Learning how to make money blogging is less complicated than it sounds and I’m here to share how making money with a blog whether blogging is your hobby or business is possible. I make money through blogging to afford traveling the world and live a luxurious lifestyle (by my simple standards, not the Kardashian way) and hope reading what I’m doing will help you too.
How to make money blogging
Monetize Your Blog Content
Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money because you can promote a wide-variety of products. Just about every popular store like Walmart, BestBuy, Amazon, and others have an affiliate program.
Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product or service to your audience using special tracking links, and then get a referral commission for every time someone buys after clicking your link.
Many products and services online have affiliate programs that you can join. There are affiliate programs available for every industry (niche).
If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing, you can start by thinking about the products you already use that your readers may be interested in as well. Then you can see if they have an affiliate program that you can sign up for.
You can find a huge list of products to promote from:
Show Google AdSense Ads
Google Adsense is the entry level to start monetizing ad slots on your website. Google Adsense is an easy way to make money from your blog. All you need to do is adding a script from Google Adsense to your website and start displaying ads.
You will get paid some percentage every time a user clicks on the ad.
I personally don’t do this on my website as I prefer keeping my own brand clear, however I’ve been selling ads through Google’s network and it works great.
Don’t get prepared for the big bucks from the early start unless you already have lot of traffic on your website.
Looking for a Google AdSense alternative? Try Media.net. They also have a large pool of advertisers, and their payouts are good.
Sell Ads Directly
Google AdSense is easy to set up, but the amount of money you can earn is limited. Each ad click earning will vary.
Directly selling banner ad space on your website can be more lucrative. Instead of having to rely on an intermediary who takes a cut of the money, you negotiate the price and terms on your own.
Most bloggers charge a flat rate because it’s easier than keeping track of views or clicks.
Still, directly selling ads takes more work to manage than using Google AdSense. Instead of just adding a bit of code to your website, you’ll have to negotiate the pricing, come up with an agreement and terms, and take care of administrative work like invoicing.
Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
If you are not interested in displaying ads to your audience and wonder how to monetize a blog without ads.
With ad networks, you lose some control over the content displayed on your site. Some readers will get annoyed or offended by ads, and more and more people are using ad blockers which affects your earning potential.
An alternative way to monetize a blog is through sponsorships.
A sponsorship works just like it does in other industries. Basically, a company pays you to represent their product and promote it to your readers.
To get started, it’s a good idea to put together a one-page media kit that details your traffic stats, social media following, audience demographics, and any other data that will make your site more appealing to advertisers. Then, you can approach companies to negotiate a sponsorship deal.
When publishing sponsored posts, it’s crucial to know about the laws in your area about disclosure.
If you publish a sponsored post in the US, you must comply with the FTC’s Endorsement Guides. This includes disclosing whenever a post is sponsored.
Get Paid to Write Reviews
Similar to sponsored posts, you can also make money by writing paid reviews on your site.
You get to try out products related to your niche and get paid for writing a review.
The process for doing this can be similar to getting sponsored posts. You’ll want to review products that are relevant to your niche, that your audience would be interested in.
You can approach companies on your own to ask about doing paid reviews. There are also websites like PayPerPost that can help to connect you with businesses who may be interested.
Sell Digital Products
If you’re looking for a more low-maintenance way to make money online blogging, then selling your own digital products may be a good choice. While you do have to invest the time to create the product up front, after it’s created your work is very minimal.
Here are a few digital products you can create and sell on your website.
Sell Ebooks
Ebooks are an obvious choice for creating digital products. They are relatively simple to write and produce. If you’ve been blogging for a while, then you can collect some of your old blog posts and turn them into chapters of a book.
Once your book is written, you can design a cover using a tool like Canva and create a PDF of your ebook.
To sell Ebooks you don’t even have to have your own website, you can sell your book through Amazon & others.
Sell Online Courses
Selling an online course is another great way to make money online.
Courses usually sell for a much higher price point than ebooks. You can charge a premium for your expertise.
You’ll need to create the lessons for your course, plus any supporting materials that you want to include such as downloads, slides, checklists, templates, etc.
I hope this helped understanding different ways how to make money blogging and if it’s something you want to do you totally can. If you’re just about starting your journey and want to learn how to make a website read my other article on that!
Cheers,
Istvan