There are many different ways to monetize a blog. Below are some of the most common ways to monetize your blog.
Some ways to make money with your blog are easier than others. Some methods will require you to learn some skills but the payoff will be huge.
The more time and effort you invest in your business, the more money you will make. Your blog is your business. It is an asset.
If you are just starting out, don’t worry too much about making money right from the start, the more time you invest in your blog, the more this asset will grow.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate Marketing is one of the most popular and profitable ways to monetize a blog.
Affiliate marketing is when you’re rewarded for promoting someone else’s product or service . You link to a product or service using an affiliate tracking link . When someone clicks on that link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission.
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there to join. Here are a few I recommend:
- Amazon Associates – Get paid when your blog visitors purchase products on Amazon through your affiliate link on your blog. (I use Lasso, read my review of Lasso here )
- Bluehost – The web host I recommend and they have one of the most popular web hosting company affiliate programs.
- Commission Junction and ShareASale – Huge marketing networks with thousands of retailers who can promote your products and services on their blogs.
Displaying ads on your website is one of the easiest and fastest ways to make money from your blog . It’s as simple as it sounds. You join an ad network like Google AdSense and place their JavaScript code on your website where you want to display ads.
The amount of money you make from ads will depend on a large number of factors. One of the more important is how much an advertiser is willing to pay for the demographics of your readers. If most of your readers are from third world countries, don’t expect advertisers to pay you top dollar.
The most important factor when it comes to ad revenue is your niche and what you write about.
If you are writing about an industry where it is difficult to acquire new clients and the value of each client to businesses is very high, you can expect to be paid a good amount.
There are many different advertising models bloggers can use to generate revenue. Here are just a few:
Cost Per Click (CPC)
Once you place an ad on your website, you will get paid every time someone clicks on it. This is called CPC (or cost per click) advertising . This is the model that is the most profitable. You get paid for every single click.
How much you get paid for each click depends on what industry your blog is in. In competitive industries where the cost of acquiring new customers is high, you can expect higher rates paid.
If your blog is in the insurance industry, you can easily get $10 – $50 CPC. That means you will get $10 – $50 per click.
For most other niches with moderate demand, you can expect to get a modest $1 – $2 CPC rate. But if you’re in a niche where it’s easy to acquire clients or where clients don’t spend much money, you could get paid a much lower rate.
How much money you make from ads depends on what industry or niche you are in. Some industries pay more, others pay less. That’s how it works and there’s nothing you can do about it.
If you’re considering CPC advertising, here are two networks I recommend:
Google AdSense is a publisher advertising platform by Google. It has been around for a very long time and a lot of pro bloggers have made their fortunes from this ad network. Because it is a Google company, it is one of the most trusted advertising platforms on the internet.
They offer different types of ads including responsive ads that adapt to the user’s screen size. They let you control what type of ads appear on your website and allow you to disable ads individually if you want. Their ads blend seamlessly with your website’s design without ruining the user experience.
Media.net is a giant in the advertising industry. They have been around for a long time and are one of the most trusted players in the game. They offer several different types of ads including native ads, contextual ads, and of course, display ads. Their ads look great with your content.
Unlike most ad networks, Media.net displays beautiful ads that not only look great but match with the content of your website. Before you start displaying their ads on your website, you must first fill out an application. This network is high quality because of the process of elimination through the application form.
Cost per mil (thousand) views
CPM (or cost per mille) is an advertising model where you get paid for every 1000 ad views. How much you get paid depends on what industry your blog is in. There are some minor differences between CPC and CPM. And depending on the topic of your blog, you may make more money with CPC than CPM or vice versa. The trick is to experiment with both types of ads.
BuySellAds is a marketplace that allows you to buy and sell ad space based on impressions. It is a platform that allows the bulk buying and selling of ad space impressions. Some very large publications rely on them, including NPR and VentureBeat.
The problem with BuySellAds is that they try to maintain the quality of their marketplace and as such have high standards for the websites and properties they accept. If you want to work with BuySellAds, I recommend you only apply after you have gained some traction.
Direct Sales
Selling ads directly to an advertiser is a great way to generate revenue and have a positive cash flow. If you want to get paid upfront for the ads displayed on your website, selling your inventory directly is the best way to go.
There are only a few ways to sell your inventory directly. You can either reach out to businesses in your niche and sell them your inventory or you can advertise on your blog where you sell ad space.
