Can you make big money from a free blog? The short answer is yes. However, there’s a lot involved. If you want to know how to create a blog for free on Google and earn money from it, this detailed guide is an eye-opener before you hop on this lucrative bandwagon.
However, before we dive into the guide properly, I will address some things most guides won’t.
Why a Free Google Blog Can Be Lucrative
Let me start by stating that free blogs can bring you money.
Here are six reasons to back up my claim:
Some free blogs allow monetisation.
Even free blogs appear in Google searches.
People will barely be able to tell the difference between free and paid blogs.
You can design it to be attractive.
You don’t have to spend.
While you still have a lot to learn about creating a blog for free on Google and earning money from it, you could obtain all the required skills within weeks by purchasing my Blog Lifestyle Mastery course.
1. Some free blogs allow monetisation.
The biggest reason you can make money with free blogs is that some platforms allow monetisation in any form. Luckily for you, this includes Google’s Blogger — which seems to be your current choice.
A significant reason why people ask whether free blogs earn money is the blanket financial prohibition on most platforms. Google’s Blogger doesn’t have such bans.
Tip: if you have a substantial budget to run your blog, I’d suggest you opt for other paid online blogging platforms like Squarespace. This platform has juicy perks, such as the choice of purchasing website design templates created by others. Personally, I have an award-winning Squarespace design studio and boast over 190 custom Squarespace website designs.
2. Even free blogs appear in Google searches.
One of the biggest concerns of wannabe free Bloggers is whether their articles will rank well. Google clarified that free blog articles could rank high if they provide valuable content and employ proper SEO practices.
3. People will barely be able to tell the difference between free and paid blogs.
Although free blogs are at a slight disadvantage in terms of professionalism, people will trust any free blog that publishes quality content that solves users’ problems. Just focus on offering value to readers and following the right SEO strategies to increase your monthly pageviews. This is critical to earning money with Google blogs.
4. You can design it to be attractive.
Free blogs are pretty limited in customisation. But the available customisation options are enough to design a simple and catchy blog acceptable to visitors. The good part is that you can continue to improve your blog’s design as you publish content.
5. You don’t have to spend.
Spending money eats a chunk of your blogging income. Some hosts will cost you several hundred dollars a year, which reduces your overall income, especially if you live in a third-world country with a weak currency.
The hosting fee attached to some blogging platforms is one of the main reasons why some people question whether you can earn money with Google blogs. Thankfully, you don’t have to shell out to create a Google blog.
Monetising Your Free Google Blog
It’s pretty easy to monetise a blog today, free blogs inclusive. In the early days of the internet, just setting up a blog will cost you thousands of dollars, and monetisation was difficult due to limited options and the fact that most internet services were still in their infancy.
Despite the relative ease of monetising a blog today, most bloggers don’t tap the full monetary potential of their blogs. The reason is that most simply don’t understand or fully understand blog monetisation strategies.
According to reports, most bloggers make as little as $2,400 in their first year, while pro bloggers rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly. You can follow my step-by-step guide on how to create a free Google blog—outlined in the latter part of this article—to get started on your hopefully rewarding blogging adventure. Or, even better, enrol in the Blog Lifestyle Mastery course.
When to Start Monetising Your Free Blog
So, when is the right time to monetise your blog?
It varies by niche and strategy.
Some niches bring more money than others, regardless of your income strategy. The products and services of a particular niche may be multiple times more expensive than those of other niches, generating higher affiliate earnings, pay-per-click, etc.
How Does Your Target Monthly Revenue Influence Monetization?
When to monetise your blog also depends on your target income before monetisation. This requires a little maths.
Let’s say you want the blog to be able to dole out up to $200 a month before you implement a monetisation program. Yes, you read that correctly; free blogs earn money, but there are stringent requirements to meet first.
Assuming you intend to offer a course that costs $10 a month, you need 20 people to buy the course to meet your monthly target. If your readers become habitual visitors and are active with comments, it’s reasonable to say even 100 monthly pageviews will give the target income.
But if your income avenue is Google Ads and you only see 100 visitors monthly, you’re less likely to make $200 from that unless your niche has an incredibly high click-through rate (CTR) and your blog has a reasonable conversion rate. Similar reasoning applies when you rely on affiliate programs for your income.
There’s no free blog that you can’t monetise, but others have less wiggle space, such as being unable to monetise through ads, affiliate marketing, etc. You can use any free blog to advertise your freelancing services or sell courses that readers will buy. You only need to learn how to create a free blog and make money, which I’ll address briefly.
