There are a lot of ways for you to earn money just by sitting at your home. In today’s world, there are many ideas you can opt for and earn from them. Some jobs from home include working for someone else but you can also start your own business as an independent entrepreneur. You can earn a great income by starting a blog or YouTube channel. In this article, we’ll discuss how to start a blog or YouTube channel for beginners.
Blogging is exceptionally a rewarding skill. You can start blogging easily by just having a laptop, a stable internet connection, and a creative mind. If you have writing skills and have a great command of the English language you can start your blog within just minutes. Select a niche of your interest and start creating content on that specific niche. You can grow your blog by staying active and posting content regularly. Then it will surely be a game-changer for your life and it will allow you to make thousands of dollars a month. There are some great platforms like WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and Medium.com where you can easily start your blog.
Starting a YouTube channel can also be beneficial for you. If you are a beginner and thinking about starting a channel in the future so my advice is to start it now, not tomorrow. For that purpose, you just need a creative mind. Choose a suitable niche according to your skills or interests and just give it a start. You don’t even have an idea how it will help earn money for you just by sitting at your home.
So, the first thing to start with saying is that if you are thinking to start a blog or a YouTube channel, you can start either one. But you can’t start both at the same time. Because that’s not going to work for you. So you have to start one of them. Let’s discuss the pros and cons of both.
Blogging:
First of all, we are going to discuss some pros and cons of blogging and how beginners should go ahead and start a blog.
Pros:
- Cheap and Affordable:
Blogging is a very cheap and affordable source of income. If you are a beginner then go ahead with free sites where you can start blogging. At the start, there is no need of buying a domain or use paid sites for blogging if you can’t afford them. You can start with free sites like Blogger.com. So you will be able to get started and have something you will call your own.In this way, Blogging will prove a low hanging fruit for you.
- Suitable niche:
If you choose a perfect niche that meets your interests completely this is just a great thing for your blogging career. Do you love writing your favorite stuff? That’s just perfect! Just write down the topics you are interested in and kind of see if anybody likes it. But if you are not good at writing and you want to make it better, don’t worry at all. Remember you can’t be perfect at it. You can make it better by improving your communication skills.
- Monetize your blog:
This is another positive thing about blogging that you can monetize your blog. You can say that most people start their blogs just due to the reason that later, they can monetize them and earn a great amount of income by placing ads. You can go ahead, start a blog, can post regular content. When your blog has some good quality, original content related to your niche you can apply for monetization. After getting Approval from AdSense, your blog will start generating income.
Cons:
Earning money from blogging isn’t that much easy at all, blogging has some cons too that can create difficulties in your blogging career.
- You have to generate traffic:
All the traffic to your blog must be real and generated by you. A ton of people will create content related to your niche that will get ranked. So, you have to do proper SEO of all your blog posts. First of all, do keyword research to find the keywords to target with high monthly search volume and high CPC. After keyword research, write down the content with on-page SEO and then post it to your blog. This isn’t just enough. You’ll have to do promotions, back linking, and social sharing of your content to generate high traffic and to get your posts ranked against your competitions.
- Time Consuming:
Blogging is time-consuming, for sure. To create high-quality content and to generate huge traffic to your blog is surely a time-consuming process. Such as, firstly when you start a blog you are going to set up everything. Then you have to spend time on research and creating content. Then you have to put some more effort to make it look pleasant to the eye. And at last, you have to do SEO and promotions of your content and have to spend further time on it. So, yeah it is time-consuming.
- Very competitive:
Another negative part of blogging is that it is highly competitive. There are millions of blogs out there. A lot of people have the same niche as you. So it will become more difficult for you to rank your blog when there’s already high competition out there. But, you have to make your blog fairly authentic and speak with a particular voice, discussing high demanding topics with optimized content as that’s the only way to get success in this field.
YouTube:
Let’s move towards YouTube and have a look at the pros and cons it.
Pros:
- An excellent way of communication:
YouTube is an excellent way of communicating with others because on a video you communicate differently. In a blog post, you have to think about your grammar, emotions, and many other things. But in a video, you are just like you are in real life. That’s the best thing. In this way, you can build a great connection with your audience. Also, YouTube has a lot of fun. You create videos on whatever you like or want to share with your audience.
