How to Make Money Blogging

To understand how to have a blog that makes money, you’ll need to see the different monetization strategies that work best.

Depending on what your blog is about, there are different ways to make money from your content. Of course, a few general monetization strategies work for most blogs. These include advertising, affiliate marketing, selling products or services, and sponsored posts.

1. Monetize your blog through affiliate marketing.

Many bloggers and online influencers skip over affiliate marketing. They either think it’s too hard, that it’s a waste of time, that they will turn followers away, or that their followers just won’t be interested.

In fact, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money blogging. And, it can be done without annoying your followers or turning them away.

Most bloggers, especially new bloggers, think they need massive traffic numbers before they can start making money from affiliate marketing.

This simply isn’t true.

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy. You get paid based on the results you produce. In other words, you don’t need thousands of visitors to your blog to start making sales and earning commissions. You just need to drive traffic to your blog and include affiliate links in your content.

Once you have a few good blog posts under your belt, you can start pitching products and services to your audience. If they’re interested in what you’re selling, they’ll click on your affiliate link and be taken to the product or service’s sales page. If they make a purchase, you’ll earn a commission.

2. Create your own digital products.

Why invest the time to create your own product and sell it? Here are a few reasons:

• You have complete control over it.
• It’s passive income, meaning you build it now and make money for years.
• It improves your reputation in the blogging world (not everyone has their own products).
• You can refer to it from any piece of content you create.

For most blogs, the two best things seem to be an eBook and an online course.

Especially with courses, there’s a lot of potentials to make money as other people are eager to learn how to do what you’re about to teach them. And a great way to promote your course again is Pinterest.

Although I don’t sell any courses on this blog (yet), I have two courses that I regularly promote on my other site: Blogging 101 and Blog Flipping Master, both using Teachable as my course platform.

The biggest pros of creating and selling courses are that they’re a great way to establish your authority in your niche, and they can make you some serious passive income. If you put in the up-front work, you can reap the rewards later.

The cons are that they take a lot of time to create and perfect. They’re also not as easy to promote as other products (such as eBooks) as people need to be convinced that your course is worth taking before they’ll part with their money.

3. Make money with sponsored posts.

Sponsored posts are basically when you get paid to write about a company, product, service, or anything else. The advertiser pays you to link them in your post and possibly include a review or mention them in some other way.

This is a win-win situation as the advertiser gets more exposure and traffic, and you get paid for something you were going to write about anyway.

Sponsored posts are a bit different from other types of advertising as you’re not selling your readers anything. You’re simply telling them about something that might interest them and including a link so they can check it out if they want to.

I’m a big fan of sponsored posts, a monetization strategy that worked well for me. Usually, all it takes is to create a reputable blog with tons of content, and advertisers will start reaching out to you. Once you get the hang of it, you can begin cold pitching yourself and find new sponsorships.

Not every blog is designed for that, so you should experiment with different monetization strategies to find out how to earn money from yours.

I’ve had the most success making money on my Europe travel blog through sponsored posts. Still, I’m now experimenting with other strategies such as affiliate marketing and selling digital products and courses on this site.

4. Ad Revenue

For years, I stayed away from displaying ads on my other sites (travel and freelancing niches). However, I believe we should all test different blog monetization methods to find what works best for our audience, skills, content, etc.

So I decided to sign up with Ezoic, a reputable publishing network collaborating with some big names in different industries.

In terms of traffic, other publishing networks usually require a website to hit somewhere between 10,000 to 100,000 monthly views. With Ezoic, you can start making money with ads as low as 1,000 monthly views, although they now don’t require minimum traffic.

The best thing about Ezoic is that they put the user experience first, which is essential for any website that wants to make money from ads.

I did that, and my application was approved. After that, the company’s people started reaching out with welcome emails and next steps. The installation was a bit complicated (at least for a non-tech person like me), but it’s all detailed in the support documentation.

The next step was connecting my site to Ezoic and monetizing my content with ads!

It took me a while to get used to seeing Ads everywhere on my blog, but it was definitely worth it as I started making money immediately.

To sum up

You’ll never know the full potential of making money blogging until you test different things and see what works best for you and your audience. If you want to make money blogging, there are many ways to do it. You can start by experimenting with one or two methods and then scale up once you find something that works.

The important thing is to never give up and keep trying new things until you find a monetization strategy that works best for you.

I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to make money blogging. If you have any questions or want to share your experiences, feel free to comment below!