engagement and conversion rates.
Using child pages with WordPress will allow you to neatly organize your website’s content and improve its SEO.
These strategies known as search engine optimization or SEO can help your blog rank on Google’s Search Engines for a particular keyword or topic searches (queries) on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. This is ‘Blog SEO’ for beginners.
When doing keyword research, there are inevitable mistakes that marketers need to avoid if they want to find the right terms and use them in their content.
In this article, I’ll show you how to perform keyword research, how to discover top keywords with keyword research.
Blogging is very much still alive. It’s processes change over time, but blogging still drives brand awareness, traffic, and leads.
I’ve shared how I make money as a blogger through ads (publishing), affiliate links, courses and webinars, speaking/coaching, sponsors, and services. Now, let’s look at other current bloggers that share their income reports. So how do bloggers make money?
Many Ways:
As one of the top tools for building websites, it is easy to set up a WordPress website in 30 minutes or less. Take a look at the steps below! If at any time you feel overwhelmed, contact my brothers. They are WordPress Developers and can help you with your website. 702-917-0755.
If you are confident that you can follow the process to build a WordPress website yourself, you can learn how to build a WordPress website here.
A blog is channel where someone posts content on a regular basis. A vlog is video, and a blog is generally a website, or social channel.
A blog can be news related, with frequent posts, or informational.
There isn’t one way to write a blog post. However, there are a variety of blog formats, and framework.
Generally, a blog consists of a Title, intro paragraph, table of content, multiple subtopics, images, video, and a summary.
Starting a blog may be exciting and gratifying, but it can also be time-consuming and frustrating if you don’t start it with the proper sort of blog.
I’m talking about one that you can monetize. Both are essential, in my opinion.
Some bloggers operate their own personal blogs. Some are meant to be kept as a diary. Others are intended for public viewing only, while others are simply for friends and relatives. All of them have a place in the internet world, but not all of them make money!
Here is your road map through the most common types of blogs:
These come in a variety of flavors, some have solid themes, and others are less so. They are meant to be precisely what they sound like: very personal blogs about a person’s lifestyle – cooking, fashion, parenting tips, cars, anything that involves the blog owner’s day-to-day life is fair game.
Income often comes from display ads on pages or blog posts that have been sponsored by advertisers who want to reach your readers with their products. These types of blogs usually attract a wide range of advertisers.
Sponsored posts may also appear within the content or at the end of a post as an “advertorial.”
Money blogs are similar to lifestyle ones but have a theme that centers around, you guessed it, money. They often cover topics about saving or earning more of it. These may include “best credit cards” tips and ideas for creating passive income.
Advertising on finance blogs is mostly through banners placed around the main content page. Usually, the ads are related to the topic being discussed in that post. Income can vary greatly depending on click-through rates.
These blogs provide information about new gadgets or “must-have” products within a specific category like electronics or software. The authors might be experts in this area and write posts based on firsthand experience using various products available today.
Tech bloggers often make extra income from affiliate links, display ads, and sponsored posts. Many companies want to get the word out about their new products – this is a great way to do it!
These blogs cover a particular topic in great detail. They are meant for an already established audience looking for useful, informative content on the subject matter.
Income from these sites is usually generated through display ads and sometimes affiliate links if the website is about a particular product or service related to the blog post’s theme. These blogs can also be monetized through sponsorships, ad networks, video syndication, and paid posts.
This type of blog covers topics that are often found in tabloids or entertainment news magazines like celebrity gossip, red carpet photos, and movie trailers.
Topics may include reality TV stars or pop culture phenomenons like “Fifty Shades of Grey.” If you’ve been engrossed in the tabloids at your local supermarket checkout line, you know what this type of blog is about!
Often, there isn’t much income coming from entertainment blogs – unless the blogger has an advertising deal with a company like Ezoic or Google Adsense.
The website may operate on revenue generated by display ads and banner networks. In addition, some bloggers are able to monetize their audience through sponsored posts or pay-per-click advertising.
If you’ve ever wanted to write about your furry friend, then this is your chance! Pet blogs are similar to lifestyle or entertainment types of sites, but they often cover topics around the readers’ pets.
