There are various ways of making money online, and blogging is one of them. But the question is, how exactly can one make money blogging?
If you are asking yourself such a question, you are in luck!
Whether you are a beginner planning on starting a blog or having a blog you wish to monetize, this post is just for you.
In this article, I’ll take you through the best ways you can Make Money Blogging.
Let’s face it.
Money is one of the many advantages that come along with blogging. You can passively make money from your blog (even when you sleep). Although there is money to make, you might be thinking about how to make money from your blog.
Therefore, this blog post highlights the various methods you can explore to earn through your blog.
The monetization methods mentioned in this post can be used independently or as a combination of a couple of methods to maximize revenue from your blog. The choice is yours.
Without delay, let’s dive right in!
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model which involves selling goods on behalf of another company or manufacturer to earn a commission. You are paid for recommending products through your blog.
This is one of the easiest and most lucrative ways to make money with your blog.
As a blogger, you act as a link between the customer and the company. You provide a customer with information to persuade them to buy or not buy a product. This is done through the content you create such as reviews, how-to info posts, tutorials about the products, and add links to them.
If a user clicks and purchases through your link, you earn a commission without any additional costs to the user.
Affiliate marketing involves little to no start-up costs since you do not need to create the product yourself. You only need a little traffic to be successful with affiliate marketing. You can earn money from affiliate marketing even with a small audience if it converts well.
In most cases, companies will freely provide you with their products to test and give honest feedback about them through the content on your site.
A caution for you, most bloggers on the internet get duped into the habit of reviewing products they have not personally encountered, used, or tested. They go ahead and sell their audiences products that they do not know how to operate.
Now, to avoid being just like any other blogger on the internet, ensure that you test the products yourself. If you do not have the opportunity to do so, ensure that you carry out extensive research.
Watch YouTube reviews and check-in forums, and look for feedback on the goods you want to review on your blog.
Ensure that you believe in the goods you are selling to your audience. This will also help you easily write reviews, as you possess first-hand information about the products you promote.
For example, if you are promoting a hosting plan, ensure that you have hosted a site via the provider and tested all the vital things like up-time and down-time, speed, and reliability, among others.
This way, it is a win-win situation for you and your audience. You will be able to earn income and your readers will also be happy and contented with the product you are selling to them.
There are various affiliate marketing programs from various brands that you can join to start making money by promoting their products, such as Amazon affiliates.
All you need is to sign up for these programs. Once accepted, you are given promotional tools such as links, banners, coupon promo codes, and trials to promote products on your blog.
Some affiliate programs offer payment for leads such as clicks, sign-ups and purchases, and recurring fees.
You can also join various affiliate marketplaces such as Impact, Commission Junction, and ClickBank, where you can find different affiliate programs to join and promote.
With affiliate marketing, you can generate good income from your blog.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is where a company pays you to post or create content about their product on your blog.
Companies are looking to promote their products and have a set budget ready to spend to increase their brand awareness. They are ready to pay you for sponsored reviews on your blog.
All you have to do is position yourself and ensure you are ready to provide your blog as a platform for promotion.
Ensure that your blog has a media kit that highlights your blog’s metrics, analytics, traffic, and numbers that will persuade sponsors. This works for sites that have established their footprint and have the numbers.
Besides, there are various platforms such as IZEA, Aspire IQ, and Adsy. What these platforms do is that they connect brands to influencers and creators. Simply create a profile listing your blog, and interested brands will reach you with sponsored post opportunities.
What happens if your blog still needs to be bigger?
Now, here’s the thing. Do not highlight your weaknesses or so.
Instead, do this.
Take the extra mile and start pitching sponsors by yourself. Persuade your potential sponsor on how your blog is growing and how dedicated you will be to push their brand. Highlight why you are their best bet.
With this method of monetizing your blog, you can up to $5000 for posting one single post on your blog.
You should also follow the Google guidelines on Sponsored content, like enabling sponsored post tags on sponsored content on your site to fully disclose to your visitors that the content is sponsored.
Posting sponsored content on your blog can help you make money on your blog by posting sponsored content.
Selling Products Through Your Blog
This is one of the most prominent monetization methods you should prioritize, even as a beginner in your blogging journey.
First, you should know that various people are willing to learn from your experience and skills and are willing to pay a cost to them.
Secondly, digital products are easy to build and create. Since you already have a platform, your blog, you can quickly start selling as early as day 1.