Monetisation Strategies for Free Google Blogs
In this section, I’ll discuss the various ways to monetise a free Google blog. You can choose to implement two or more income streams — the more, the better.
1. Offer a freelance service.
Before starting a blog, it’s believed that you have some knowledge, skill, or experience worth sharing. That will attract people to your blog until they take some desired actions that earn you money. This may be by clicking on ads, buying affiliate promotions, paying for your courses or freelance services, and others.
If you have a great passion for any particular niche, nothing convinces prospective employers like setting up a blog around that passion or writing extensively for websites in that niche. If freelancing is your intended or one of your intended income streams, then focus on a particular niche and publish some of the best content in that vertical.
The Blog Lifestyle Mastery course not only teaches and provides blogging resources but also explains how you can earn money with Google blogs.
Your blog is your portfolio and the best asset for convincing employers, primarily if you collect several client feedback that praises your handwork. I don’t think any seasoned employer will hire you without seeing a good portfolio.
Don’t wait for clients to find your website. There are many ways to reach clients — freelance marketplaces, online forums, QA platforms like Quora, Guest posting, and many others.
2. Join affiliate programs.
Do free blogs earn money with affiliate marketing?
Yes, they do.
Some affiliate programs pay hundreds of dollars for a single sale through an affiliate link.
You’ll see many products and services in your niche with affiliate programs. Once you start receiving visitors, even if you have fewer than 100 visits per month, it’s okay to start promoting affiliate links in your articles.
The income will likely be negligible during the first few months, but your participation will give you experience and insights that will improve your affiliate marketing strategy and skills. You can learn much about affiliate marketing in the Blog Lifestyle Mastery course and use that knowledge to earn hundreds of thousands later.
Some free blogs earn money primarily via affiliate programs, as little as it may seem.
3. Sell books or courses.
Even with just 100 monthly visitors, you can start selling items and services on your free Google blog. Your success with such a monetisation strategy depends on your knowledge and skill in the niche. If you’re an expert who publishes unique, robust content, people will be more willing to buy your books and courses.
Don’t overprice your products and services. It’s good practice to offer discounts to email subscribers or those who comment on your posts. You can host those products on marketplaces like Payhip, Gumroad, Amazon, etc. and link to them from your blog.
If you have an exceptionally loyal fanbase, sometimes you don’t need to write anything unique for your eBooks. Some bloggers just collect and organise all their previous blog posts into a single eBook and ask readers to pay whatever they want for it — quite an easy way for free blogs to earn money.
4. Partner with brands.
After growing a massive readership, try contacting brands about advertising their products. Some will be so desperate to cooperate with you that you’ll get away with charging much higher than you thought possible.
But to get the attention of brands, you must have a relevant and sizable market to which they can advertise their products. This gets more lucrative if you have a significant social media following.
5. Advertise with Google.
This is perhaps the most popular and easiest way to earn money with your free Google blog.
All you have to do is follow the steps outlined by Google to join the AdSense program. Following your account approval, Google will begin to display ads on your blog and pay you per click.
The most significant disadvantage of this method is that you need a lot of traffic to make any reasonable amounts. By following the steps below to grow your blog’s traffic, you should earn a lot from Google AdSense. Combined with the other monetisation options, you may make far more money than you ever thought possible from a free blog.
How to Create a Blog for Free on Google and Earn Money? — A Step-By-Step Guide
Creating a Google blog is quite simple. However, you must adhere to the blogger content policy and terms of service if you want the blog to last long enough to start generating revenue for you.
Here are the basic steps involved in creating a free Google blog:
Log in with your Gmail to blogger.com.
At the top left of the screen, click on “Create Your Blog.”
A title box pops up. Enter the name of your blog and click “Next.”
Choose a URL for the blog (note that a .blogspot.com extension is added to the address you specify).
Click on “Save.”
That’s it; you now have a free Google blog.
Your next step is to beautify the blog with themes and other features and start publishing. There are no easier alternatives for free blogs to earn money using Blogger than a good design and publication.
1. Customise the theme.
From the menu list on the left side of your screen, select “Theme.” The default theme for Blogspot is Contempo. You can choose a different one from the many options under the “Themes” menu.
In my opinion, the best themes include Contempo, Essential, Soho, Notable, and Emporio. These are the fastest themes and have virtually the same customisation leeway as the other themes. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insight to test each theme for speed and other factors and settle for the best.
After selecting a theme, click the “Apply” button to implement it.
Since a free blog is what you want, the list of free themes will suffice. While you can customise them to a level of average beauty, the most beautiful Blogspot themes require a one-time purchase.
So, if you were wondering how to create a free blog and make money, now it’s somewhat clear. However, there’s still a lot to discuss.
