A simple route map for making money from a blog

A few months ago, I gave a talk to a bunch of journalism students on blogging. At the end, we got to chatting and it turns out they were extremely interested in how you could make money from your blog.

For most people, it is going to be very difficult to make serious cash. But for those of you that want to attempt it - here is the process that successful bloggers seem to take.

• Create niche blog.
  By niche, I mean one that is highly specialised and ideally without too much competition.
• Build popularity
  Write interesting/controversial/useful/SEO optimised posts. 
• Do basic monetisation
  eg advertising, affiliate links.
• Syndicate your blog
  Make sure your posts can be found on facebook, twitter, etc and even Kindle. Anywhere people can be found - syndicate your blog there.
• Build an email list
  Use giveaways, great offers, team ups, swaps etc. 
• Guest post
  on other people's blogs or get them to guest post on yours.
• Create an ebook
  After a few hundred blog posts - create a book based on the blog content.
• Market the ebook through your list.
  If your blog is really influential - at least some of the press will do features on it/you.
• Speak out
  Use your by now influential blog/ebook to get speaking gigs (unpaid to start, paid later on).
• Keep blogging
  and turning out the ebooks to your peeps. Start selling specialist seminars. Consider making parts of your blog premium content for paid subscribers only.