How to Monetize a Blog

Not too many years ago, creating and maintaining a website would’ve cost you thousands of dollars. Monetizing the website was just as hard, as Stripe didn’t exist and PayPal was still in its early years.

Nowadays, starting and monetizing a blog isn’t such a difficult task.

When Should You Start to Monetize Your Blog?

To monetize your blog, you should build your blog first. This means more than installing WordPress and posting several blog posts. First, you should put as much effort as you can to create compelling and valuable content for your audience.

Simultaneously, grow your audience and build a community. You can start monetizing your blog as soon as you’ve attracted a decent amount of traffic, built a community, and have earned the trust of your audience. It is easier to sell your services and products or recommend [affiliate services and products to an audience that trusts you.

Key Components

Ways to Monetize Blog

Display ADS on Your Site

Advertising networks like BlogHer, Burst, Lijit, and Google AdSense, work with lots of advertisers who pay the network to put their ad on your blog. Displaying ads on your website is the fastest way to profit from your website, and it is a method that surely works.

Usually, bloggers begin by displaying ads, and they later work their way into more profitable strategies for monetization.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a link or an ad to a product or a company that results in commission if the end result is a sale. It is one of the most common ways that bloggers make money online.

To do affiliate marketing, you will need a niche, an affiliate product, and an audience to promote that product to. However, keep in mind that you shouldn’t just be focused on pitching products so you can make a sale. Instead, you should pitch products that will also provide value to your audience.

Sell Online Courses

Selling online courses that are focused on a specific topic and subject has a higher value than blog posts alone. The best thing is, you don’t need lots of customers or leads to profit from your first course. People like the convenience that online courses offer.

Creating and selling online courses is a great way to earn money since you can sell them several times, and you don’t need an inventory to keep them in. If you have knowledge of a certain subject, you can create a curriculum and start teaching students all over the world about that topic. Besides earning money, through online courses, you’ll be able to expand your community and add additional value to your existing blog.

Sell Books

Writing short eBooks and selling them has an upward growth trend. Use your blog to promote your books, give away free copies in order to get reviews, and give discounts to your customers. However, to make a living out of selling eBooks, you will need to publish books on the regular and work extra hard.

You’ll make more money if you have more quality books. With eBooks, you won’t have to spend any cash on promoting them. By running a blog, you already have the audience, platform, authority, and influence to promote your books.

Another option is printable workbooks. Although people don’t expect that their audience is willing to buy something online and then print it, printable workbooks are a great way to monetize your blog.

Sell Physical Products

You can sell physical products to your audience. For instance, if you have a travel blog, you can sell a guidebook for exotic destinations. The selling of the products will depend on whether or not you’ve already built an audience.

When selling physical products, think about your content.

Do you have a catchphrase? What is it about your content that people love? Do you have an interesting logo that is well-known in your industry?

Come up with a few ideas and put them on your products.

The benefits of selling physical products on your blog are that they generally have a high perceived value, and they can be used as an extension of your digital products (per instance, your eBooks). When you hand off something tangible to your audience, there is a personal touch involved, which can make your customers feel like they are a part of a community.

Run a Virtual Summit

By launching a virtual summit, you’ll be able to build relationships and connect with influencers that could, in turn, bring you engagement, reach, and credibility. When you host a virtual summit, you’ll be able to bring together dozens of industry leaders and do a one-on-one interview with them.

Although the summit could take weeks to prepare, even a month, it will definitely pay off in the long run. Through a virtual summit, you’ll be able to network with industry leaders, establish yourself as an authority, generate revenue, and build an email list.

Create a Paid Membership Site

With a membership site, you will have to create premium content for your members, which makes it a big investment, but it’s worth it in the long run. With a membership site, not only will you reach more people, but it will give your audience a sense of belonging and community. The members will subscribe monthly or annually and will receive exclusive benefits for it.

With membership tiers, you’ll be able to get a constant flow of cash since you won’t be relying on one-time sales. However, you will have to put a lot more effort into the content you produce.

Publish Sponsored Posts

You can write a sponsored service or product review and the experience you’ve had with it and share it with your audience. Sponsored posts can be blog posts, reviews, podcasts, videos, and basically anything that is paid for by a sponsor. However, sponsored posts require a lot of credibility and traffic in order to get a result from it.

With sponsored posts, you will charge a company a certain fee to write about their product. This way, you will expose that product to your audience, and the company will acquire new customers. When writing a product review, make sure that you write it honestly since you can lose the trust of your readers if you give a dishonest review.

Coaching Services

People will start to reach out to you for advice as soon as you start establishing yourself in your niche. Offering a coaching service to clients can bring you money, no matter when you started blogging. The coaching process can bring dramatic results, so coaching services are highly demanded right now.

You can start selling yourself as a consultant and coach if it fits into your business model. Naturally, coaching isn’t appropriate for every niche, but you can play around with the idea and customize it to fit your niche. For instance, if you’re a fashion blogger, you can offer consultations for styling.

Consulting will allow you to gain profits from your expertise and knowledge, without you having to do lots of extra work.

Freelance Services

If you’re running a blog, you already have the skills that are needed to offer freelance services. You can transform your financial life by becoming a freelance blogger. You can write articles on different topics for landing pages, emails, sites, etc.

Good quality content is recognized by B2C and B2B companies as the ultimate tool for nurturing a loyal audience and attracting leads, which is why freelance bloggers can make a living from their writing. Although the market might look crowded, it is really hard to find freelance bloggers the have social media, WordPress, and SEO skills.

Freelance blogging will also let you know the people in your industry, which will help you create better content that is focused on the interests of your audience.

Accept Donations

You can also make it possible for your audience to make donations if you want to monetize your blog. Ask your audience to make a small donation so you can keep creating content. This will especially work if you’re a non-profit. Even if you aren’t a non-profit, donations can be used to earn money for your blog.

There are many WordPress plugins like PayPal Donations, Charitable, and Give, which you can use to enable this feature on your website. However, to get donations from your visitors, you will need to have a dedicated audience and provide them with valuable content. By choosing a WordPress plugin, you’ll have to do most of the setting up on your own, but in turn, you will pay fewer fees.

Summary

What’s important to keep in mind is that you have to offer some value to your audience in order for your blog readers to give you their money. Get readers by creating amazing web content, and then use the ways we mentioned to monetize your blog.

Now that you know how to monetize your blog, you should pick one or two of these strategies, and you can start making money today! Something you started as a side hustle can easily turn into a full-time income with a little hard work.

Frequently Asked Questions