Now that you created your blog and have been religiously putting new content on your blog, you need to think about how you can monetize your blog. Monetizing just means making money from your blog. There are many ways to make money blogging let’s look at 10 ways you can monetize your blog.
Table of Contents
1. Make money blogging with affiliate marketing
I’m sure you heard the word affiliate marketing thrown around on the internet and if you’re into blogging, this is a word you’ll most likely come across. Affiliate marketing is great for bloggers who don’t yet have their own products and services to sell. What affiliate marketing is, is that it’s essentially a way for you to promote other people’s products in return for a cut of the profit. Say you own a food blog and you may really like a particular air fryer so you contact the air fryer company to see if they would work with you. You provide a link on your site to buy the air fryer and if someone purchases the product you may get say 20% of the profit. That’s affiliate marketing.
You can use affiliate marketing as a way to make money. Both big and small companies may offer an opportunity for affiliate marketing you just have to reach out. Some bigger companies like Amazon have an affiliate marketing program that you have to apply for.
You have to do your research on which company you want to work with since not all of them pay the same.
For me, since I’m running a personal finance blog that focuses on inspiring people to become their own boss and make money in various ways on the internet, there are many companies I can do affiliate marketing with. For instance, I can work with Newton (a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange platform) and place an affiliate link in my article. In my how-to buy cryptocurrency using Newton article, I did exactly that.
If you’re a Canadian and you want to buy cryptocurrency using Newton you can sign up via this link and once you spent $100 you and I will both get $25
And if you want to find out how to buy any crypto available on Newton through Newton, check out this article. How to buy Shiba inu using Newton.
You see what I did there? I added links to my article to promote some service or company and when people purchase from my link, I get something in return.
Affiliate marketing is available across all niches and the payout can be big or small.
One thing you need to do is to make sure you tested the product and/or service first before you recommend it to others. Recommending something that you don’t use yourself and haven’t tested it to make sure it’s good can damage your credibility. Next time you have something you genuinely think is good that you want others to try, no one will believe you.
Affiliate marketing is a great way for bloggers to add an additional income source through blogging. However, some companies may require you to have a certain amount of traffic before they allow you into their affiliate marketing program so if you aren’t there yet, make sure you spend more time writing articles, promoting articles, and driving more traffic to your site.
2. Make money blogging with displayed ads
It’s best not to tinker with displayed ads with your site until you have some traffic to your site. If you have less than 5,000 visitors per day, your blog is still considered to be low in traffic, and placing ads on your site risks driving visitors away as it may make the site load slower.
There are some people who would tell you to put ads on your site the first day that you have your blog up on the internet while others may tell you to wait. Ultimately, this is your decision to make and yours only. You can experiment with putting ads on your site to see how it performs and removing ads from your site to see if there’s an improvement. For some niches out there, it may not be worth it to put ads on your site before you have enough traffic as you risk losing visitors to a slower site while some niches may not matter.
Something you must learn is the pay-per-click also known as PPC. This is how much you get paid based on how many clicks you get for the ads put on your site. If you have a high PPC it means that you get paid quite well for every click that you get to your site and if you have a low PPC it means that you get paid not so well for every click that you get to your site.
A downside of putting ads on your site is that it drives people away from your site. It may be worth it to keep people on your site as long as possible by linking different articles you wrote to different articles that people may be reading. The longer people stay on your site, the more potential you have of making money from the traffic you get. Sending people away from your site may give you some monetary gain but it may not stack up to what you could have earned had you kept them on your site.
The real income from displayed ads comes when you have more than 10,000 visitors per day and the big money is when you have 100,000 visitors or more per day to your site every day.
You can also choose to negotiate terms with advertisers to get more money per click. However, your time is better spent monetizing your blog in other ways.
Ads make up a small portion of most bloggers’ income. Once you have enough traffic to your site, you may begin to monetize your blog through other means that may be more lucrative (we’ll talk about what those means are).
3. Make money blogging by selling pdfs and/or printouts
Another way you can monetize your blog is by selling pdfs. What pdfs are we talking about? This can be anything related to your niche. Say you own a fitness blog specifically in the yoga space, what you can do is to sell PDFs of different yoga poses that people can buy and print it out to refer to when they are doing yoga.
The great thing about selling pdfs and printout is that you can make the product once and never have to worry about it again. Say if you want to sell sauce, with more customers, you’ll have to gather more ingredients to make the sauce, but with pdfs and printouts, more customers don’t mean more work for you. You make the digital product and it’s yours to sell forever.
Another example I can give is in the personal finance space. You see, I’m a personal finance blogger, if you want to make money by selling pdfs and printouts, it can literally be anything that is related to personal finance such as a beautifully illustrated pdf of 10 ways to save money that people can print out and paste to their wall at home. It can also be a budgeting sheet that is going to help a lot of people save money by sticking close to their budgeting plan.
There is a tremendous amount of opportunity to make money in every niche within the pdf and printout space. You just have to use your imagination a little. What are people looking for? What do people want? How can you make their lives easier with a simple printout?
In fact, there are tons of people making tens of thousands per month just selling printouts.
You can hire someone on Fiverr to make the printout for you or you can design it yourself on sites like Canvas.com where it is free. But make sure it’s something that people want to buy. Of course, you can experiment to see what do people want.
After you create your pdf, you can install a plug-in called Woocommerce on your WordPress (if you use WordPress to build your site) and begin selling your pdfs. You can also choose to set the price as ‘free’ or ‘sold out’ if you wish.
