Once you start getting some traffic coming through your blog, the next thing that is usually on your mind is to monetize your blog and make money as a blogger.
At this point, you start asking questions such as How to monetize a blog? How to monetize a blog with ads? or How do I make money with my blog?
While there are answers to all these questions, blogging’s sole purpose is to share knowledge on your desired field of expertise.
However, It’s also a good thing if you can make money out of your shared knowledge by monetizing your blog.
There are several ways you can monetize your blog with ads, affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, selling products, sponsored posts, writing blogs for brands, and more. This brings me to the idea of writing this article.
This article will walk you through ways to monetize your blog and even make money as a career blogger.
So let’s take a look at some of the most promising and proven ways to make money blogging.
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How to monetize a blog
Here are some of the best ways to make money blogging, even with low traffic on your blog.
#1. Create and sell online courses
People want to learn these days but want to learn conveniently and easily. Online courses offer such comfort for people to learn anytime and anywhere without commuting long distances.
The key here is figuring out what your audience might be interested in learning. Once you figure out that, you will either create a course yourself or hire a freelancer to get it done for you.
Selling online courses will significantly impact your income; hence, you do not necessarily have to spend time and money shipping products. All you need to do is to automate the process through a sales funnel.
Here is a great Video by Sunny Lenarduzzi who has made over $6 million by selling online courses.
Though you might not make $6 million selling your course but trust me, you will sure start making money once you implement the process of selling online courses.
As a blogger, you can create an online course on any topic that people are struggling with.
It doesn’t have to be a complex topic like A/B testing – it could be as simple as “how to use Google Docs.”
Are you surprised? Here’s proof that this works: Joseph Michael Nicoletti created an online course that helps novelists write their novels with Scrivener, and he makes about $20,000 – $30,000 per month.
You want your course to be engaging, useful, and unique. If you follow these four tips for creating an engaging online course, you’ll succeed:
As you can see, people make a lot of money creating and selling online courses, and you can also do the same.
You can start with a blog post you are getting a lot of traffic from. That way, you will be able to target the people to buy your courses easily.
Finally, do not wait or insist on creating a complex and advanced course. You can start with a simple course and later upgrade it and remarket it to those who bought the first version.
Creating and selling courses is a sure and one of the easiest ways to make money blogging
#2. Make money with Sponsored posts and reviews
These days, many digital companies are eager to get online exposure through quality reviews and blog posts.
The reason is that they understand the long-term value of sponsored posts and reviews. The more traffic you have, the more you will be able to charge brands for reviews and sponsored posts.
They continue getting the benefit of those sponsored content as you continue to increase your domain and page authority.
This is what makes these sponsored posts and reviews a trendy part of influencer marketing.
Think of writing sponsored posts and reviews as influencer marketing is growing so fast and so loved by brands.
Take a look at the growth figures in 2020 at almost $10 billion. These figures are expected to grow even more in the new future.
You must put your audience’s interest and leave an honest review of the product or services on your blog so you won’t lose their trust.
Always put your audience first when writing reviews for brands.
For example, Matthew Woodward charges almost $1000 for a sponsored review and clearly points out on his advertising page that a paid review doesn’t mean a good review.
Being transparent with his audience maintains the trust he’s built with them, which is much more valuable than $1,000.
Though as a beginner, you should consider charging between $150 to $300 per review, this is because your sponsors will check your domain authority, traffic sources, and level and won’t be willing to pay very high at the beginning.
Another example is Michelle Gardner of Making sense of cents, who charges around $5,000 per sponsored post and makes $10,000 to $20,000 a month from sponsored posts, writes mainly on products and services she uses herself. That way, she can ensure that the people in her audience will love it too.
Another thing you must have in mind is Niche related posts. When writing sponsored posts, be selective and specifically write on topics or brands that are related to your blog Niche.
This is because you want all your articles to look natural to search engines and your audience.
For example, if you blog about online advertising, don’t make the mistake of writing sponsored posts about cars or machines that do not relate to your blogging niche.
On a final note, you can reach out to brands, but please do it only when you start getting some significant traffic.
#3. Write for brands as a blogging freelancer
Using your writing skills and experience will make you serious money if you are doing it right.
