Blogging 105: 10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog

Blogging is fun, and it can also be a great source of income. Apart from sharing your knowledge, and meeting other experts in your field, blogging is also another means by which you can build your reputation, and gain substantial monthly income to your bank account. This is not a lie nor a matter of false motivation. The likes Darren Rowse, Gina Horkey, and Gary Vaynerchuk proved it right.

Yeah, you must have come across some people who said it isn’t possible to make money through blogging. That might be because they have tried it, or they know someone who has invested in it and came out with nothing. The truth is that blog monetization is very tasking, and require lots of time. You will be required to do lots of SEO, and also gather much traffic before you can make a dime. But, you can make thousands of bucks once it’s established.

The primary reason why some people earn little or nothing from blogging is that they have little knowledge about blog monetization, and must have been leveraging on one means. And for this reason, I have researched and compiled ten different ways through which you can start earning from your blog. All you just have to do is to understand them and leverage on two or three methods that work for your blogging niche.

1. Pay Per Click or Google AdSense

Pay Per Click (PPC) is the most utilized form of blog monetization. Although it doesn’t promise an enormous amount, but know surely that a hundred cents will give a dollar, and you can get more when you receive thousands of visitors per day. However, nothing can be achieved until the blog has gone popular to gain lots of traffic.

The most common PPC campaign is Google AdSense in which you allow adverts on your website and get a token when an audience clicks on it. The amount paid for each click varies and usually depend on the value of the product advertised. For example, the returns per click for real estate advert will be higher than that of a skincare product. Whereas the number of clicks depend on where you place the adverts on your website pages – some positions have bigger ROI.

Setting this campaign up on your website is not difficult. You start by registering your site for Google AdSense and then insert the ads within your content using code or ads management plugins available on WordPress.

2. Pay Per Sale or Affiliate Marketing

Here’s another most utilized blog monetization technique. Affiliate marketing is the act of getting commissions by selling other people’s product to your audience. It’s much like PPC, but in this case, you get paid whenever your audience buys the product. However, it’s easier to acquire wealth through this method and require extra effort- you can get as much as 70% return from each product sold.

Extra effort in the sense that you will have to convince them into buying the products which are not possible through ads or link posting. You will have to go the extra mile by writing reviews and also mailing your audience regularly. Being strategic is the only way to succeed in this marketing campaign, and I have enough tips for you already.

Starting affiliate marketing on your blog is not that technical. Firstly, you will register with an online marketplace such as Amazon, eBay, ShareASale, or ClickBank depending on the type of product you want to deal in. After which, you will be given an affiliate link for every product you apply for. Then, you advertise the product to your audience using contents and include the affiliate link for them to purchase.

For more information, feel free to check out my blog section to have access to all my articles on affiliate marketing.

3. Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the short form of electronic commerce, and it refers to the selling and buying of products on the internet. Companies and businesses always choose to launch their eCommerce store on popular internet marketplace like Amazon, and Shopify. Still, you can decide to be unique, and avoid the massive payment by starting your store on your website.

Moreover, you will be able to make more money by using exciting contents to attract more customers to your store. The commodities to be sold might be your locally created products, and the store may be a model of your mortar and brick shop.

The better way to attempt this is to use the WordPress eCommerce plugin known as WooCommerce. With this plugin, your WordPress website will rapidly transform to an eCommerce store, where you can add products and advertise it with you well-written articles.

Ecommerce is very profitable because you keep all your profit, but you can decide to expand more and make more sales by offering affiliate program to other marketers.

4. Info marketing

Ecommerce is very cool, and it can also be stressful when you start dealing with shipping and delivery. However, you can avoid those processes by selling your e-books, audiobooks, and videos on your website. You might be wondering what will be the contents of the info products.

If you own a cooking recipe blog, there’s nothing that stops you from selling an e-book that contains 20 best Chinese recipes you have discovered. Meanwhile, you can go further by making a video of how each meal is prepared. Information is a valuable product, and people are always ready to pay to get it.

Moreover, since your audience would have been conversant with your blogs and know the quality of the information you share, it will be effortless for you to market these products, and make your quick income. You can even spice it up by including email marketing to remind them of your new products.

5. Solo Ads

In the previous point, I mentioned email marketing, and I will love to continue from there. Email marketing is the process of making money from your email list by sending regular updates to remind your audience of new products, promotions, and discount. Email marketing is very useful in affiliate marketing and eCommerce, and it’s the reason for most multi-billion companies.