The HTML editor.
Blogger has an HTML editor with which you can further customise a theme. This editor is tailored towards people with technical skills like coding. It enables further customisation by altering the underlying code of the theme.
The need to self-educate.
No one will teach everything about customising a Blogspot theme in one article. You’ll have to learn by testing and previewing unless you hire a website designer. In fact, some things require online research to understand.
Again, you can’t learn all you need in one day or one week unless you already have experience running or designing websites. However, the good thing is that you mustn’t learn everything before starting to publish.
Do free blogs earn money even without much investment in educating yourself? Highly unlikely unless you were born lucky.
Tip: You can publish a post immediately after a theme is activated. All themes come with a basic design that allows you to publish a post without customising the theme.
2. Confirm search engines’ visibility.
Double-check whether your blog is set to be visible to search engines.
From the menu, click “Settings” and then under “Privacy,” verify that the toggle button is green.
You can access any desired changes through one of the items in the menu, provided such changes are allowed. From Layout to Pages, Comments, and Stats, everything your free blog needs is tucked under one of these menu items.
By following these steps, you’ll barely find the need to ask anyone: how do I create a free Google blog?
3. Begin posting articles.
Posting with Blogger is as easy as sending an email. The post editor has rich formatting features, allowing you to upload images and other files easily. Click “NEW POST” on your Blogger dashboard and then type or copy and paste whatever you want to publish.
Click on the pencil icon at the far left corner of the composer toolbar to change between “text view” and “HTML view” accordingly. The text editor contains all the tools you need to organise your article, insert links, add images, etc.
Make use of these tools like you would any word processing software. This feature allows free blogs to earn money via beautiful text formats.
It’s good to spend time exploring the post editor before you’re ready to publish anything. This will familiarise you with the tool, save time, and maximise formatting when publishing your first and subsequent posts. You can always preview your posts before publishing them.
4. Linking your domains.
You can launch a free blog if you don’t have the money to go premium yet, or because you just want to test the waters. However, a time may come when you’d like to expand the blog’s coverage. This is when you’ll become aware of some anti-income limitations.
At this point, a lot of people and many search engines are already familiar with or used to your free blog. While you can easily refer most visitors to any new website you set up, convincing search engines to transfer your blog’s SEO power to the new website will take time, and some SEO juices will drop along the way. Free blogs earn money but have restricted scalability, which often demands migration.
The best thing would be to link the two domains. It’s not a 100% SEO-friendly migration method, but the process should go through successfully. Moreover, it should result in fewer SEO disadvantages than just attempting to direct visitors and search engines to the new website.
How to Link Your Domains
Linking a Blogger domain to your custom domain is possible, but the steps are a bit technical and slightly different from host to host. You must set up your custom domain in Blogger following these steps before proceeding to your website host and completing the design.
Some website hosting companies have at least one detailed article on how to link your blogger and custom domains. Sometimes these articles are published by third parties. The most important thing is to get the guidance you need.
You should contact your host for instructions if you can’t find a complete article guide. So, it’s clear that “how do I create a free Google blog?” isn’t the only question you’ll be asking about Blogger. Ultimately, you’ll need to scale it via linking or migration.
To succeed financially at free blogging with Blogger, you need to receive enough monthly traffic. There are numerous means of boosting your blog’s traffic. The following sections will describe these processes in considerable detail.
How to Drive Traffic to Your BlogSpot Blog
Here are the most effective ways to drive traffic to your new or old Google blog without just posting on social networks:
1. Use Q&A platforms.
Plenty of free blogs earn money, thanks to Q&A platforms like Quora. This is possible as it allows bloggers to jump-start their website’s traffic and subtly sell services. Quora is getting more than 500 million views monthly; chances are, you’ll find several answerable questions related to your blog’s niche.
Providing helpful answers and linking to your blog is the best strategy for channelling traffic from Quora to your free Google Blog. Just be careful not to post duplicate content or use affiliate links excessively; otherwise, Quora will ban you from posting anything there. An excellent way to avoid this is to read up on the dos and don’ts of Quora before leveraging it for traffic.
Besides pushing traffic to your free Google blog, Quora will also give you quick discovery by search engines. Such accessible traffic sources make it possible to create a free blog and make money in no time.
I think Google somehow discovers the popular contributors and answers on Quora, Reddit, and similar websites that use an internal voting system. If you already have answers on Quora that people are benefiting from, users will start discovering your blog the first day you publish on it.
Suppose Google figures that you are a successful contributor on Quora. In that case, it’ll value the links you share because the assumption is that a helpful personality on Quora won’t usher people to a trashy blog or website. This will be a massive SEO boost for your free blog to earn money.
