Why, What & How To Blog Profitably (With 2 Case Studies)

Why What How To Blog Profitably With 2 Case Studies

Blogging can be about anything wholesomely valuable we experience in everyday life that gifts insights or saves others time and effort. That means we work hard to create or find solutions to problems and develop the habit to write or document that journey or experience down on a site blog to share with others. Evidently, the nature of the blog subject matters for long-term sustainability and benefits: Blog safely and sensibly.

Note: Blog was migrated from TakeNotesGuide.com and updated.

3 Reasons To Start Blogging

  1. Blogging Uniquely; Yours Truly
  2. Develop Your Writing & Presentation Skill
  3. Blogging For Profits

How To Start Blogging Quickly

  1. Jot down ideas anytime
  2. Outline
  3. Medium & WordPress Platforms

How To Blog Profitably

  1. Medium
  2. Ezoic and Adsense with WordPress

What To Blog

  1. Your experiences
  2. Millennial experience
  3. Products and services reviews

Please note that blogging can be started quickly but substantial profits will take time and effort: Blogging done right is certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme, but increasing results can be seen even within a year. Read on in the post for an expectation of a realistic timeline of how much profit for how much content in how long (results may vary).

3 Reasons To Start Blogging

Blogging Uniquely; Yours Truly

You may not have the writing flair to write as no others can, but if you can read this post chances are you can write, research, contemplate, and present your findings, insights, and recommendations, especially when you go THAT extra mile to create unique value that others appreciate. Give what your readers came for and more.

Everyone is different, and even twins can think and behave differently, so is your blog your experience your research your content your words.

If your hosting platform does not lay claims to your content, then it is your digital content right. We create our own digital footprint content, whether videos, images or just words, we have a unique product (blog) we can call fruits of our labor.

Develop Your Writing & Presentation Skills

Skills development, including writing and presentation, is about creativity and experimentation or practice, and probably a ton of it. Imagine the amount of time we invested since childhood to learn every alphabet and word by heart till we can well-versed with conversing and writing articles, why not put it into use by writing daily or regularly?

Both writing and presentation skills are boundless in their forms and expressions, limited only by our own imaginations and obstacles.

For example, even blogging to help others learn English or other languages can be a viable platform to grow your blogging audience.

Even vlogs or video blogs can be gratifying and successful when done right. For example, millennials may also be interested in various videos presenting different subjects or lifestyles that are fun or out of the norm i.e. outdoor life, building a cabin, or even living in remote places. Advertising channels such as Adsense on YouTube have really opened up various video topics to possible streams of good revenue and income previously unheard of.

Blogging For Profits

Top requirement: One year or more of blogging hard work for reasonable earnings.

Why blogging is a good business model?

Anyone willing to invest the time and work hard to write good content can start having their articles rank in Google is typically around 8 or 2 to 6 months or even sooner. That can translate to being able to start earning passive income in half to a year with advertising, depending on how much quality content is written. You are in control of your blogging business.

“Anyone with internet can work hard and earn legitimately with blogging”

Take Notes Guide

The workings hours are so flexible and anyone with a reasonable computer (even refurbished or old Linux laptops) and internet access investing the time and hard work can churn out quality content learning from a good and free YouTube video channel. Even mothers with kids can do it 🙂

If one follows and consistently presses on to write well with focused content, even with certain risks of failure (as with most or all businesses) involved, one may expect a good average income of a couple of hundreds or thousands in just 2 or 3 years or sooner. That means that even if we spend just one year in good niche blogging, we may yield a residual monthly income of a few hundred bucks. It is still profitable even with personal blogs (generally speaking, niche-focused is smarter in terms of profits).

The risks of not succeeding in blogging profit could be just the low domain name and hosting fees, and our time and effort in contemplating, researching, and writing. But we can learn from our mistakes and use the knowledge and skills acquired to start yet another better blog.

Please read on for more profit details and case studies later.

Note: Do not write superficial (as in just compiling some ideas from other sites mindlessly) content and never plagiarize.

How To Start Blogging Quickly

Anyone can start to blog quickly (after registration on the blogging platform) beginning with writing down their ideas on a piece of paper or digital note app, then organizing them and researching more, before publishing them as a blog post. Some may prefer to write and publish straight away.

