Note: This is not my blog or content. Friend of mine is starting it and wants to eventually monetize it, but has no clue how. She'll be writing this no matter if she makes money on it or not... But if she's already doing it and can make money on it, why wouldn't you?
So... I understand that you make money on it by ad clicks.. But how? What is the mechanism for actually getting ads on your page? How do you get money deposited into your account? All of this is assuming you own the domain.
Google ad sense and ranking your site on Google listings through thorough search engine optimization aka SEO is pretty much the basis.
Every year or so Google changes up their algorithm, that's the best time to rank, if you can figure out what the new algorithm is looking for.
Depending on what platform she's using, there are probably already good tools for setting it up and checking your seo. Every page should have a long form keyword, that is repeated often. Example "cast iron cooking over fire" as well as several short ones, like "cast iron" or even just "cast". The more specific you are in your keyword choice, the better your chances of naturally ranking are.
Amazon affiliate links are another good one, but easy to overdo, and if you don't make enough turnover sales they'll suspend your account.
Traffic traffic traffic. SEO and getting eyes on the page can and will take more time than actually writing the blog.
There are others, some pay better, some don't pay, but good luck digging through pages of ranked blogs talking about them to find the actual useful information.
If it's just a personal blog, something like live journal used to be, there's no point. The past several years have seen big big pushes to become wikis instead of just blogs. Places that contain all or a vast majority of information on what the blog is about.
Go recipe hunting. All the paragraphs and paragraphs of useless E36 M3 above the recipe? That's there to help rank on Google and drive traffic and ad revenue. Same as with every other niche.
Understand you're a niche writer. Learn everything, share everything, and hope you are not in an over saturated niche to begin with.
Figure out the best ways to reach out on social media. But Facebook ads and use their information to narrow down the people that will get them as likely to click on it and check it out.
You really need to whore yourself out on social media to get traffic, not just new traffic, but repeated traffic, that will engage and share your content
From everything I hear, unless you get 6-7 figure imprints a month on your blog, you're not going to make it worthwhile cluttering it up with ads these days. Used to be that the recommendation was round 10k imprints/month, but I think that hasn't been true for a while.
Affiliate marketing seems to be one that works still, although how well depends on the niche. If, let's say, you can direct people to a product or course that pays you a 25% commission then you're hopefully in good shape, but at Amazon's relatively small commission you need a lot more visitors to make it worthwhile.
The product review niche seems to mostly have wandered off to the 'tube, that used to be a way to make some extra money as well, even if you grew big enough to have people send you stuff for free.
Sponsored posts are another one - if had the odd offer for that at least a while ago on my semi-dormant programming blog, but my take was always that I write whatever I want to write about as it's a hobby.
I'd look at a blog like I'd look at a book - it's something that can get you business, but it's hard to make it a business unless you're in the business of selling something in the first place.
There are tons of ways. Best of luck to your friend, but I think this is a question that isn't worth entertaining until there is some serious traffic flow.
In reply to ProDarwin :
Agreed, and the bar for "serious" seems to have gone up a lot over the last 2-3 years.
In reply to RevRico :
Also the "meta description" of the page really helps higher rankings using SEO as well.
"Meta keyword" isn't nearly as important now due to overuse of the same keywords on repeat.
About google rankings - what they're really looking for is good content and regular updates. Concentrate on that instead of trying to game the system. It takes a bit longer but you won't get slammed when they change the algorithm to cut out the guys who have gamed it.
Sell Tshirts etc
At the start you are not going to get thousands of clicks and each click is way less than a penny ,
You do not say what she will be blogging about , but she can also get a % of the sales thru links to Amazon ,
Its not easy !
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