Is it possible to make money from a blog? Yes.
Is it easy? Absolutely.
Is it fast? Not at all.
A little while ago I shared with you some tricks that helped me write better blog posts , and today I want to talk to you about the different ways to monetize that blog post.
Many people start writing a blog with the intention of making a little extra money, but they think there are only two sources of income: AdSense and affiliate marketing. The reality is that there are more ways to make money.
Whether you created a blog with intentions on making money or not, this post should be of interest you. What I am going to tell you will give you new ideas to make the most money from your efforts. If you had no intention on monetizing your blog, when you finish reading this article you will better understand how the authors of the most popular Internet pages earn their money.
Want to know how to blog and earn money? Just keep reading and I’ll explain all the ways you can start earning today.
Making money with a blog is a marathon, not a sprint
Before proceeding, I would like to warn you that making money with a blog should be a long-term plan. A VERY long term.
Traffic, authority, trust, connection with readers … are essential things that can not be achieved in two days, so if you want to get rich in 3 weeks you are better off playing the lotto.
Today there are millions of blogs on the Internet, of which 95% are abandoned after a few months. That is why, if you want yours to bring you economic benefits, one of the essential qualities you need is consistency . And I’m not talking about months, but years.
Are you willing to write on your blog for the next 5 years? If not, it may be more convenient to invest your time in something different, or to treat your blog as a hobby and not as a business.
Once you made your decision on what type of blog you want we can begin.???? These are 9 ways to make money with a blog.
1. CPC Advertising (AdSense)
The easiest and quickest way to monetize a blog is through PPC advertising. The acronym CPC stands for “Cost Per Click”, which means that you are paid every time a user clicks on one of your ads.
There are many CPC ad networks, but the most popular and the one that works best is Google AdSense. Registering is as simple as entering the Adsense website and filling out a small form. Once Google approves your account (it usually takes less than 48 hours), you’ll be able to add advertising banners of different sizes into your blog.
What distinguishes AdSense from other advertising systems is that you do not choose the ads that are displayed, but Google does it for you. The big G analyzes the content of the page in which you have inserted the banner and shows your readers what it considers relevant. Google kills several birds with one stone:
- Ads displayed are things your readers are interested in
- They are more likely to click and therefore you earn more money if google displays content they are interested in.
- Advertisers can reach potential customers despite not knowing you or your page.
Click-through revenue depends on the competition that exists in that niche. The more advertisers there are, the more they have to pay for their ad to appear and therefore more money can be shared between Google and you. For example, in some super-competitive topics such as “forex”, “insurance” or “criminal lawyers” you can get $3 – $10 per click.
If you want to know how competitive is a term, you have two options:
- Do a Google search and look at how many ads appear on the screen. If all the ad spaces are taken (above the search results, below and in the sidebar) that means that it is a competitive niche in which you will receive good money for a click.
- Enter the Keyword Planner and look for that term. The CPC column will give you an estimate of what companies pay per click for your ad to appear in searches and blogs related to that topic. What you would get is less than half of that CPC (about 30-40%).
But not everything is great in the land of AdSense. Before you signup to ad AdSense to your blog you should consider the following:
- Some readers might not like that you have banner ads on your site.
- Typically for CPC advertising to be profitable you need to have a lot of traffic
- Google has the right to close your AdSense account at any time and without any explanation.
Examples of blogs with CPC advertising:
- Digital Photography School . Darren Rowse’s popular photography blog generates a high volume of revenue through AdSense. If you enter any article you will see ads in both the sidebar and the bottom, just before the comments
- HealthTrend . This company focuses on health and is a perfect example of merging CPC and Affiliate marketing into it’s monetization plan
2. CPA Advertising
Another lesser known type of advertising is CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising. In this case, when a reader clicks on your ad, you are redirected to a landing page where you have to perform an action, such as opening an account, filling out a survey or giving your personal information to receive more information. For each user who completes the task you make a commission.