2. Comment on similar platforms or content.
Identify the largest online communities about your niche that allow commenting. You’ll find that people ask questions, share opinions, and even argue about things you understand. Join the community and share valuable insights without being rude.
Many websites and forums have millions of monthly visits, and most visitors usually read user comments. If you realise that a website receives many comments per blog post, such as 20+ comments, try to be among the first ten people to comment. This is an effective way for free blogs to earn money via diversification of traffic sources.
The lower you drop in the comments string, the less viewership you get. Most websites moderate a linked comment and may ban you or at least censor your posts if you violate linking rules. It’s best to wait until the community knows you before starting to link to your free blog.
3. Guest post on other websites.
Nothing rivals content writing when it comes to the difficulties of managing a website or blog. It’s a challenge that every web admin deals with. Therefore, if you offer someone free and quality content, they’ll likely allow one or two do-follow links to your free Google blog.
This means you can earn money with Google blogs via guest posting - this is an effective content strategy that will allow you to promote your blog and start making money.
As long as “content remains king,” guest posting will never phase out as an effective SEO strategy. Your new Google blog will receive link juice and traffic from websites you guest post on. This is why you mustn’t neglect this strategy.
4. Practice Whitehat SEO.
Discussions on Whitehat SEO require a separate article, but I must mention it because it’s crucial to your blog’s success.
Before you scribble down the first word of an article’s draft, conduct thorough keyword research and then analyse the keywords to develop the best content for readers and Google. I’ll still recommend the Blog Lifestyle Mastery course if you want to learn really fast how free blogs earn money with solid SEO.
Conduct keyword research.
Keyword research is easy, but you can mess it up without correctly judging which keyword groups to target. Since your blog is new and depends on Blogger’s generosity, your SEO position is relatively feeble. But that doesn’t mean you can’t rank naturally for some keywords.
Choose keywords with a low ranking difficulty even if their monthly search volumes are below 1000. Typically, each main keyword has several variations that may depict slightly different search intents. Combine these keywords in one article and separate them using paragraphs that address each search intent.
One way to find out these different keywords is through Keyword Sheeter.
Carry out keyword analysis.
Now that you’ve collected a list of related keywords, it’s time to see the results Google displays for each.
From the results, you should get a good idea of what Google thinks the search intents are for each keyword. If you think Google is wrong, still cover those search intents but focus on the ones you are sure users want.
Ultimately, free blogs earn money only if Google rightly categorises them.
Craft good titles and meta descriptions.
You’re unlikely to get the title right on your first attempt. But keep analysing Google search results and tweaking the title until you arrive at the best one for both Google and your readers.
Your titles should be descriptive and compelling. Similarly, your meta descriptions should have a solid call-to-action (CTA).
Format your content appropriately.
Nobody wants to read an unorganised wall of text even if it contains the info they want. Give your articles the best design you can.
Use as many formatting tools as possible, including subheadings, bullet points, quotations, italics, bolds, etc., to make the content appealing and skimmable. This will increase the chances of your free blog earning money by having good readability.
Use appropriate images after every 300 words if possible, even if such images are illustrative only. You can use free snipping tools to cut out pictures from websites or utilize free stock images.
Also, include one or two YouTube videos that’ll further enlighten readers.
Should You Create a Free Google Blog?
This depends on your present financial situation and long-term plans for the blog.
Tip: If you struggle with your finances, here’s a blog on how I became financially free.
If you intend to expand massively in the future when the blog succeeds, you might want to go with a paid blog. Again, the Blog Lifestyle Mastery course offers a lot of advantages. Notably, you learn about the blogging craft, including SEO, writing, promotion, monetization, and more.
In addition to these benefits, you’ll also have free access to all the tools you need to make your blog a success. These include keyword research tools, email software, premium themes, larger disk spaces, and more.
But if you don’t intend to scale up your blogging activity in the future, a free Google blog is all that you need to earn a decent income blogging.
Starting your blogging journey and creating evergreen content is the hardest part, but once you start to get traffic to your blog, it's easy to monetize your blogs.
Conclusion
This lengthy blog has delineated how to create a blog for free on Google and earn money. All you need is to digest the guide and implement the lessons one after the other to start making good money blogging for free with Blogger.
To become a pro blogger earning $100K a year, you need to learn a lot and work extremely smart — emphasis on “smart,” not “hard.” The Blog Lifestyle Mastery course is what I recommend for to-be bloggers because it shortens their learning curve and provides all the resources a blogger needs to make it.