Jot Down Ideas Anytime

Frequent contemplation and jotting down your ideas and piecing them together later can stop procrastination and divide a lengthy blog post (and yes Google prefers to rank long-form posts with better research and studies and so should anyone) into manageable parts. Develop a habit to recall or write down your ideas anytime, including while doing research. A pocket notebook or note app that supports fast access can be helpful. It is a time-tested method for note-taking.

Small pocket notebook

How to take notes or jot down ideas conveniently with Google Keep?

For the speed and convenience of modern note-taking and jotting down ideas, Google Keep is truly a gem, especially for those who may add or update information frequently and collaborate. Not only is launching the app intuitive, free, fast, and cross-platform, but it is also stable enough for personal use. For convenience, install the Google Keep app on your phone, with a Keep Chrome extension, and add a bookmark in your browser for fast access. Notes can still be taken even when Google Keep is offline, so users can be productive anytime jotting down ideas, points, writing, or even doodling. Bloggers may copy from Keep over to a new WordPress post for editing before publishing.

Google Keep Dark Theme @ Keep.Google.com

Click the Google Keep extension icon while on a webpage to save. Highlight some text and click the same icon will save the URL along with the text with just one click. Add a label if you like by clicking the label at the bottom-right (optional).

Google Chrome Extension In Use

If you are taking a lot of notes and keeping them organized, these 2 posts may help before transferring to your blogging platform to be published:

  1. Notion: 10 Ways How To Fun Up Your Note-taking Love ❤️
  2. 3 Powerful ⼒ Ways To Organize Your Notion Notes Clearly

Outline

Putting down the main points of your post down first and expanding on each point later should help to keep focused and get the post done faster or quickly. Outlining with an effective structure will display a clear and organized blog layout. Having an effective blog template idea will not only keep your workflow structured but significantly easier for your readers to navigate and read.

Keep the main points near the top of the page, and expansions of each point with clear headings below. Here is a possible blog post outline template.

Blog Outline Template

Outlining can be done easily on any note app or even directly on a WordPress post editor. Another free resource that may help you to outline and organize is an intuitive left-to-right Gingkoapp blogging template.

Ginigkoapp Free Blogging Template by John R. Meese

Medium & WordPress Platforms

As for the blogging platform to start blogging quickly, Medium.com and WordPress.com are all free blogging platforms readily available to start blogging quickly after registration.

As opposed to having your own hosted WordPress.org software blog (which can provide more flexibility and options) but there is no need to spend effort, time, and money on the domain name, hosting comparisons or fees, maintenance, upgrades, migration, and troubleshooting.

How To Blog Profitably

5 steps to make $1000 per month

Google listed 3 types of consistently profitable Adsense websites: blogging, forum e.g. catforum.com, and free online tool e.g. ezgif.com.

When traffic hits about steady 100 sessions or even less per day, we may monetize it for a minimum monthly payout of 20 USD with Ezoic, even though we may apply without minimum traffic requirements with Adsense and Ezoic.

If your starting goal is to blog profitably, it would be wise to start researching for good niches that you are familiar with. Lifestyle blogs are gaining popularity among profitable bloggers. Here are some niche ideas for considerations but one will quickly realize writing good consistent content comes much easier and practical with personal interest, knowledge, and experience of that niche. However, here is a list of 74 successful niche sites that may help you decide before covering what to blog later.

Case Study 1

A personal blog: ceos3c has about 350 articles (as of December 2021) written and switched to Ezoic from Adsense about 3 years ago has earned close to ~$700 for the month of Oct 2021 alone with a comprehensive post on the experience of it.

The difference between the earnings may be due to ceos3c posts being more random in nature (i.e. personal blog) while the above one is niche-focused with keyword research. Nevertheless, both are profitable.

ceos3c 2021 Ezoic earnings

Case Study 2

I know vlog may not exactly be conventional blogging. Vlog is like blogging with a camera, to me at least. Vlogging on YouTube can be a very lucrative business with hard work and the right (affordable) equipment.

Take for example this Japanese cat videos channel (tons of short cat videos) with no spoken human words or camera man’s face. It rakes up more than 62 million views (displayed in the channel about page below) since it started in July 2018!

A rough estimation with a median of $4 per 1000 views for 62 million (62M/1000*4) will yield about $248,000 in revenue. For the purpose of comparison, let’s average that to about $6200 (248K/40) per month and growing!

