Blogging for Money – The Easy Way…
Although a website’s primary purpose is to build trust and awareness, these efforts ultimately serve as the main recipe to make money blogging. After all, you can’t expect anyone to hand over their money if they hardly know anything about you, correct?
Once you build a solid following through quality publishing and engagement, the money will naturally follow with the right combination of tools, services, and a solid long-term strategy.
On that note, today we will discuss the most common ways to blog for money while keeping our visitors highly engaged. This article explores five money-making sections, each broken into various methods you can reliably incorporate into your blog.
Let’s get started!
Advertisements
Advertising is perhaps the most widely known way to make money blogging. It is also one of the easiest ones to implement, which has led to long-lasting appeal among new and established bloggers alike.
Traditional Advertising:
Many people start a blog for money and survive solely from advertising (even in the age of ad blocking software). What makes traditional ads so intriguing is their low entry barrier, as most ad networks are happy to sign you up as long as you have a decent blog to show them.
- Here are a few tips to help maximize your earnings:
- Make sure your ads are not intrusive. One ad per page is sufficient for most bloggers and visitors.
- The best ad placement is above the fold, which means being toward the top half of a page. This naturally increases visibility and potential earnings.
- Experiment with multiple ad dimensions (such as banners, rectangles and even text-only ads). Every niche provides different results.
Where to look: Some of the most popular platforms out there include Google AdSense, Chitika, as well as Media.net.
Private (Self-hosted) Advertising:
As your blog generates a healthy amount of targeted visitors, you may start selling personal ad space as a means to make money blogging throughout the year.
This is typically how it goes:
You would get in touch with a person or company that wishes to promote their property (such as a product, service, or even an article).
Then, negotiate a price for a set amount of time (for example, $150 per month for a homepage advertisement).
Finally, you are to display a banner (or any form of visible property) on the spot you two had agreed upon.
Attracting advertisers can be difficult, so here are some things you can do to maximize your earnings:
- Let website visitors know you are accepting advertisements. Even a simple website banner stating “Advertise here” works wonders.
- Contact niche companies directly, especially those you have already seen advertising on other blogs.
- Join marketplaces like BuySellAds, which helps you connect with advertisers. This marketplace makes finding prospects much easier, as they are doing much of the marketing for you.
Native Advertising:
This is a newer form of advertising compared to the more traditional ways. The concept is rather interesting, and many sites are now blogging for money through this method above all others.
Native ads are typically shown inside of an article page. These are fairly related to the content you’re currently reading, and the headline reads just like a typical article. This is what makes them work so well, as they all look and feel very natural to the reader.
You might have seen some prominent examples on sources like BuzzFeed and other entertainment sites, typically accompanied by the phrase “From around the web.”
Where to look: Some of the best companies for these include Outbrain, Nativo, and Taboola. Give it a try and see how it works for your blog!
Product & Service Marketing
Marketing products and services are immensely popular, no matter what your blogging niche and specialty is. This works best if your audience is highly targeted, as they will be more likely to purchase any given recommendation as a result.
Let’s go over some popular product and service-based marketing…
Affiliate Marketing:
Aside from traditional advertising, this is probably the most common way to make money blogging among solopreneurs.
The idea involves promoting a product or a service on someone’s behalf – either a person or a company – through the use of a trackable link. You may freely insert them into your blog content, email messages, and other online venues where promotions are accepted.
Lastly, you would then receive a fixed or recurring commission once someone makes a purchase through said link. Rinse and repeat.
Affiliate marketing can generate a limitless amount of money depending on product pricing and overall demand. In fact, some of the top money making blogs make over $100,000 per month through a combination of niche products or services that fit their audience.
Where to look: Look into CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) and Clickbank, as they have a massive marketplace consisting of affiliate products to match your needs.
Sell Your Own Digital Products:
How do bloggers make money when no third-party product seems suitable for their audience? Easy, they simply create their own!
The selling of products and services doesn’t necessarily have to come from others. Do you have a natural skill that can be sold? If so, this provides a natural way to make money blogging while doing what you love.
Products you can create may include:
- Ebooks
- Technical guides
- Audio files
- Video files
- Software
If you can make it, you can sell it. Moreover, you get to keep 100% of the sale as you’re cutting out the middleman (as is the case with affiliate marketing).
Sell Your Own Physical Products:
Just because blogging takes place in a virtual environment doesn’t mean your products should remain intangible. In fact, many bloggers are making money blogging exclusively from physical goods and nothing more .
For example, you may buy a product locally (or overseas) and subsequently sell it for a profit. Otherwise, simply craft it from scratch and ship it to the customer.
While you can already do this on marketplaces like Amazon, selling such items from your blog can (once again) cut out the middleman and thus increase your profit margin.
Where to look: Your local thrift store, and even Craigslist (consider the free section, where many things are thrown away on a daily basis).
Sponsored Content:
Creating sponsored content involves the promotion of a product or service, and this is most commonly done through written or video content. The product or service is generally covered in a detailed review while naturally linking to it as an affiliate.
If doing it through less traditional means, you can instruct users to visit a specific URL containing your tracking code just the same (which works pretty well for video and audio-based content).
