While blogging is a lot of fun, most people blog so they can make an income from them. The good news is: monetizing your blog is easier than ever and there are so many routes to go. If you have been blogging for a while but haven’t monetized, now is the time to learn and start implementing the methods that suit your blog. Nothing is exciting as monetizing your blog especially when you start getting some readers to it so let’s jump right in.
14 Best Methods to Monetize Your Blog:
#1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of my most favorite and easiest methods to implement on a niche site or blog. Affiliate marketing is awesome: you sign up to promote a company’s products, promote those products on your blog where it makes sense, and in turn, when people buy products through you affiliate link, you earn a commission. Cha-CHING!
For simplicity’s sake, imagine there’s a specific product you’d like to promote to your readers. It’s a $100 product and the agreement is that for each one of this product you sell through your affiliate link, you will earn 10% of the sale, per product sold. If one reader on your blog buys the product, you’ll earn $10. If a 100 readers buy the product, that will earn you $1000 in commissions.
The best part is: you earn an income without having to create your own product or hold inventory for any products. You simply earn commissions and the retailer takes care of shipping the product and any customer service issues. Hands down, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to earn an income and the first route I go when implementing a monetization method for my blogs.
#2. Display Ads
Ads have become super common on blogs and niche sites. Google understands ad revenue is how site owners support their sites. This is how ads work: if you have them set up to display on your site, ads relevant to your content will be displayed to the readers. If a reader clicks on an ad, you make money!
Sometimes, bloggers are turned off by the idea of display ads but if you have a good amount of traffic, you can make a great income by implementing ads.
You can sign up with Google Adsense directly which is an ad network by Google that displays ads on your website. However, here are some other ad network options you can join and each one has its own approval process:
#3. Sponsored Content
Did you know that you can get PAID to write blog posts by companies who want to expose their products to new audiences? H-e-l-l yes!
Companies will literally pay you to write sponsored content in the form of a blog post so that their product is in front of your audience. This is similar to influencer marketing where influencers on Tik Tok or YouTube get paid by a company to talk about their product.
If you have engaging readers, a good amount of traffic, and solid content, then consider creating sponsored posts. Here are a few places where you can connect with companies that are willing to pay you for writing such content:
Additionally, you can perform outreach to individual companies and see if they are interested.
When you write a sponsored post and get paid for it, be sure to let your readers know that it is sponsored content. First, readers trust bloggers when there is transparency with their content and trust is built. Secondly, in the USA, the FTC requires bloggers to disclose sponsored content to their readers.
#4. Sell Ad Space Directly to Companies
This is another good option to consider for your blog. In this case, you sell ad space directly to companies and they are willing to pay to have their product exposed to your audience. Another plus of going this route is that you can determine a flat fee for a banner ad. Just to be clear, this is different than the ad networks discussed above. Think along the lines of creating ad spots like a banner on top of each page or the sidebar where you can sell a few advertisement spaces to companies directly.
One way to do this is to manually reach out to companies in your niche but this can be very time-consuming. A good option to start with is a platform like BuySellAds to negotiate with companies for ad space directly. Pretty cool, right? Also, a tool like AdSanity can help you manage your ads in WordPress so you don’t feel overwhelmed.
#5. Write an Ebook
Selling ebooks is an excellent way to monetize your blog, especially because once you write it, every sale that comes in is passive: no more work to be done! Passive income is delicious.
An ebook is the perfect offering to your audience from a price point perspective. An ebook is like a book so the price can vary from a few dollars to $20 depending on the topic matter. Your ebook also needs to be enticing and interesting to your audience: what problem will it help them resolve? Will it be a good read for them?
Also, if you have an existing blog post that is doing extremely well, that may be a strong hint to create an ebook version that is much more thorough.
If you have never sold your own products before, an ebook is an excellent and low-cost option to create.
#6. Offer Coaching or Consulting Services
A lot of people have great experience and information. If you are one of those people, consider offering coaching services to others on your blog.
Let’s take a blogging coach for an example: a blogger who has created a successful blog could coach other bloggers who haven’t hit the milestones he/she has in blogging. This could including coaching other bloggers in how to monetize their blogs better, how to grow their traffic, what keywords to target, and so much more.
Here is another example: a golfer can coach his paying audience on how to become a better golfer or a chef can coach his paying chefs to be trained in the cuisine that he is an expert in.
Now take into account what your expertise is in and get started.
#7. Offer Online Courses
No matter what niche you are in, you can offer your experience and expertise in the form of an online course. A lot of people find creating their own course intimidating or feel that they’re not an expert. As far as creating your own course, you don’t have to be an “expert” in the sense that you need to be at the top of your field.