As you can imagine, the conversion rate (the people who click on your ad and also take action) is much lower than in the case of CPC advertising. However, this is offset by a much higher conversion fee – typically several dollars
In order for CPA advertising to succeed, it is important that it be very relevant to your niche. If you have a personal finance blog and put a fitness guru ad to attract new clients, it is most likely going to fail. However, that same ad in a blog about health offers will work much better.
In general, the more specific the topic of your blog, the better the CPA campaigns (as long as they are relevant, of course).
3. Private advertisers
An alternative to CPA ads are private advertisers. Just as magazines rent their pages to companies, you can rent areas of your blog to companies in your niche for a fixed monthly price.
There are two ways to find private advertisers:
- Offer your services to potential clients . This strategy consists of contacting by email or phone the companies in your niche that might be interested in advertising on your blog. You can start with those who are advertising on AdSense since you know they already invest in online advertising every month. If you are able to show them data and graphs that it would be more profitable to advertise on your page than through Google, they may be willing to make the change.
- Let them get in touch with you . If your blog becomes a authority within your niche, the companies themselves will contact you to advertise on your website. The easiest way for this to happen is by publicly showing that you accept ads on your website. For example, you can have a banner with the message “Advertise on this blog” that leads to a page in which potential advertisers can download your statistics of visits from the last year, the reasons why it would be profitable to advertise on your page, and prices.
As in the case of CPA advertising, the more specific your niche is, the better this monetization method will work, as there will be more companies interested in advertising on your page. In addition, the more traffic you generate the more money you can ask the advertisers, as more people will see your ads.
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is nothing more than a specific type of CPA advertising in which the action that the user has to perform is to buy something. You promote a product or service for another company on your blog, which pays you a commission each time you generate a sale.
Affiliate platforms work as follows:
- Sign up as an affiliate
- Through the platform you create special links with your affiliate code, which point to the page of the product to promote
- You put those links in your blog
- A reader clicks on any of those links, makes a purchase in the next X days (X depends on the company cookie) and you get a commission
- The following month you will get paid for the commission you generated through your links.
Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs, but there are many more in all niches: travel, health, digital products … To find them you just have to search in Google the name of the company followed by the Word “affiliates”.
Sometimes it is the companies themselves that manage their affiliate programs, but it is very common for them to do it through an affiliate networks. These are some of the most popular ones :
- Amazon
- JVZOO
- LinkShare
- Shareasale
- ClickBank
- Commission Junction
The amount of the commission varies depending on the company, and ranges from 3-5% of the sale price in the case of physical products up to 50-70% when it comes to digital products.
The key to success with affiliation is to get the users who are in the middle of the buying process and drive them to your blog, and the most common way to do this is by writing articles about offers or product reviews and ranking them on Google for buying terms. .
If someone searches the word “Coffee maker” in Google, you do not know if they are buying or not. they may want to buy a coffee pot, but maybe they already have one and it has broken down, or maybe they looking for photos of coffee machines. However, if they are looking for “buy coffee machine”, “Nesspreso coffee review” or “Keurig coffee price “, we know that they are thinking about buying a coffee maker and, therefore, it is much more likely to end up generating a sale.
5. Your own products
The most lucrative method to make money with your blog is to sell your own products, since there are no intermediaries and therefore the margins are higher.
The most common on the Internet is the sale of digital products, and more specifically the info-products such as ebooks or courses. The advantage of this type of products is that duplicating them is free, so once you created it, it costs the same to sell one million. In addition, the entire sales process can be easily automated thanks to platforms like E-Junkie , teachable, Gumroad or even Amazon.
In addition to digital products, it is also possible to sell physical products through a blog. For example, I could sell art work I created, t-shirts and other merchandise. The biggest drawback of this monetization strategy is that it does not work automatically: you have to keep a stock, mail things out and handle customer service and returns. However, you can erase the keeping inventory part by using a sales system called dropshipping, which consists of passing orders directly to the supplier. The order is placed on your site and then you pass the order and payment of product to the supplier who will then ship the item to the customer.