You can also make money from your email list by letting other businesses use it. Let’s say you have an email list of 10,000 digital marketers; then you can monetize it by sharing it with a software producer who just launched a new voice-over app – it’s called solo ads. You can decide to charge them for every sale, conversions, or each message sent.

If you a looking for a way to make revenue from the list of your blog subscribers, then proceed to Nextmark, a site where you can meet bloggers and marketer who are interested in your list. Make sure to follow all applicable laws.

6. Online training, workshop, and webinars

Now it’s the time to step up higher and make cool revenue from your blog. Online training, workshop, and webinars are another means by which you can monetize your blog. This can be done when you have already gotten your niche’s authority, and you possess enough newsletter subscribers already.

In online training, you create a series of teachings and schedule time for each class. Let’s say I want to create webinars on blogging. My first lecture may be an introduction, and then the next day will be about “how to choose a blogging niche.” Then, I will monetize the training by asking people to pay to get access to the training.

Webinars is also very similar to online training. But in this case, you provide a means of interaction for them to ask questions. You can make use of the likes of Zoom for the class while you use your blog to create a buzz around the webinars. Webinar also include the use of power points presentation, and teaching aids to illustrate your points.

The last part is the offline training workshops. I meant offline in the sense that you organize a live seminar in a physical environment like a hall or a hotel conference room. Your blog is required to advertise the tickets, inform your audience about the program and what they stand to gain. You can go further by telling them more about the biography of the guest speakers.

However, the rule governing these training is that you must offer tangible things, and the secret of whatever they want to learn- not cheap stuff they can quickly get on blogs.

7. Consultancy and Freelancing

A blogger can also leverage on his website by offering his unique skills for the audience. Freelancing experts always utilize this method to boost their career and showcase their talent. As a writer, a blogger can get more gigs by displaying their incredible writing skills on their site. This will even make them hire you more for their work because they have seen samples.

Consultancy can take any form. It can be a business expert using his knowledge of business establishment and management to assist other entrepreneurs in growing their brand. It also works better for website designers. Beautifying the site with wonderful themes will help to advertise their creativity, and its functionality will make others crave for their services.

When you have gotten the reputation and acknowledgement from people, you can then proceed by displaying your different packages on your home page for the audience to see. With that, they would be able to hire you for their work. Some bloggers generate thousands of bucks monthly by using this monetization strategy.

8. Surveys and Polls

Engaging your users in surveys and polls is another blog monetization method. Data are valuable, and it’s needed by companies and organization to understand their customers better. However, getting data from these buyers or recipients is very hard because of the difficulty in meeting and interviewing them. Therefore, these companies begin to utilize blogs to garner data from people.

So, a blogger can monetize their website by allowing these companies to conduct these surveys on their audience. What they will do is to advertise the polls and encourage their readers to take part in it. Money earned from polls and surveys is higher than that of ads because it is part of the cost per mile campaign- that which you get paid when your audience take some specific actions.

However, to earn more from this method, you must ensure that the polls or surveys align with your niche. That’s a survey in which most, if not all of your audience will like to participate in.

9. Site auctioning

This is where you make a huge amount, but it takes so much effort. People do sell out their blogs whenever they are tired of the niche, or they were unable to earn from it. Whereas, there are some website designers or so-called bloggers that love developing blogs and later sell after it might have gotten lots of traffic and recognition.

People likely make a massive amount from this sale because others are willing to buy a ready-made website, especially if it ranks higher on SERPs. You can also decide to sell your blog when you are tired with the niche, feels like running another blog in a different niche, or want to go into a different career.

10. Donation and crowd-funding

Blogger also monetizes their blog through donation and crowd-funding. There has been news of those that start up their businesses from collections gotten from the crowd-funding campaign. This method is often used by religious groups to fund missionary journeys, and gather resources for orphans and needy.

Although there are crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, using a blog will enable an organization or a person to express their goals and objectives to the fullest. Moreover, they would be able to show the results of their campaign to gain more from the people who have supported. And also to convince those who are doubting their credibility.

Last thought;
I hope this article provides you with several options to turn your blog into a money-making machine. It’s up to you to explore all the methods and choose those that will work perfectly for your niche. Blogging is fun, but it can also be a good source of income. Why don’t you turn your passion into a job?