This type of blog covers anything from training tips to “celebrity” pet news and product reviews. Because pet owners are more likely than any other demographic group to be internet users, these blogs can do well on the web.
These sites usually come in banner ads and sometimes pay-per-click ads if the website receives enough traffic. In addition, some bloggers may also monetize through affiliate links or sponsored posts.
The small pet niche is a popular, income-producing type of blog. The writers cover topics like “what does a rabbit eat” and “where did my turtle go.”
Choose a topic that you know you can blog about daily if necessary. Blogging burnout is a genuine phenomenon!
Don’t worry about coding. You can have someone design your blog for you to fit your personal style, or you could even try blogging on an already-existing blog platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Weebly.
My brothers Jeff and Paul Helvin at Ballen Brands design WordPress blogs.
You should take it up as a hobby to learn HTML and CSS, but if you really want to start your blog quickly, skip the coding. It’s not worth the time until you know that blogging is really something you want to do for yourself.
Plus, it can be intimidating to try to learn without any context or understanding of why doing so will benefit you.
You can use a free WordPress platform for your blog, but if you want to use your blog for commercial purposes – whether it is through ads or by selling products – then you will need to pay for the WordPress platform. The free version of WordPress is open-source software that encourages users to create personal blogs and websites that are not for profit.
You’ll pay for a host for your WordPress website. A host is an internet server that holds your website files and allows people to access them on the World Wide Web. A host charges a monthly fee based on how much storage space you need for your website.
There are many hosts you can choose from, including big ones like WPEngine or GoDaddy, which also provide top-notch tech support should something go wrong with your blog. Smaller shared hosting plans like the ones at Bluehost tend to be cheaper than large ones because they offer less storage space and bandwidth (how much data you can transfer in a month). They usually run between $6 and $20 per month.
Be careful about using shared hosting plans. You may suffer from speed times that are too slow.
You can also install premium themes which usually require a license order to be downloaded; these typically cost between $35 and $100. Themes are used to design your blog’s look and feel.
There are thousands of free themes, and some offer paid upgrade options. It’s probably best to start with free themes and work your way into paid themes as you discover more about WordPress web design.
There are also WordPress plugins that work with one-time payments or subscriptions.
A WordPress Plugin is software that you can add to your blog to add functionality.
For example, I use a plugin called Link Whisper, which is an internal linking tool that provides recommendations for linking within my blog. It’s a one-time payment each year. While not essential, the plugin aids me in performing daily SEO tasks on my blog.
You can create a successful blog without Facebook, yes. There are many ways to generate traffic to a blog.
When you think of the success stories of startup companies and bloggers, many of them didn’t use social media as a starting point for their websites. In fact, when I started my first blog, there was no social media! (Can you imagine?)
My aim was to be on the first page of Google. It was an exciting period for me as I dominated search with a blog.
I was writing for a few hours daily. I didn’t have much competition! It’s tougher now with so many bloggers.
Facebook is not the only way to promote your blog post socially. LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, Instagram, etc. are some other options you can try.
Youtube is an excellent channel to start a blog. With its large audience and new content every day, you can keep your blog up to date with videos on a regular basis. If you are comfortable with video or willing to get uncomfortable on camera, this is a great way to start a busy blog.
In addition, Youtube blogs can be monetized. Once you reach 4000 hours of watch time (people watching Youtube because they found your video first), and 1000 subscribers, you can apply to the Youtube Partner Program. This program allows you to monetize your blog with ads and gives you a cut of any sale that happens through an ad click.
You can also monetize your Youtube channel with affiliate income, sponsorships, product or service sales, merchandise, donations, and crowdfunding (crowdfunding is when you ask your viewers to support you with donations or sales of items).
There are downsides to using Youtube for your blog, as well.
First, it is very competitive. Thousands of people try to make money on Youtube every day, so it can be difficult to get noticed.
Second, even when you do make enough money, the payment structure has a lot of rules that have made changing earnings almost impossible.
Thirdly, YouTube does not give bloggers control over their own pages–it all belongs to Google. So if anything happens that makes them unhappy, they’ll just remove everything about you from their site without warning or explanation because “they can.”
But if these drawbacks don’t concern you, you can make a video blog on Youtube.