You might have chosen to start blogging because you love writing and you figure you are good at it.
Hence you are just starting out and not making a lot of money from your blog. You can spend some time writing for others to keep the cash coming in until you stand on your fits.
Digital brands are constantly on the lookout for quality writers to enrich their websites with quality content to boost their digital marketing.
They say in the game of SEO, Content is king, and there is every reason brands need content now more than ever to keep their growth on the upside.
It is also easy to find companies to write for by simply searching for brands related to your desired niche on Google.
It might interest you to look at how much blog freelancers are charging per blog post on freelance websites such as Fiverr. Take a look at the image below.
Given the above, let’s say you completed 10 articles a week and each cost $150 for just a 1500 words blog post, that’s $1,500 per week which is a good amount to keep you going.
Content marketing is actually becoming a huge business. In fact, The Global Content Marketing Industry forecast will surpass $107,540.6 million by 2026, from $36,786.6 million in 2018, growing at a CAGR of 14.3%, according to content marketing market analysis by Research Dive.
This presents a big opportunity to find brands that might be interested in your service and start writing for them. Apart from the above Fiverr cost per blog post, here is what an average content creator charges for creating content.
As you can see, the price varies based on the niche and so you should consider your offers according to your niche and country of residence.
Making your writing offers effective and profitable also depends on how you present yourself. First, you will have to create quality content on your blog to show a sample of what your clients are going to get.
This way you will be able to easily convince them to believe in you and hire you after sending offers to them.
#4. Sell eBooks to your audience
Selling ebooks has made book entrepreneurs millions of dollars around the world. In recent years, bloggers have also joined the trend, and they are making it big just by placing ebooks on their blogs.
The good thing with ebooks is that it’s easy to create and easy to sell. The entire process of selling digital books is automated, so you don’t have to worry about shipping and other cost-related to selling.
You are only expected to create your book and place it on your blog, so when your audience show interest and makes a purchase or drops their emails to download a gift, your CRM captures keep sending them follow-up emails to get them to buy your book.
Another benefit of selling ebooks on your blog is that you don’t need to have massive traffic before starting; you need to create a great landing page to get your audience to take action easily.
Here is a typical example of someone who made it without having so much traffic to his blog. For example, David Oudiette converted the knowledge he’d gained building landing pages into a 252 page $39 ebook.
He didn’t have a lot of traffic on his blog as all he did at the time was consulting, but David was able to generate over $13,000 in revenue from his ebook.
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How to sell ebooks
There are several ways you can sell your ebooks and here is how
Selling ebook on your blog
You can list your ebooks on your blog sidebars widgets, specific sales pages, or landing pages on your blog. However, you may not be able to sell a lot because of your low traffic as a beginner which will be an obstacle.
But there are so many other great platforms where you can sell your ebooks.
Selling ebooks on Amazon
Amazon is by far, one of the best platforms to sell ebooks. It was first created for selling books and still maintains the reputation for being one of the best ebooks platforms.
You should take advantage of Amazon and sell your ebooks to raise some money to keep you going.
Sell your ebooks on Shoutmeloud
Shoutmeloud is another platform you can sell your ebooks to make some money. It’s also effortless to sign up and list your ebooks.
It’s mostly popular for blogging-related ebooks, which will surely allow you to read other nice blogging books to improve your skills and blogging career.
Bloggers make money by selling digital books on Amazon and other sites like shoutmeloud, and you too can do the same.
#5. Sell Ad space and Display Ads
Monetizing your blog with ads these days is by choice, but still one of the most popular ways bloggers choose to monetize their traffic.
The reason is simply the fact that online advertising is one of the most popular ways brands or businesses get their visibility online and reach out to a large number of potential customers.
Every company online has an advertising budget and is eager to buy ad spaces as much as possible to put their products and services in front of their customers.
Even though many people don’t like using ads as a monetizing strategy, It’s in fact a good way to get you started. Many bloggers start with ads before getting into other forms of monetizing.
You may not make a lot of money but certainly, you will be able to get something coming in before the big box.
Even with display ads, you will be making some good cash if you optimize your ads and get the highest bidders to pay for your ad spaces.