There are various products you can create, such as physical ones, and sell through an E-commerce store, but the easiest ones are digital products. You do not need a physical location or production.
You can create digital products such as templates, themes, plugins, wallpapers, presets, courses, and E-books and list them for sale.
You can also create courses and explainer content in E-books or videos and sell them to people.
People are willing to learn and are in constant search of learning things from skilled experts.
You are good to go as long as you simplistically solve someone’s problem. Your products will have a unique selling point.
Furthermore, after creating your products, create blog post content around the products you have created to promote them regularly on your blog. This can help you make money from your blog.
You can also list your products on platforms like Gumroad and other digital marketplaces. I advise you to create a specialized directory of your products on your website or blog and sell to your audience directly other than relying on third-party platforms.
Do not wait to gain 10 or 20 years of experience. Start creating now. There isn’t a better time than now.
All you have to do is ensure that your products are of high quality, well packaged, and solve a problem. Once you put out a good product, it will attract positive reviews.
More positive reviews about your products will attract more customers and sales and make more money.
Advertising
This is one of the most typical forms of monetizing blogs popular among bloggers. Advertising on a blog takes on various forms such as showing display ads, native ads, banner ads, etc.
Advertising platforms pay you for impressions and clicks that you get on your blog for the ads served. So, if a visitor visits your blog, as they scroll through your content, see an ad that interests them, and click on it, you earn income.
To start advertising on your blog, you can apply for ad platforms such as Google AdSense, Ezoic, MediaVine, AdThrive, and other alternative ad networks. Each ad platform has its acceptance criteria, and aspects such as traffic and policy compliance are considered and come into play before you get accepted.
For example, for AdSense, one click can equal $0.5 [ Just an example]. So if you get 50 clicks per day, you will earn $25.
It would be best if you kept in mind that Ads are numbers. You need to have loads of traffic to earn a stable and significant income. The more traffic, the more income you can earn.
Another way to make money with ads on your blog is by directly selling advertising space. This can be through banner or widget ads placed in different areas on your blog. Advertisers will pay you for impressions, clicks, or sign-ups from showing specific ads on your site.
To set up your blog for showing ads, apply to ad providers and get accepted to different programs. Similarly, set up an ‘Advertise With Us‘ which highlights your website stats where potential advertisers seeking to collaborate with your blog can reach out for deals.
Be selective about the ads you show to your audience to maintain your site’s integrity. Ensure that you are getting lots of traffic to generate wholesale ad revenue. A/B test with different ad sizes and locations to find out which spots drive more clicks and impressions.
This way, you can earn money from your blog passively (even in your sleep).
Subscription Services
This is common with news blogs, where such sites offer breaking and the latest news to premium subscribers.
Guess what?
You can offer premium subscription services on your blog and make users pay for your content.
Let’s face it.
Ads are annoying, and they affect user experience.
They tend to slow down website speed, and this affects SEO. But, you can still earn income with your blog while maintaining a good user experience for your audience. You can create a separate version of your site where users can subscribe to disable ads or offer them independent premium content.
Users can pay for packages periodically, such as weekly, annually, or monthly.
Building an audience first is the key to charging a subscription to your blog. It would help if you had a community and audience with whom you have built a strong foundation and level of connection to make it easy once you enable monetization so that you are sure they will pay for your content.
Another key thing to consider is to ensure that you offer your audience ‘Gold.’ What I meant by Gold is the value that they won’t get elsewhere. This can be resources, free access to tools, videos, tips and tricks, and secrets, among others, that are scarce elsewhere on the internet.
You can also create tools such as a plagiarism checker, keyword research tool, and an online calculator and charge users on subscription plans to those tools.
By adding subscription services to your blog, you can make money blogging without affecting user experience on your website, unlike ads.
Consultation Services
Are you an expert in a particular field? Doctor, Mental health expert, Dating and relationship coach, this is one of the most viable ways you can make money blogging.
Why stress setting up a physical meet-up with your clients when you could hop on a call, deliver your services, and still get paid?
The first thing to note is that your clients will not appear out of thin air. Unless you have a previous physical location, you must work to attract clients to your service before even offering it.
Be a professional and set up your social media profiles on all platforms. Optimize your website for SEO, drive organic traffic and drive clients directly to your blog.