Selling your own products successfully is not easy. Creating something that others want to buy is already a challenge, but that is just the beginning. In addition to creating the product you need to have marketing knowledge, copywriting , pricing policy, etc. This is why 99% of people who try to create and sell their own products fail.
6. Services
Having a niche blog and writing frequently on a topic will help position you as an expert in your niche. After a while, you can take advantage of that authority and offer your services. As you have demonstrated over the months that you know your field and have established a relationship of trust with your readers. Some of them may be interested in what you offer and become a customer.
The key to this monetization model is trust . Demonstrating your knowledge with what you write is not enough; Your life should be a faithful reflection of what you preach, ie: you have to live your own story. Would you hire a fat dietitian to lose weight?
Here are some ways to build trust in your blog:
- Credentials – If you go to Brian Harris website , you will see that under his header he has a section that says “As seen in …” along with the logo of some important pages he has been featured on. That conveys confidence and serves to prove that he is not a stranger to the topic, because he has appeared in all those places .
- Testimonials – The opinions of other satisfied customers are one of the best ways to get new customers to trust you. To get the first ones, start working for free or at half price in exchange for a testimonial. Each time a reader writes you an e-mail saying something nice ask permission to use it as a testimony in the future.
- Show your face – Let your readers see you in photos and videos. People like to interact with people, not robots.
- Design – The design of a blog matters a lot. It is not the same to enter a blog with domain xxxxx.wordpresss.com and the default template, and to enter the blog of Pat Flynn . The former transmits distrust on all four sides, while the latter is much more professional. A web with a good design is shouting “I’m serious!”.
I will be releasing my own service page shortly.
7. Promotion of your company
If you already have a company, a blog can be a fantastic marketing tool. Your clients are interested in knowing who you are, how you work and how things work behind the scenes .
One of the most famous cases is that of BaseCamp , whose blog Signal Vs. Noise – in which they speak of their philosophy on work – was a key factor for the growth of the company and also served to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here’s how they did it:
- They published posts with ideas quite different from traditional ideas. These articles produced traffic, which they monetized thanks to the ads they had in the sidebar
- They created a PDF book called Getting Real with the best posts on their software development philosophy and sold it for $19
- They created the paper version of the book and put it on sale through Lulu.com for $25
- With the content of Getting Real , they created a series of lectures. Each earned $ 50,000
In total, they made more than $ 750,000 from the blog!
The story of Basecamp is incredible, but in my opinion the true potential of a blog can be seen when starting a company. Creating a community around a blog can make things much easier and give you that initial push. When you have 2,000 faithful followers, it is much easier to carry out any project, because those people who trust you will be happy to be beta testers , give you feedback , promote your product and support your crowdfunding campaign.
8. Donations
Few people realize that the easiest way to make money with a blog is by asking your readers for donations, if your work or services has helped them in any way they will be happy to donate to you through PayPal. Sometimes you just have to ask !
This is something anyone with a loyal following can do and does not require programming skills of any kind, as PayPal provides you with the necessary HTML code and you just have to add it to your blog. You can get your donations button here .
If you want to be more original, you can also generate the code for a donation of a fixed amount and instead of the PayPal button use one that says “buy me a coffee” or “buy me a beer” ????
9. Employment Opportunities
A college degree is no longer enough to find work. Now you are also required to prove that you know how to do something useful . And what better way to prove it than through a blog?
Publishing frequently means exposing yourself. Yes, it is possible that both friends and anonymous readers laugh at you, but it is also possible that what you attract someone’s attention. And if that person has a company and is looking for someone with your profile, it can lead to a employment opportunity.
So … what are you waiting for? Start your blog today!
What is your favorite method to make money with a blog? If you have any more ways to make money from your blog please comment below.
