Monetising a blog takes time and relies heavily on having traffic. The more readers you have, the more attractive you are to advertisers. To make a decent income from blogging, think about having multiple streams of income coming in from different sources and through different means. Building a blog’s loyal following and then turning that audience into revenue takes effort, time and patience. With well-thought-out long-term and short-term plans, right planning and content development, it is indeed possible to turn your blog into a money-making machine.
Here are some of the ways to make money from blogging.
1. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a pretty standard operating procedure for blogs at this point. Affiliate marketing works by adding tracked affiliate links into the text of your blog. You can make a small commission every time a reader clicks through to a site you recommend and makes a purchase. The links will lead readers to the website of a brand, and the money you receive is to say ‘thanks’ for sending some of your lovely readers to their site.
Almost all online eCommerce websites have an affiliate program of some sort. Affiliate marketing is a natural fit for many bloggers. As a blogger, you’re always recommending products and services to your readers. A lot of companies offer affiliate programs so it’s really easy to find relevant programs to join and start earning commission. The key is to be authentic and genuine with affiliate marketing.
Write reviews and articles with your honest opinions and only encourage your readers to buy something if you think it’s a good product or service for them. Affiliate marketing can generally make a lot more money than display ads, so it’s a smart option when you’re ready to jump in. The key to affiliate marketing is partnering with affiliate programs that are aligned with your readers and the goals of your site, and to offer value to your audience.
Put their wants and needs before your potential affiliate earnings. You don’t want to pitch everything under the sun – stick to what your audience wants and offer affiliate products and services that make sense. If you’re interested in adding these links to your blog, check out the best affiliate marketing programs to use. Also, don’t forget to put an affiliate link disclosure on your site.
2. Advertising
Ads have been around as long as blogs have, and they’re still a great way to get started monetizing your blog. As a more visual way of advertising, you can sell advertising space on your blog page to brands that relate to your readers. Adverts can be placed anywhere, but they’re commonly found across the top of blog pages or in the sidebar. You can earn income in one of two ways.
CPC (cost per click) means you’ll get a set payment for every reader who clicks the advert, while CPM (cost per thousand) means you’ll negotiate a set payment for every 1,000 ‘impressions’ the ad gets. With the growth of AdBlocker plugins, the CPC and CPM can be low, but it does depend on your industry, and there’s little harm in trying them out. Alternatively, you can check out the best ad networks for publishers out there and select one that suits your needs.
Some networks have traffic minimums you’ll need to reach before you can join, and others, like Google AdSense, have no or low standards that can also mean low earnings per visitor. Another way you can achieve display advertising, is to approach an advertiser directly and negotiate a deal with them to place ads on your blog. That said, ads can be a good way to bring in a baseline income to cover your blogging expenses, and with enough traffic, it’s more than possible to make a few thousand dollars each month off ads.
3. Sponsored content
One of the best ways of monetising a blog is through offering sponsored content opportunities (or advertorials). These are essentially adverts in the form of a paid-for article or blog post. But the key here is to ensure your advertising aligns with your audience. Sponsored content can be videos, podcasts, blog posts, roundup stories, reviews and interviews. After you create the content and it’s published, you will receive a payment within a few days.
With sponsored content, there’s no waiting game to receive money as you would from affiliates. Additionally, the revenue isn’t dependent on clicks or views, unlike other types of blog monetization strategies. It depends on how large your readership (niche audience) is and where their brand is placed on the blog. Once you’ve grown your readership, brands will often approach you to discuss sponsored posts.
4. Sell digital products
Digital products are relatively easy to create and sell, especially if they meet the needs of your audience. You can charge a fee for access to eBooks, video tutorials, courses, workshops, printables, checklists, graphics, music, or documents. In order to make this option work, you need to be able to show you’re extremely good at what you do, or that your content has proven to be incredibly valuable.
It can be pretty difficult to convince online communities to pay up, as there’s a tendency for people to think everything online should be free of charge. An eBook is a great first product to create because you’re already in the business of creating content – often, selling an eBook is simply a matter of repackaging and branding your content. And if you think people won’t pay for your information, think again.
Bloggers often give away more information for free than they need to, and you’d be surprised to know how many people will gladly pay a few bucks for valuable info, especially if it impacts their health, finances, relationships and so on. Online courses are all the rage these days, but there’s good evidence to suggest they’re not going away anytime soon. People love to learn stuff, and if you can teach your audience something useful, a course is a great way to monetize your blog.
5. Sell physical products
When done right, e-commerce is a great way to monetize your blog, though it doesn’t work for every niche or blogger, so testing here is key (i.e. don’t place a wholesale order from overseas if you don’t know how the stuff will sell). If your blog’s on WordPress, you can use a platform like WooCommerce to create a store, or use Shopify on a subdomain (shop.yoursite.com).
6. Offer memberships
Online memberships are popular these days, and for good reason. Some folks aren’t up for paying hundreds of dollars for a one-time course, but they are game for a low-fee monthly membership that offers access to resources, community, etc. The key here is determining what your membership looks like: what do members get each month, how do you provide that value and how do you retain members for the long haul?
7. Offer services
If you have skills or advice to offer, it’s more than possible to offer services on your blog. For instance, you can offer digital marketing services on your blog. The key, as always, is to ensure you’re offering services that your audience is actually interested in, otherwise your traffic won’t convert to customers.
8. Offer consulting
Consulting is another great way to monetize your site and potentially less time-consuming than services. For example, if you take on an SEO client, you may spend all yout time updating their on-site elements like title tags, descriptions and so on. But if you work with them as an SEO consultant, you can provide them with a project plan and they can implement the game plan themselves.
So consulting in this way can be slightly easier to scale. A great way to find consulting opportunities is to look through the income reports of competitors. If they’re doing consulting work in their industry, you can look through these reports and oftentimes find out how much they’re making by doing so.
Conclusion
Nothing worth having comes without hard work and a few challenges. Be under no illusion that blog monetisation takes time. Many bloggers only make pennies from monetising their blog each month – and this is after having worked on their blogs for a while. To have a chance of creating a full-time income through blogging, you need traffic, and lots of it.
The blogging market is saturated with lots of aspiring bloggers fighting to be seen. However, if worked on with dedication and consistency, it is possible. Blogging is definitely a challenge because it takes a lot of commitment and consistency to be able to monetize it properly. How much money you can make from blogging is variable. That’s the nature of monetizing a blog at the start, however with time bloggers can do very well.