Read the post below to see how you can make money with Native ads and other forms of display ad formats.
Recommended read: Leveraging native and display ads to increase revenue
How do you monetize blogs with ads?
Ad networks to monetize your blog traffic
There are several things to look out for when choosing the right ad network to monetize your blog traffic.
The pay is important, and this means how much you will be getting per click (PPC) and per 1000 impressions (CPM).
Also, the types of ads and fill rates should matter to you. Will those ads be intrusive or offensive to your audiences? Avoid spammy ads. Spammy ads will make your audience stop reading your blog.
So here are two ad networks we recommend
#1. Monetize with AdsTargets
AdsTargets is one of the best when it comes to traffic monetization. It doesn’t matter how small your traffic is, as far as you are consistent and have some good content on your blog, you will be accepted.
You will be able to monetize your blog traffic with almost all the ad formats such as Native ads, banner display ads, text ads, eCommerce ads, interstitial ads, and more.
#2. Monetize with Google AdSense
Google Adsense is owned by Google and is surely the biggest ad network for publishers. Just like AdsTargers, you will be able to monetize all your traffic with Adsense and make decent pay, especially when you have quality traffic.
#6. Make money through Affiliate marketing
There is no way you can have an article about blog monetization without including affiliate marketing. It’s actually one of the most popular ways bloggers monetize their traffic.
In fact, affiliate marketing powers much of the web; approximately 15 percent of the digital media industry’s revenue comes from affiliate marketing. In the U.S., affiliate marketing drives as many e-commerce orders as email.
With affiliate marketing, you can promote other businesses’ products and get a commission for every sale you help bring in.
Affiliate marketers work the same way as most salespeople. They help promote and sell a company’s product and get a commission when someone buys.
Here’s a visual breakdown of how it works:
How affiliate marketing works (Image source: HubSpot)
Affiliate marketing work through referrer programs like recommending a product or services to your audience and making a commission out of every sale.
It works effectively by writing reviews and including affiliate links or images on your blog and getting people to make purchases through those links.
For example, Your commission is $10 for every sale. Let’s say you get 100 people to buy that product, and you will earn $1000.
In other cases, an affiliate program is based on a percentage, If for example an affiliate percentage of a product is 10% and the product costs $100, your share per sale will be $10, and getting 200 people to buy that product will easily earn you $2,000.
You can even make more on a product hosting plan like I make $65 per signup. I get someone to signup on Bluehost
What attracts people to affiliate marketing is that you can piggyback on a great product and sell that to your audience.
With Affiliate Marketing You Only Need Three Things
- A niche (This seems to be popping up a lot doesn’t it? 😉).
- An affiliate product.
- And an audience to promote the product to.
You build your audience by writing about topics related to your niche, and once you have an audience, you can find products from affiliate networks like:
- Rakuten Marketing
- Amazon affiliate (make sure to check out the AAWP WordPress plugin)
- ShareASale
- eBay Partner Network
- Clickbank affiliate
You can find other lists of affiliate marketing programs to join and make a good amount of money apart from the above listed.
You can also check what affiliate products other blogs in your niche are promoting, and reach out to those businesses yourself.
One thing to keep in mind when monetizing your blog with affiliate marketing is that you should be focused on providing value to your readers and not just pitching products so you can make a sale.
Case in point, the best affiliate marketers don’t even come across as affiliate marketers.
Take, for example, Ryan Robinson who makes tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate earnings every month through his blog.
Affiliate earnings (Image source: Ryan Robinson)
Ryan creates a lot of valuable content for his readers and pitching products he likes and uses feel like a natural part of that.
Since more and more businesses now have affiliate programs you can start promoting products no matter what niche you’re in.
Conclusion
This article is meant to teach you the most profitable ways to monetize a blog and make money blogging. Blogging is still very profitable if done right.
I believe your passion will turn into profit over time if you are consistent. Is that consistency that pays and quality content matters a lot when it comes to blogging.
Make sure every piece of content you are putting out is valuable and unique in a way your audience will love and reach engines will find it valuable enough to rank it.
Focus on driving more quality organic traffic, quality traffic is what makes you money, and you must do your best to get the bulk of your traffic from search engines.
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