YouTube Cat channel About

Bonus

Below is a video for a good expectation of how much good unique niche content posts to write with keyword research for how long and how much earnings as suggested from an experienced successful blogger (results may vary with blogs). Please view the video for more information.

More than $4K per month in 24 months?

Note:

  • The huge jump from 150 page views per month on the 6th month to 5K-10K page views by the 12th month is a game-changing exponential traffic growth!
  • By the 18th month, a reasonable average income of $1.8K to $2K may be possible
  • Earnings also include affiliates i.e. Amazon
  • Battleshipping, interlinking, more content, answer targets, industry outreach are mentioned in the video
  • These results are for WordPress blogs

Summary: Below is a short profit comparison of 3 types of content

Focused niche WordPress blogPersonal WordPress BlogYouTube Vlog
> $4000/month by 2nd year~$700/month by ~ 3rd year>$6000/month by 3rd year
Please note results may depend on different factors such as the niche, the effort spent, and so on.

Medium

Medium is a popular blogging platform

Why blog on medium? Medium for profits?

If you write good quality content, Medium may provide for the highest-earning average earning potential (compared with Ezoic, WordAds, Mediavine, Adthrive, or Adsense).

Medium is a reputable writing platform that is the most profitable based on search results i.e. median $20.81 per 1000 views. To earn from Medium, there are requirements including having 100 followers, and there is a particular strict requirement that stands out: Only certain countries (33 including the U.S. as of writing) will be accepted. Otherwise, there is not much need to worry about installation, maintenance, or even monetization other than writing good content that people want to read. Anyone can register a Medium account to start writing.

Among some requirements including limited countries and 100 subscribers to start earning on Medium blogging exclusively, a disadvantage is the risk of putting all your time blogging time and effort on one single platform.

Bloggers may import content into Medium from elsewhere with a canonical link in Medium to avoid the Google search engine penalty. Exporting from Medium is also possible. But cross-platform content re-publishing may not be the best option in comparison to original and unique blog content of one clear single source.

Ezoic And Adsense With WordPress

TakeNotesGuide.com’s homepage: WordPress With Blocksy heme

WordPress.org (with a hosting company of your choice) may be the most popular blogging choice for most. WordPress software is free and flexible with freedom for customizations. However, this also means it can be time-consuming and bloggers can be bogged down with various technical and monetization issues over the years. Fortunately, these obstacles should not be overwhelming and may even provide learning opportunities for bloggers to blog about.

The Powerful Ezoic Dashboard With 9 Other Features Pages

Monetization venues with advertisements are varied. Based on some Google results, the most profitable and reputable one can be Ezoic for starters i.e. $11 per 1000 views. Adsense should also be on the list for beginners as well i.e. $2-5 to $30+ per 1000 views. Adsense on YouTube yields an average of $3-5 per 1000 views. Both do not have minimum traffic requirements.

WordAds i.e. $2.25-2.40 per 1000 views. For much higher traffic, Mediavine and Adthrive are popular as well i.e. $15 per 1000 views.

By the way, Ezoic (an Adsense partner) and Adsense can co-exist on the same blog. A neat trick I learned to maximize Ezoic ads exposure without having to risk losing your Adsense account after 6 months of inactivity is to set the Ezoic traffic percentage to 99% and the remaining 1% to Adsense.

A more comprehensive review of which advertising networks pay better may be found on this YouTube video. Here we can see that advertising on WordPress with Ezoic and others can be as or even more profitable Medium. Plus you do not have to be overly dependent on Medium alone for your content earnings.

Note: These earning figures may vary depending on factors including your niche.

Power and responsibility

Blogging is a form of power to reach out and share our thoughts but blog responsibly. For written blogs, ideas and words are your power. Depending on cases, we can do not mean we should. Blogging is fine as long as we do not hurt anyone and abide within legal limits. In fact, blogging should enhance or improve the value of life experiences.

Blogging also means the power to help others with our writing, no matter how insignificant it may seem but a meaningful journey of a thousand miles begins with a deliberate single step.

What To Blog

Your Experiences

Do not belittle or take general experiences for granted. From personal general experiences with drinking tea, learning how to solve a WordPress/App problem, to an awesome flowers parks walking experience that we can have on a regular basis.

