Blogging is usually recommended as a way of making money online for those that want to quit their nine-to-five jobs, work from home, or just make some extra income. Here today I will show you a few ways of monetizing your blog and making a living as a content creator.
To start off: why try blogging? Blogging has been proven to be an easy way of creating a passive income stream. The fact that so many people have made it work already should be a good sign, right? There are as many blogs as there are niches you can think of (and if you can think of a niche that hasn’t been blogged yet, you just found a golden opportunity!).
Blogging has literally no limit income-wise, and apart from the monetary value, it can also be fun. I would have never thought that writing would be so fulfilling. I enjoy putting time into a new post and seeing it go live, and I enjoy the positive feedback that comes after my efforts.
But enough of that, let’s jump to what brought you here:
HOW TO MAKE MONEY BLOGGING
Google Adsense:
The first and easiest way of monetizing a blog is through Google Adsense. Once you have built a blog or any other website you can open a Google Adsense account. Then Google will have a look at your site and decide if it is a safe place to run their ads.
Google has two kinds of ads - CPC and CPM:
CPC, which stands for Cost Per Click, will pay you for clicks on ads. You will be paid every time someone clicks on an ad from your site.
CPM, which stands for Cost Per Impressions, will pay you for ads seen. You just need someone to go on your site, an ad will pop up in their screen, and you will make money.
Probably an ad has already popped up on your screen at some point. That’s a Google ad, and I get a little bit of money for that.
You can expect to be paid around a dollar per 1000 views, so the success of this depends highly on how much traffic you drive to your blog.
Affiliate Marketing:
With a blog you have the opportunity to pitch products and recommend them to your audience. I would suggest that you only recommend products related to your niche and that you genuinely like. Pushing products that are not related to your niche will hurt your image and so would recommending products that are not good. Doing that would be annoying to some of your followers. It is really not worth it.
So how does it work? If you have read any of my book reviews you have probably seen that at the end I leave a link where you can go to Amazon and buy it. By doing so, I get a commission – usually around 5% of the price – every time someone makes a purchase using that link. This means that of a $10 book I get 50 cents. Not a lot, I know, but with lots of traffic and lots of sales, people manage to make a living just off of that.
One of the beautiful things about affiliate marketing through Amazon is that you can get a cut of anything they sell. Do you want to pitch diapers? Chairs? Guitars? You get a cut from every sale.
Even though Amazon is slowly taking over the world, there are other affiliate options. Most of them will come when your audience is big enough, but this doesn’t mean you can’t get them earlyon, too. These other options are smaller companies that have a business in the same niche as yours. A very easy example:
You have a fitness blog where you talk about nutrition and workout routines. You can contact (or be contacted by) a big gym franchise. You can become an affiliate and for every person you send them via a link, you are given a set amount of money. It sounds easy, because it is!
Another way of making money with that niche would be selling actual products. Most fitness blogs get contacted sooner or later by companies that sell diet teas or protein powder. Once you get contacted it is up to your negotiation skills what you can get out of it - people manage to make thousands of dollars this way.
Private membership:
Once you have a large following, or you think you have high quality content, you can make your blog private and ask for a membership fee. Doing so, the only way of accessing your content would be paying monthly or annually.
You could go fully private, making all of your content invisible for those who don’t pay, or partially private, offering some free content and reserving other content for your “premium members”.
Sell ad space in your blog:
Another easy way of making money is selling ad space. Imagine your website is the wall of your house. You could make money by getting as many ads as you wanted on the outside wall. The differences between these ads and Google Ads are:
Google Ads: are more targeted, they work with cookies and are adapted to your visitor. You get paid more or less depending on traffic.
Agreed ad on your page: are permanent. You get paid what you agree with the advertiser.
Just like the second type of affiliate marketing, these ads will depend strongly on your connections; that is either being contacted by someone that wants to reach your audience or by contacting a company that might be interested on your audience.
Lets go over the fitness blog example again:
If a protein powder company wants to reach your audience they will contact you to place a banner somewhere on your site. This banner will be placed on your blog and every visitor will see their ad.
Again, how much money you make this way depends on your traffic and on your negotiation skills.
Full blog sponsorship:
Another way of advertising a brand could be by getting a full sponsorship. This way of advertising is a lot more extreme as you could change the name or slogan of the company as the brand wants. For example, if this blog was to be sponsored by McDonalds, the name mightchange from “TheWealthHike, helping you grow” to “TheWealthHike, I’m loving it” or “TheWealthHike, powered by McDonalds”.
This kind of sponsorship doesn’t happen often, as it tends to be a very aggressive way of advertising.
Sponsored posts:
Another way of earning money with a blog is through sponsored posts. Just like in many previous examples, someone will want to reach your audience, and the way they will do it will be by writing content for your page.
For instance, again with the fitness blog example, a nutritionist will write a post about how important it is to control your diet to reach your fitness goals. At the end of the post they will leave their contact details and their social media link so that anyone interested in knowing more about it will go to them.
This case is particularly good. The advertiser gets exposure and the blogger gets money and more content to publish, win-win.
Sell eBooks, courses or other digital products:
With affiliate marketing you can make a little bit of money selling other people’s products, but nothing really stops you from selling your own products and getting all the revenue.
You can use your platform to sell anything, from physical products to eBooks or courses. Even though selling physical products can be very lucrative, the biggest advantage to digital products is its format. Due to its characteristics it is a very good example of passive income: you work until you have finished a product, then you automate the downloading/mailing process, and that is pretty much it. You can forget about it and wait as the money comes in.
At free stuff we have a couple of eBooks that are currently free, but we do believe in their value so we could set a downloading price, getting paid that way every time someone decides to read it.
Sell other services:
You could use your blog to sell other services:
Psychologists could do Skype therapy.
Professionals could do consulting calls.
Personal trainers could prepare training sessions.
Dropshippers could drive traffic to their online stores.
(Click here to learn more about Dropshipping)
Donations:
This way of making money relies totally on the good will of your audience. It is via donations that most beginner content creators start building their blogs or channels. Since Patreon emerged a few years ago a lot more people have been able to monetize their passion.
Today one of the main ways this blog is monetized is through donations, when someone downloads one of our eBooks on free stuff they have the chance to donate whatever they think that eBook is worth.
Donations are not a source of income you can rely on unless you have a massive following, but even if that’s not the case, a few extra dollars a month can make a difference.
You might be interested in:
Click here to learn more about Dropshipping.
Click here to learn about The 50-30-20 rule.
Click here to read my review of Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill.
Thanks for your time, keep growing ;)