- YouTube is a self-promoter:
The second positive thing about YouTube is that there is no need to promote your content just like your blog. Only you have to do is make your videos, then edit them. Once they are edited we go through the process of uploading them on YouTube. And then YouTube takes that content and promotes it completely.
- Great for audience building:
YouTube is an amazing platform for audience building. You can build trust between you and your audience easily as compared to a blog. People start knowing you when you connect with them. They start judging you whether you are real or just pretend to be real. After this, they start believing in you and start following you. So, YouTube has a huge impact on people’s lives because they hear you, follow you, and feel your authenticity. That is less possible when you are running a blog. So, this is a great way of building an audience. But remember both have their pros and cons so it’s a positive one for YouTube.
Cons:
Now we will go through the negatives of YouTube.
- Editing is Time Consuming:
One of the important things is that editing takes a lot of time. Editing is the main part of the video because a video with good content is useless if you are unable to edit it properly. When you are a YouTuber, you have to plan your idea and you have to do some research on it. Then to create the content and to edit it. So all that takes pretty much time.
- You can’t own your channel:
This is the major problem that the channel you are running you are not able to own this. Yes, it’s yours and your name and videos on it but ultimately it’s not yours. YouTube and Google can delete your channel at any time. So, it’s not like a blog where you own your blog and control it.
- YouTube is Competitive:
YouTube is competitive but not as blogging. It’s depending on your niche. If you select a niche with the low competition then it will be less difficult for you to rank your content as compared to blogging. For example, If you are selecting a personal finance niche and create videos on it and there are not that many people doing it, you can get huge traffic to your videos as the niche is not competitive on YouTube. But there are tons of blogs related to the finance niche. It’s because many people are not willing to face the camera, so they grow their blog and share what they want to share.
So, Blogging and YouTube both can be profitable if they are done properly. Because both have pros and cons but if you have done both of them properly you must get good results.
Blogging vs. YouTube:
So the next thing people asked frequently that which one to choose? Should we start a blog? or a YouTube channel? So the answer is you can choose either of them. You can do both of them but you will get results of one where you focus on. It’s depending on you and your niche.
Confused and want to choose one? Here is a short key for you to help you decide which one will be a better one and more profitable for you.
- Which platform aligns with your goals:
The first thing to consider is that choose the one that perfectly aligns with your goals you are trying to achieve. So, before starting a blog or YouTube channel, first, try to understand what your goals are and what the best way you can achieve them is. If you will get the answer to this question you will get the answer of which one to choose.
- Which one has lower competition for your niche:
Choose your niche carefully and after that, you’ll have to check on which platform it has more competition. For example, if your selected niche has more videos on YouTube than blog then you have to focus on articles and vice versa. To figure out the competition do some basic keywords or title research to identify the keywords/titles that you can create content around.
- Speed of audience growth:
The next important question is how quickly you can grow an audience? This is very essential. Building an audience on a blog as compared to a YouTube channel is slower. So if you want more audience in a short time then surely go for a YouTube channel. Because of the like and trust factor, YouTube builds an audience a lot quicker than a blog. Also for starting a blog you first have to learn how to start blogging, on which platform, and how to start writing so it’s better to start a channel if you don’t have that much time. But if you aren’t confident to be in front of the camera, and you also have plenty of time to spend, go for blogging. It’s your choice that you want to spend more time doing tasks on the blog or focus your time on trying to create quality content on YouTube.
- Does your niche benefit from the video:
Some niches are better served by video than blog because they are visually more beneficial. In some other cases, text is equally good or better for portraying a message. So check out whether your topic or niche will be represented by a blog better or by video.
- Which platform is suitable for your monetization strategy:
Blogging has one major benefit that whenever and wherever you want to go back and change something, you can surely do. For example, such a situation occurs when you get an offer that will promote your content. But it is only possible in article format where you simply go back and add some links or anything you want. But in the case of video, it would be difficult or impossible to mention the new affiliate offers in the existing videos as you can’t edit them.
Another monetization benefit is that on your website you can select which ad network you would like to monetize while on YouTube you are forced to work with Google AdSense.
Conclusion:
In the end, we can conclude that no platform is good or bad at all. If you want to start a YouTube channel, it doesn’t mean you can’t start a blog and vice versa. Pick any one of them and get started. The real thing is how consistent you are, and then you will succeed no matter on which platform you are on.