Charge clients on a contract basis per session or time spent on a call. This way, you can earn money through your blog.
Membership Sites
Members of your audience can subscribe annually or monthly, daily or weekly, whichever period is.
For example, you can serve a membership-based newsletter to paid subscribers. Like subscription services, the key is building a loyal audience and community from your blog.
One of the key ways to do this is by constantly engaging with them in comment sections or through a newsletter.
Offer exclusive perks and content to members who have an active membership subscription. Give them content not shared elsewhere, notify them of new content updates first, and offer them exclusive brand deals and discounts among others.
Simply put, offer rare VALUE.
Once you establish yourself as an expert in your niche and build a loyal audience, it will be easy to charge a membership subscription fee on your blog and make money.
Freelance Services
The first step to making money through your blog as a freelance writer is establishing yourself as an industry/niche expert. This is easy if you are consistent. With time, you will start to stand out in your niche.
Build credibility over your name by sharing extensively on the topic you cover on your blog. Create a specific page on your site where you showcase your portfolio.
You can offer programming, writing, and website design, among others.
And yes, although there has been a surge of AI content, you may think human writers need to be more relevant.
No, let me tell you a secret!
In fact, with everyone relying on AI writing tools like ChatGPT, and Jasper AI, human content is becoming scarce.
Besides, search engines favor human-written content as opposed to AI. This is because AI content usually needs to be more helpful to users and written mainly to manipulate search rankings.
Personally, I don’t particularly appreciate relying on AI content. For the many times that writers have submitted AI written content, I have passed it through AI scanners and rejected it as a result of heavily being produced by AI and losing value.
So, market yourself on your blog by creating a dedicated page for your freelance writing services and how people can contact you. Avoid freelance platforms and mainly offer your services through your blog.
Offering freelance services through your blog will make your boss and eliminate the reliance on third-party sites. They outrageously charge large cuts on your pay, leaving you with little to no penny.
Leverage guest post opportunities on various blogs in your niche to continue marketing yourself as a freelancer.
But as a rule of thumb, ensure that you give value even when you are guest posting on other blogs. Ensure that your posts are well optimized for SEO, adequately researched, and comply with editorial guidelines such as word count, link placements, etc.
This way, you earn money both ways. First, from your blog through the various methods discussed earlier and through the freelance opportunities you get referred to from your blog and other sites on which you have featured.
This also helps you build backlinks to your site in the long run and build your site’s authority overall.
Events and Webinars
One of the critical aspects you should work for in your blogging journey is building credibility and establishing authority.
Once you have built a respected name in whichever industry or niche you are in, you will easily monetize and sell people your expertise.
Another fantastic way you can monetize based on your credibility is by organizing educational events, workshops, and webinars.
Here, people will pay for tickets to attend informative sessions where vital advice about the niche is shared.
Various digital marketers, such as Neil Patel, who have built authority in the blogging industry, have benefited from such events. Neil has hosted various SEO-related events garnering masses of digital marketers attending to gain knowledge.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical event, and you can schedule an online event and make people pay you for tickets to attend.
In exchange, you offer them valuable information and value—this way, you can earn money from the authority you’re built with your blog.
Donations and Patronage
This is one of the easiest forms of monetization, where you create a page where users can reward you or give you appreciation in the form of money through your blog.
Set up a donation page, Patreon, or buy me coffee services where happy users who appreciate your content can support you.
This is a way your users can say ‘Thank you’ for the services and helpful content that you provide to them through your blog.
Include buttons for payment gateways on your site where users can click send funds to you as a form of appreciation.
Please don’t be too pushy into forcing them to send you appreciation tokens but let them do it voluntarily.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, I have discussed the top 10 ways that you can make money blogging. A blog opens you to a wide range of income sources that, if utilized well, could earn a living.
But here is the catch!
Like any other business, making money online will not make you rich overnight. It would be best if you put in the work and effort to see results consistently.
Remember, Rome was not built in one day!
Before you ever expect to earn money online, you must give ‘something,’ which is value. It is after you provide value that you can earn in return.
With consistency, hard work, and discipline, you will start reaping the benefits of online money.
I hope you found this post helpful!
Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions, inquiries, or ideas. I will be happy to connect with you.
About the Author
Kityo Martin is an expert tech freelance writer at Workaguide.com. He writes about topics on SEO, Blogging, and Tech on his blog solving readers’ problems.