As long as you have knowledge that you can share with others that can teach them something, you can create a course. For example, since I have extensive knowledge in creating blogs that generate an income, I decided to create the Affiliate Phoenix Academy: How to Create a Niche Blog & Make Money course.
Depending on what your blog’s overall topic is, you can create a suitable course. Here are a few examples:
- A photography course on how to shoot images for your blog using an iPhone or Android camera
- A knitting course that shows beginners how to get started in knitting and walks them through their first knitting project
- A gardening course that shows people how to grow their own vegetables and herbs in a small space
With a course software platform like Thinkific, it’s super easy to get started with and launch your first course!
#8. Create a Membership Site
Check this out: you can create paid-only content on a site that people have to pay to get access to. That is what is called a membership site and can generate good revenue for your blog. A lot of bloggers don’t think that people would pay for their content but this isn’t true. Your most loyal readers who love your content will become members and only members have access to this awesome content from you! The best part is that you can charge them a one-time fee or a monthly fee. A monthly fee is great especially if you’ll be providing frequent, fresh content.
There are a few membership site platforms you can choose from to build out your own membership site:
#9. Sell Digital Products (Other than Ebooks)
There are so many other types of digital products you can sell such as music, art, your own services, video trainings, printables, WordPress themes, mobile apps, and templates of all kinds (depending on your niche)! If you have the skill and you know you can create a digital product that your audience will absolutely love, then you should highly consider this route. I have come across sites that have done well selling only templates.
Here are three digital download WordPress plugins that can help you get your digital products up and running to sell:
#10. Sell Physical Products
Depending on the subject matter of your blog, selling merchandise can be a great way to go. I have personally shopped for coffee mugs on a coffee blog, bought hiking gear from the personal recommendations of a hiking blogger, and fun cat t-shirts from cat bloggers!
Just because you have a blog, nothing changes: you can also sell merchandise and it might be an awesome fit.
Selling physical goods is much harder than digital products because you have to worry about supplies, inventory, and customer service. However, print on demand takes care of this as well so explore that option as well.
This monetization method absolutely kills it in certain niches.
#11. Freelancing
Given that your blog is about a certain topic and you are demonstrating your experience and expertise in it, it makes complete sense to offer freelancing services to your audience. With freelancing, you don’t need to spend hours creating a product; you’re already skilled at what you do and now, you can get paid for it immediately.
This makes total sense if you are a tax advisor, graphic designer, writer, copywriter, search engine optimization expert, web designer, and so much more!
Simply, add a page on your blog titled “Hire Me” and add a form using Contact Form 7 or WPForms. In fact, adding a video where you explain your experience in your field can greatly help conversions.
#12. Paid Webinars
Free webinars are awesome: you give your audience what they want while positioning yourself as an expert. You also get to promote your existing products to them.
But have you heard of paid webinars? No? Okay, well, if you don’t have paid courses on your blog yet, you can certainly go the way of paid webinars. You can promote the tickets to your existing audience and record the webinar for them so they can watch it again later or revisit as needed.
The format of a webinar goes as following: an introduction to what the webinar is about, an introduction to you, discuss the overall topic, and at the end, there’s a question and answer session. Nail your webinar and you can add it to your arsenal of “products”.
Here are software you can use to host webinars:
#13. Build an Email List
Arguably, building an email list is one of the BEST things you can do to monetize your blog. If you start building your email list from day one, you will have a list of people who are eager for your free content as well as your paid content. You can promote your products to your list at any time.
Here’s the most important part to understand: the people who sign up to your email list have willingly given up their email address to you to be contacted by you. They want to hear from you! They are your most ravings fans!
In fact, you can promote any other monetization method to your email list. Not only that, but an email list is important to build in the tricky world of algorithm updates on Google (and other platforms).
You can use PopUpAlley to design an eye-catching popup form to capture emails. Here are a few email list software tools you can use to get started today:
#14. Accept Donations
Have you heard of the phrase, “ask and ye shall receive”?
Well, it’s the same case here. There will always be a part of your audience that will happily buy your products or make donations. Donations may make a few bloggers or content creators hesitate but even huge sites ask for donations. One example is Wikipedia.
For donations, you can use the following options for payments:
In Conclusion
Here is a summary of all the monetization methods discussed in this article:
- Affiliate marketing
- Display ads
- Sponsored content
- Sell ad space directly to companies
- Write an eBook
- Offer coaching or consulting services
- Offer online courses
- Create a membership site
- Sell digital products (other than eBooks)
- Sell physical products
- Freelancing
- Paid webinars
- Build an email list
- Accept donations
All the monetization methods discussed above are utilized by established bloggers and niche site owners to make money from their blogs. These monetization methods work for small blogs as well as blogs with a lot of traffic. Implement one method on your blog today to get started with your blog income. Good luck and have fun! If you have any questions, ask them in the Affiliate Phoenix Community here.