A word of warning about lesser-known ad networks
There are a lot of ad networks out there but here’s a tip: a lot of them are scams . It’s not uncommon to hear bloggers complain about an ad network that has disappeared with thousands of dollars of their earnings.
If you want to go the advertising route, only work with ad networks that are already known and trusted in the industry. It is a good precaution to read reviews about ad networks before placing their ads on your site.
Sell services
Selling services related to your niche is a great way to earn extra income from your blog. While you won’t make much money this way at the beginning, as your traffic grows you can turn your side hustle into a full-time freelance business. And if your niche is big enough, you may be able to turn your freelance service into a full-time agency.
When deciding what you can sell to your readers, make a list of the things your readers typically need and then cross out any items you don’t feel confident about.
If you run a fitness blog, perhaps you can sell a customized diet plan if you’re a dietitian or a certified medical practitioner. If you run a personal finance blog, you can offer your personal finance advice as a service.
how to promote your services
Once you have a service in mind that you want to sell to your readers, you need to promote it to the people who read your blog. If no one knows that you are selling a service, they won’t be able to buy it.
Services Page
The easiest place to start is the Create a Service / Hire Me page for your blog. You only need a few things on this page. The most important one of all is a list of the services you offer and a really detailed description of what you provide.
I also recommend writing down how your process works. This will let your customers know what to expect.
Another thing you can add to your services page is a list of case studies or your portfolio. If you are a marketing consultant, people will want to know how you have helped other businesses in the past.
Showcasing a detailed case study of your past work helps convince prospective clients that you can actually perform your service. If you’re a web designer or do some kind of visual work like graphic design, you’ll want to showcase your portfolio on this page.
Next, you may want to display other businesses in your area that you have worked with. Most people don’t display who they have worked with unless they have worked with a large corporation like Microsoft.
But when you’re selling a service to a niche, showing a list of businesses you’ve worked with in the past can help with credibility.
Finally, you may wish to list your pricing information on your services page. Most freelancers prefer not to do this so they can raise their prices with each new client.
Use the sidebar
If you want people to know that you are selling a service, you have to actively promote it. A simple way to do this is to place a banner/graphic on your blog’s sidebar with a link to your services page.
This will grab attention and ensure that your service page does not go unread.
Promote your services in your blog posts
Most people are hesitant to promote themselves or their services out of concern that they will come across as spammy or too “salesy.” But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. When people read your blog regularly, they begin to trust you.
And when they need a service in your niche, there is no one they trust more than you. So, promoting your service in your blog posts where it is appropriate is a great way to land your first few clients.
Information Products
Information products are nothing new. An information product is something that sells packaged information such as an e-book or an online course .
Most blogging experts rave about information products and call them the best type of product you can promote on your blog.
And there are a few reasons for that:
Low investment
Writing an ebook or creating an online course may take some time but it doesn’t require much money and if you are willing to do some extra work, it doesn’t require any money at all. On the other hand, if you decide to create a software product, it will cost more than thousands of dollars.
low maintenance
Once you create an information product, be it an online course or an ebook, there is not much need to keep it updated. You may need to update your course material once every few months but the cost of maintaining a product is less than any other type of product.
It’s easy to scale
An information product is a digital product and can be copied as many times as you want . Unlike a physical product, you don’t need to wait for a shipment of your product to arrive from another country before you can start selling. You can sell an information product to both 100 people and a million people without any increase in manufacturing costs.
High Profit
Unlike physical products or software products, there are no maintenance costs or ongoing development costs . Once you create an information product, the costs are over. Whatever you make after that is just profit.
If you’re just starting out and have never made any money before, I recommend starting with advertising and then once you’ve got your feet wet, move on to information products.
Now, creating and distributing an information product requires you to learn many different skills and one section in an article cannot do it justice. Even writing an entire book would not do justice to the topic of creating and selling courses.
Coaching
If you run a blog in a niche where coaching is possible, coaching your clients can be a very lucrative option to make money with your blog. Your regular readers trust you and want to learn from experts.
If you know how to coach people in your niche or think you can learn how to do it, you should consider coaching people as a way to generate income from your blog.
How much you can make as a coach will depend on the niche you’re in. For example, if you’re coaching software developers to build complex algorithms for their companies, you can expect to earn over $10,000 per month with some clients.
But on the other hand, if you’re a dating coach for college students, you probably won’t make much money.
