Four Ways To Make Money Blogging

Whether you’re blogging for business or blogging as a hobby, one thing every new blogger wants to know is how to monetize a blog and make money blogging.

Here are 4 different ways to monetize your blog:

An affiliate is someone who markets and promotes other people’s products in exchange for a commission on sales that result directly from their recommendation. Affiliate marketing is the easiest blog monetization strategy to get started with.

When you sign up as an affiliate for a brand, you’ll receive a unique tracking URL to use in your blog posts. Then when someone clicks on your unique link on your website or in your blog posts and makes a purchase, you’ll receive credit and a referral fee.

If you decide to monetize your blog with affiliate marketing, follow these best practices:

1. Only promote things relevant to your audience
2. Only promote things you have personally used or experienced
3. Only promote things you would recommend to friends and family
4. Add an affiliate disclaimer to blog posts and your website

It doesn’t matter if your blog is small or large, gets a hundred visitors a day or thousands of visitors a day, if you have a blog, you can get started with advertising.

There are two main types of advertising:

Ad Networks connect advertisers to blogs and websites that want to host ads. When working with an ad network, you’re not selling any ads. You’re simply displaying ads from that network. 

• Businesses pay the ad network to show their ads
• You sign up for an account with the ad network and install their code on your website where you’d like ads to show
• The ad network selects the ads best suited for your website based on criteria you provide and displays them on your website
• You make money from either ad impressions (views) or clicks

Direct ads, on the other hand, are ads you sell and manage yourself on your own website. With direct advertising, businesses seek your blog out, purchase specific advertising spots through your site, and pay you directly.

If your blog receives a significant amount of traffic and you have built up a considerable following, you can pitch your influence to brands who want to reach your audience. 

The three most common ways to do this are:

• Brand Partnerships: A brand hires you to collaborate with them on the creation of new blog and/or social media content that highlights the brand.
• Sponsored Content: You receive discounted or free products, services, or experiences in exchange for a review, blog post, email blast, and/or social media posts about the gifted item, or a brand pays you to write about them.
• Partner Content: A brand pays you to publish an article or another type of content they wrote on your blog.

When engaging in brand partnerships or publishing sponsored posts of any kind, just remember that you are required by law to disclose those relationships.

If you have an audience, you can monetize your blog by creating something to sell to them. The key is creating something that aligns with the content of your blog and helps your audience take the next step or solve a challenge they are currently facing.

For example, you can monetize your audience by creating:

• An information product like an ebook, manual, blueprint, video training, or digital workbook.
• A tangible product like a book, t-shirt, mug, hat, print workbook, journal, or stickers.
• An online course, an email course, or a video course
• A virtual or live event or online summit
• Service packages and consulting

When it comes to making money with your blog, it’s important to remember that it’s probably not going to generate riches overnight. Monetizing your blog will take time because you’ll need to experiment, test, tweak, and test some more to see what works with your audience and what doesn’t. Then you’ll need to drive as much traffic as possible to your blog because the more people who come to your site and read your posts, the more ad impressions, ad clicks, affiliate link clicks, and conversions you’ll see.