4. Make money blogging by selling ebooks
Another digital product you can sell on your blog is ebooks. You can sell your ebook on Amazon with their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program or through your own site.
I recommend selling your ebook through your own site. It gives you more control of pricing and you can keep 100% of the money made through your ebook.
You just have to format it in a correct way and if you can’t format it right, pay someone on Fiverr to do it for you for $5.
Your ebook could be anything within your niche. Say you own a food blog, your ebook could be a collection of recipes you developed.
If you own a personal finance blog that teaches people how to make money on the internet. Maybe one of your ebook could be on how to make a living blogging.
The possibility is endless the kind of ebook that you can write. Of course, you may need to pay someone to proofread your work to make sure there’s no spelling or grammatical error. It’s one thing to have one or two typos in your blog but if people are paying for it, they’d don’t want to see obvious spelling and grammar errors even if there’s just a handle of them.
5. Make money blogging by selling courses
Selling courses is one of the easiest ways to make a million-dollar. If you want to make a million-dollar in a year, you’ll have to sell your course to 10,000 people at $100 each. You can also sell your course to 5,000 people at $200 each. And if you price your course at $500, you’ll have to sell your course to 2000 people to make a million-dollar by the end of the year.
I know, you may wonder, “but how do I sell my course to 2000 people?”. A lot of people on the internet claiming to have made a lot of money selling courses neglect to tell you that they built up a big audience base first. It takes time to build up an audience. Sure you can luck out and just put your course out there and lots of people come to buy it but the secret to making a lot of money from courses is your ability to court attention and establish an audience base. If you don’t have an audience base, no one would be there to watch you launch your course and subsequently buy it even if it’s the best course of the subject in the entire world.
Blogging gives you the opportunity to establish an audience base that you can then sell your courses to.
There are places out there such as Udemy.com that allow you to upload your course and when people type in a search term into the search bar, they may find your site and buy your course. However, it’s quite competitive to be found on Udemy in virtually all niches. You can try to find what Udemy is lacking and create a course to fill the role but chances are, you won’t be too lucky in that regard. It’s best to sell your course on your own platform such as through your blog.
Making money blogging by selling courses should only be done when you have an existing audience base. It takes time for people to trust your brand and by the time you accumulate enough audience and interest, the course you created before these people found you may already be outdated.
Establishing an audience first on your blog before selling your course can also help you understand what the audience needs and how you should create your course as well as what to include in your course.
Once you have enough monthly views and monthly visitors to your site, selling a course is a great way to monetize your blog and make a lot of money in a relatively short time.
Update:
Something to note is that there may be some upkeep that you need to have with courses. A lot of people would only buy courses that allow them to ask questions if they have any. You may need to be on standby, ready to answer their questions within 24 to 36 hours. While you may think that it’s fine but if you have a lot of students it can quickly become overwhelming. For this reason, some teachers would allow students to interact with each other and help each other in the learning process.
Something that all the teachers who create online courses to sell on the internet don’t tell you is that once you created a course and sell the course, the student becomes your responsibility for the foreseeable future. Imagine still managing a course that you created ten years ago. Long after you’ve already moved on to other projects you want to pursue. For this reason, it’s good to think about how long the student can have access to your course or to you. You don’t want to continue updating the course for the rest of your life! Include the disclaimer in the course description that the course material would only be available for say 3 years after the initial purchase after which it would no longer be updated and no support for the material would be granted.
6. Make money blogging with a consultation service
I don’t really like this approach in making money blogging because you’d be exchanging your time and we know if you’re exchanging your time with blogging, it’s not very scalable. Unlike a digital product like a pdf or a printout that you can sell again and again without requiring more of your time or resources, consultation does require the use of your time and energy in order to generate an income. You can’t create more time in your day thus your income is limited with a consultation service.
You can choose to raise your hourly wage with a consultation service but at some point, the wage may put off people from using your service.
You can use sites like Calendly.com (not an affiliate link) to allow people to easily book for your consultation service. You can select when you’re free and your customers select from a list of available slots.
A consultation service can be done over the internet via a Zoom call so it doesn’t matter where your client is, they’d be able to contact you.
Afterthought
There are many ways to make living blogging on the internet and become your own boss. You can finally quit your job and pursue your passion.
It’s not unheard of to work <5–10 hours a week on blogging once you establish an audience base. You can use the rest of the time to travel, spend time with family, and do anything else you desire. There’s a lot of freedom to be had if you are willing to work for it.
The great thing is that you can achieve this kind of freedom through blogging in just 1–2 years. If you can take the time to produce 500 high-quality articles on your blog and give it some time (at least 8 months) to mature and be found on Google, that vision of freedom is within reach.
It certainly isn’t easy. This is why I don’t say “make a living blogging with just 100 articles!” because not all your articles may be good. Some of them will not hit anything. You’ll put it out there and no one will read it. However, the more high-quality articles you have, the more chance you have of some of your articles doing particularly well and driving lots of traffic to your site. With more traffic, you may gain better affiliate marketing opportunities and thus more money.
You’ll have to expect that on some months your blog may do really well and bring in more money than other months and on some months your income may tank but the more you write, the more you monetize your blog, the higher that baseline of income from blogging would be. At some point, your lowest income month in the year could be $30,000.
Michelle from www.makingsenseofcents.com is able to rake in $100,000 per month from her blog. I’m sure some months she makes more and some months she makes less but the lowest amount she makes per month is already higher than what the average person makes in a year.
Let’s get started
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