How to Make Your Blog Work for You: Monetization Ideas
Starting a blog is easier than ever. With just a couple of hundred dollars and a few clicks, you can start and manage your blog on WordPress as soon as today. You can post what you want, in your own time and on your own terms. You can finally have your financial freedom.
Truth be told...
No matter what anybody tells you, earning through blogging takes time and hard work. Nothing comes out of thin air.
I know a lot of people don’t even know how to start a blog, let alone grow it enough so that it brings in a nice income. But there are proven methods that will help you get healthy and steady instream for your efforts, trust me.
Leverage Affiliate Marketing
One of the most common ways of monetizing your blog is to leverage affiliate marketing. It is a massive global industry that accounts for more than 15% of all digital media revenue. With affiliate marketing, you promote the products of other businesses and get a commission for every time your site visitor makes a purchase through your link.
This is especially convenient when you're just starting out and don't have your own products or services to sell. Affiliate marketers are exactly like salespeople, only in the digital sphere. They help promote and sell a company’s product and get a commission when they close a sale.
Finding affiliate offers is easier than ever with the majority of big and small brands running affiliate programs nowadays. Moreover, 84% of bloggers and publishers are already creating content for affiliate purposes.
Probably the most popular affiliate program is Amazon Associates. It is the easiest way to start off monetizing your blog. But the industry is more diverse than you might think and there are thousands of affiliates, like search affiliates, influencers, bloggers, review sites, coupon sites and so much more.
An average affiliate commission rate is usually 5%-30% of the sticker price. If it’s physical products the rate is nearer to the 5% mark. For digital products, even 100% commissions are possible.
The good news is from the buyer’s perspective, they still pay the same standard price, so your commission is not funded by the buyer. In the case of reputable websites, you can even get special discounts and coupons for your audience specifically making it a win-win.
All you have to do is develop content that is in harmony with the affiliate offers you’re promoting or better yet take the kind of affiliate offers that can very naturally be integrated into your existing content. This is particularly great for established bloggers, who can pick and choose and ultimately promote the products they are passionate about, use personally, and know their audience will enjoy.
Take Android Authority for example, they cover everything and anything on android phones, including new arrivals, phone cases, accessories and so much more.
Create Online Courses
Selling digital online courses is another great way to earn money from blogging. It is projected that the e-learning market worldwide will reach 243 billion U.S. dollars by 2022. The potential is staggering, still most bloggers refrain from creating their own course as they think you need to be an expert to do so. That is not the case, though.
By developing informative and helpful courses rich with step-by-step video content that can add value to your audience you can simply sell them on autopilot, making it another great way for generating passive income.
Overall, creating an online course is arguably the best way to monetize your blog, but it takes a massive amount of research, planning, building, and then selling. It’s not a walk in the park. High ROI requires hard work. But the thing is you can create a course once and sell it for years to come.
Make Money with Advertisements
Now, the ever-so-popular pay-per-click advertising. Ads actually do work despite their bad rap and they are the fastest, if not the most profitable way to start monetizing your blog. This is how blog ads work: you earn a small amount of money every time a visitor ‘views’ the ad, and a little more every time a visitor clicks the ad.
You can sign up to Google AdSense and start earning as soon as right now. But you need substantial time and traffic to see any tangible income from ads. For new bloggers with little website traffic, Google Adsense might not make sense.
But for websites with 50k, 75k, 100k+ page views a month, it can make a few thousand dollars. They don’t even need to be permanent, just a temporary way of making money with your blog until you can find some better way to earn money from blogging.
Sell Ebooks
Ebooks offer a relatively quick way of making money from your blog. Develop an ebook that's aligned with the content of your blog. You can even repurpose some of the content already on your blog and then add more detail and context. If you're teaching a skill that many people struggle with, it's likely that the ebook will produce a great profit.
If you're still unsure what to write about, check your blog metrics and sort through your ‘most viewed’ post to find out which topics resonate the most with your audience.
Selling an ebook can be the fastest way to find out whether people are interested in what you’re creating enough to pay for it.
You can promote your ebook directly through your blog as it’s very advantageous because you’re going to keep all the profit. Simply create attractive content that will draw people in, then entice them with your ebook. Or you can publish your ebook on platforms like Amazon Kindle, which will surely up your sales significantly and will result in more exposure.
Generate Revenue with Sponsored Posts
Sponsored posts and reviews as a means of generating revenue from your blog are probably the least popular from the list. Why? Because you need to have good traffic and high authority to pull it off.
So a sponsored post is basically a piece of content where you get to promote or talk about the product the sponsors gave money for. This way the product gets exposed to your core audience and, in turn, brands get more exposure, engagement and new customers. This works especially well when you are an established thought leader in your niche with a great following.
It’s sort of like influencer marketing, just not in the way you’d imagine it. In this setting, the blogger is the influencer. It’s easy to see why it's a favorite for lots of bloggers. You get to publish your favorite content on your blog and you also get paid for it!
Final Words
If you’re eager to take your blog a step further and discover its earning potential, then you’ve made the first step by reading this article. Now is the time to use them and see the amazing results for yourself.