The first example would be a problem-solving or troubleshooting blog. If you took hours or are adept at solving various problems, chances are that solutions would be useful and valuable to someone Googling it in the future. We may share this knowledge separately in one personal blog and another niche-related one.

For example, you ask yourself:

What Have I Learned Today Worth Sharing?

Take Notes Guide

Even a short but valuable post of at least 330 words may still be worth sharing if it helps someone out there searching for this information.

The second example is the SUN. The SUN provides so much warmth, light, beauty, and life that we cannot possibly praise the SUN enough. We can see photos of sunsets on Instagram but did we really not take for granted how much the SUN has given? Most people will not even give thanks to the SUN on any given day even though the SUN has given boundlessly.

Glorious And Splendorous SUN @ Sunset

We can offer heartfelt thanks, share pictures and praises for the SUN on a daily basis, just out of love for the SUN. Priceless.

Sunset, Sun, And Sky Photobook
Sunset, Sun, Sky Photos PDF book (Personal use free)
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Millennial Experience

Millennial experience values more what we are doing than what we own and is often shared visually on social media.

Some examples of millennial experiences include:

  • Instagram hashtaging during an event to meet more people
  • Renting scooters and touring
  • Hiking
  • Night running
  • Cafes
  • Morning weekday protein bar giveaways
  • Just instagramming a selfie to let everyone know

Did you have a pleasant millennial experience? How and why? Can you share for the benefit of others without expectation of any returns or the need for self-glorification?

Personal experience is perhaps the most important factor in the quality of life. The inner experience of love and peace triumphs. Beyond the limits of basic necessities, do we really need so much more material things to sustain life and the quality of happiness?

Take cats as an excellent example of such an explosion of love displayed for the past 2 decades. They may be pitiful but they can be genuinely happy and snuggle and frolic or manifest a very relaxed composure and blissful facial expression when owners or strangers pet them. It seems they have an inherent natural ability to make others think or say aloud “I love you!”. It is kind of amazing when one thinks about how special cats are, and understandably why so popular these years despite having been around since I-don’t-know-how-long.

Are you a man of few words or camera shy? Some content does not require speaking, an example is a vlog YouTube channel that features going around different places to connect and pet cute cats. Gratifying videos do not have to be epic.

With some niche videos i.e. cat videos, it is not even necessary to show your own face, but cat face is a MUST 🙂

Cute kittens playing

“Love and share the love for others.”

Take Notes Guide

For those who wish to create videos without showing their faces, especially informational ones, consider creating movies with Keynote. This post may help – 7 Easy Steps Guide: How To Use Keynote To Create A YouTube Video.

Products and services reviews

There is a lot of potential in writing individual products and services reviews and experiences with them. However, it may take time and resources to make extensive comparisons of products or services in the same category depending on the blogger’s personal preference and expertise niche.

“Go all out and write a product review”

Ricky @ IncomeSchool on ranking #1 on Google every time for product reviews

Like any other good blog post, products reviews should not be superficial and in fact, they should go the extra mile or miles by buying and using them yourselves before posting with authentic reviews that stand out from other sites, that means not just copying and gathering products specifications into one page but doing a lot more to deliver what YOU as a reader would choose to read: A really well-researched review with insightful and useful information you can hardly or ever find elsewhere.

For an example of a good Netflix movie or series for avid shows fans, can you offer MUCH MORE than a strong (and good) constructive opinion on the plot, directing, or ending? Perhaps you can somehow compile interviews and reactions from the public and critics with an engaging insightful poll on social media into a YouTube video? Can you contact the series creators for a behind-the-scene short interview for more interesting information? Can you provide more facts relating to the plot or reasons for how the story may have been developed and more e.g. what are some of the most fun childhood games from the Squid game or what games should be played for the next seasons?

Read here to know more about the fair use of movies or shows screenshots for blogging.

A word of advice for critics though: Please write honestly with the feelings of others in mind.

An example of a hugely popular Netflix series to review

Note: Products or services can get pricey when you have to purchase and test them out for some time, therefore certain personal interests, existing collections, or past experiences, and personal buying power should be factored in for such a niche.

Bonus: BuzzSumo

A search on BuzzSumo‘s main page will return free relevant titles with high engagements on different social media platforms and searches. This is useful for inspirations, ideas, and problems-solutions that people will want to read, and for you to write about.