How to get started: Contact niche companies and websites. Let them know what kind of traffic and engagement you have and make it all about them! This can be a numbers game, which means you should contact a set amount of places on a weekly or monthly basis.
General Sponsorships:
You have probably heard or read content creators state, “This has been brought to you by…” followed by a company or service. This is referred to as a sponsorship, and as you know, it has been practiced for many decades now (especially on TV and radio).
That said, you can successfully implement this very idea by suggesting a relevant product or service to your audience.
How to get started: Attracting a company to pay you may seem tough at first, but it is perfectly doable if you have a highly targeted audience (as this generally means quality visitors). And once again, don’t be afraid to go after niche companies yourself and laying out the benefits to working with you.
Sponsorships have taken the audio/video industry by storm thanks to the likes of YouTube. Why not take a piece of the pie by leveraging your target audience?
Accessibility
As you can see, there is no shortage of unique methods when blogging for money and long-term financial independence. The following are based on providing access to certain benefits and sections on your blog…
Memberships:
A membership model can be a massively reliable way to make money blogging, all depending on the specific products and services you offer. Thankfully, you can create a membership portion on your blog related to just about anything – as long as there is demand for your offers.
Common membership examples include:
Selling ebooks and digital tutorials: Do you have anything to distribute or to teach others? You may offer premium access to recurring guides on a weekly or monthly basis.
Audio/video guides and tutorials: Similarly to helping others in written form, you can also lend your talents in a audio/visual format.
Private forum access: Forums are generally free, but you can always charge to access special content or a very niche group that focuses on expert and professional discussions.
Specialized services and other goodies: Can you grant access to other incentives that are conveniently available from one location?
How to get started: The sky’s the limit if you wish to make money as a blogger through a membership scheme. Popular membership solutions include S2Member and MemberPress.
Job Boards:
Making money from a job board can be highly reliable once it becomes popular. This is due to the fact that job seekers tend to visit regularly in search of new clients and jobs.
Here are some common ways to blog for money primarily through a job board:
Ad-supported listings: It’s free for employers to post a job listing, and free for workers to apply. However, the board would show conventional advertisements on various places (be it traditional or private ads, as previously discussed).
Charge for featured listings: In this case, most job listings are free of charge but employers must pay to “sticky them” at the top of the board. These listings generally garner more attention than the rest, and the amount of money is typically dependent on your current traffic.
Charge for every listing: You may choose to simply charge employers for every job that gets published on the job board, including non-featured listings.
Charge job seekers, not employers: This method is the least popular, but many blogs take this route depending on what’s being offered as a whole. This is often part of a membership scheme, as we recently discussed.
How to get started: There are quite a few job board plugins for WordPress, with WP Job Manager being one of the most popular. Otherwise, you can also rely on a job board theme which converts your entire website into a full-blown job portal, similar to Monster.com and Indeed.com.
Services
Thankfully, you don’t need to rely on someone else’s property as a way of blogging for money. Here are some common examples…
Sell Your Expertise:
Promote your talents on a separate “Hire me” page or (even better) on your main Contact page to attract interest parties. Typical skills and services may include:
- Writing and editing: Are you a good researcher, writer and/or editor? Let visitors know about it!
- Copywriting: This is vastly different than traditional writing, as it requires an influential touch to convert leads into purchasing or subscribing to any given product/service.
- Development: Can you code or program? Perhaps you know your way around PHP, CSS, and other languages? Again, feel free to sell yourself to the masses for an attractive price.
- Mentorship: Most bloggers have a certain skill that sets them apart. What’s yours? No matter how minor or common you think it is, there will always be someone who could really use your help.
- How to get started: You can earn money on your blog by promoting such services on all primary pages (such as the homepage, your ‘contact me’ page and others).
Other Ways to Make Money Blogging
CPA Offers:
CPA stands for Cost Per Action/Acquisition, as you get paid when people perform a specific task. These are somewhat similar to affiliate links, but the traffic can be easier to convert depending on the situation at hand.
If an advertiser is looking to build a mailing list, they may pay you for everyone that clicks on your links and signs up to their newsletter. This means that you earn without anyone making a single purchase, which could translate to a large income in the long-run.
CPA offers can be useful in just about any niche. However, they are especially popular among entertainment and lifestyle blogs, since many of these revolve around entering contests and fun sweepstakes.
Where to look: Popular CPA networks include MaxBounty and CPALead.
Donations:
Lastly, donations are one of the more humble ways to make money from a blog. This isn’t really used as a means to generate big profits, but rather as a way to help maintain your blog.
Many bloggers choose to keep their website free of advertisements and deliver a superb user experience (by providing everything for free, for example). As a result, they kindly ask readers to make a one-time or recurring donation to help keep the blog alive.
You could potentially make good money as a blogger with this approach, though it really depends on how persistent you are about donations and how visitors perceive your offerings.
Where to look: Popular platforms include PayPal and Patreon (with the latter being especially helpful if you provide new material on a regular basis, such as new books and tutorials).
Conclusion
So, can you make money blogging even as a newer publisher? As you can see, the answer is an absolute YES, regardless of niche and target demographic.
Let’s come back to this article a bit later again, as there are several other ways to make money from a blog with the right set of tools and strategic approach. If you have any questions about any of these, feel free to contact us and we’d be more than happy to help you get started in monetizing your blog!