Example screenshot of BuzzSumo

Some thoughts

Blog not just for yourself, but for the benefit of others.

Sometimes we may tend to overthink and overlook certain basic but valuable experiences we learned from. Good bloggers may develop an eye for content and take notes of these experiences for posting. A significant factor to a good blog can be excellent research that provides unparalleled or unique insight.

If you write good content that people want to read and live in the accepted countries, give Medium a shot and a chance to be rewarded well for blogging. Just focusing on writing quickly really good content on Medium may be an excellent way to kickstart your blogging journey for longer-term considerations including profitability. But banking on one writing platform feels like placing all your eggs in one basket, even though you own your Medium content and exporting option is available.

Alternatively, blogging on your own WordPress site can be the next better choice for flexibility and profit. Start with Ezoic and Adsense. And consider Mediavine when traffic takes off i.e. 50K sessions per month.

What good content to write about? For one, anything we genuinely think makes good common sense and provide value to others. Also, Google search suggestions of your niche topics and BuzzSumo may provide some inspiration and ideas. In short, write what YOU will choose to read – Useful, unique, and well-researched or superficial and unhelpful?

Blogging may not only be a low-risk (low capital investment) good business model for anyone but it can also be a future retirement fund too including singles and mothers.

Blog kindly and honestly. Good luck!

More And Related Information

Why blogging can be rewarding?

Mostly, blogging is hard work. However, like many endeavors, it can be satisfying to see your baby project mature into a full-fledged website with signup form, graphics, animations, and videos. More importantly, your blog can help someone with a problem or improve his/her situation 🙂

Can I take screenshots to use on my blog?

Here is a good article that should answer your question pertaining to the fair use of different types of screenshots.

How convenient is blogging?

Another good reason to blog is convenience. You can write good content wherever and whenever you want, even from a bed on your smartphone. You are not limited to fixed working hours or a workplace. One may even vlog with a smartphone camera for seconds of fun.

Convenience is an important word in this modern digital age. People use smartphones to get things done that they cannot or would not otherwise. Even a simple task as jotting down a good idea can be done in a jiff before we forget it.

Why promote a WordPress blog on social media?

A social media WordPress plugin is a good addition to a blog for ease of follows, likes, and shares. As for which social media, I believe the recommended way to go about this is to adopt the ones that you personally often or regularly use. Social media may reward those who are more active on their platform. An active user should probably know how effective his reach or post can be on a particular social media platform and optimize from there. The top two platforms that can be considered for leveraging are Facebook and Twitter where advertisements are also possible.

Twitter ads engagement rate can be much higher than Facebook according to this article.

What plugin to promote a WordPress blog on social media?

Ultimately social is free and works well with different sharing options in just a few steps.

What if I ran out of ideas or exhausted what to write for my niche?

Go off-topics may be fine as long as you are not overdoing it. Please read here for more information. You may also be interested in some ideas to reduce stress and prevent burnout.

How to quickly do a word count on WordPress post edit on Mac?

Click anywhere on the blog post in editing mode, hold down the CMD key and type the key ‘a’ twice. This will select everything on the whole post. And the word count will appear on the right side under Block.

Word count example on WordPress Post Edit

Also, a really useful way to count words while on Chrome is the free Word Counter Plus Chrome extension. It will reveal the words and characters count by just highlighting any text and right-click->Word Counter Plus.

Word Counter Plus example

What can be a realistic or modest time length estimation of earning a full blogging income?

Let us suppose living a frugal $2000 income per month life with 150 long-form posts written for a niche, at just a slow or modest pace of just a post per week, that would equate to 48 posts per year, and about 3 years of consistent writing and researching.

Also with blogging, one has the freedom to relocate to cheaper places and there is no limit to how much we can continue posting thereafter.

What can I do if my eyes feel tired from long hours of staring at the screen?

Strong Warm Daylight Lamp

Other than regularly consuming foods that are beneficial for the eyes such as blueberry and wolfberry, getting enough breaks or rest, a really good idea is to use a strong warm daylight lamp next to the computer screen, especially for long hours of daily screen staring. Interestingly, a strong warm daylight lamp may improve one’s mood as well. Not just mood, even concentration, appetite, and other aspects of life can be influenced by the type and amount of lighting according to research.

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