There are thousands of blogs in the world. Maybe you followed my tutorials on how to create one, you already own one or plan to make one in the future. There’s just one thing stuck in your mind that you need an answer to. How do blogs make money? It’s pretty simple. Let’s have a look at some ways to monetize your blog.
Disclaimer: All Bluehost and OneBit links and widgets in this article are affiliate links. Your purchase through them supports my site. If you decide not to use them, that is your decision and I respect it. Now, continue reading, you beautiful person.
Articles in this series so far:
1. The Introduction
2. How to create your first blog
3. How to write your first post
4. How to design your blog
Other Blogging Tips:
1. Tying your domain name to your Bluehost hosting
2. How to never run out of blogging ideas
3. WordPress plugins for every blogger
4. How to make money blogging
5. The best and cheapest hosting for bloggers
Google Adsense
You can notice that news sites and a lot of blogs have banners and other ad spaces that let advertise different products that have nothing to do with the content you are reading. That is most probably because the site is using Google Adsense.
Once you register to the site and google deems you worthy of using their ads (read here), the readers will now see a few of the ads. How many, that’s up to you. They can see one or two, or be bombarded by them at every step (not recommended). Once they click the ad, you get a reward in the form of money. This reward usually isn’t big, but as your blog grows so will the reward.
Affiliate links
The most effective way, blogs use to make money, is using affiliate links. A lot of blogs find products for their audience that corresponds to their niche.
For example, a travel blog would have a link to a travel app, that once you download through their link, they get some reward. They can also promote a hotel they spent their time at, once they built this kind of partnership with them.
Some more examples include: Fitness blogs can offer a certain brand of fitness products and get a commission from every purchase. Finance blogs can sell someone’s course. Review blogs or artists can put Amazon affiliate program links to get 10% from your purchase done through them. Usually, an artist would put in the supplies or products they use. A review blog would put in the products they reviewed. Pages like mine can offer services of hosting companies and so on.
If you are interested in affiliate marketing of a certain product, either ask a company you have a good experience with if they offer an affiliate program, put your niche into Google and put the word “affiliate” behind it or use sites like ClickBank, JVZoo, ShareASale, MaxBounty and more. A simple google search of affiliate sites will give you a plethora of sites you can use to find your affiliate products at.
Selling your own products
A lot of blogs are actually started by companies to promote their main product. The articles create organic traffic that eventually reaches their e-shop or service they promote.
When it comes to bloggers that are not part of a big company, they tend to create their own product as well. You’ll find out it’s the most promoted thing on their blog and the reason is simple. All of the money made from it goes to them. Artists can promote their own creations, finance bloggers promote their courses, writers promote their books, fitness bloggers promote their own fitness equipment and so on.
This method is the highest paying one. If you own a blog with some significant audience numbers, consider making your own product that you could sell. I know it takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it if done correctly.
Guest blog posts
When your blog becomes big enough, people will want to take a chance to show themselves in front of it. Once you have a lot of people visiting you and commenting, you will get offers from other people to post their articles on your blog. In these posts, people will write about a thing that should be close to your niche and also promote themselves. It is up to you, as a blogger, if you will charge for this. A lot of people don’t, a lot of people do. This is pretty much personal preference.
Sponsored posts
Sometimes a blogger can be contacted by a company and offered a certain amount of money to write a blog post about them. This usually happens to bigger blogs, but nothing stops you from approaching companies and ask them if they are interested in paying you for a post.
Research what an appropriate amount would be, but don’t be afraid to experiment with pricing. These things don’t have a rigid value so it’s all about your ability to negotiate.
Donations
Some bloggers ask their readers for donations using sites like Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, Tiltify, or any of the other donation sites.
For this to be effective, the bloggers usually offer some product or some bonuses in return. This can include anything personalized, invite to a Discord server where they can talk to other people from the community or even the blogger themselves, look behind the scenes, vote on what blog posts people might want and more.
What now?
Now that you have all the information you need and you feel like this could be a great side hustle for you, it is your turn to make your own blog. You can do so by using my sponsored Bluehost link, if you want to go with number 1 recommended website by WordPress itself, or use my other sponsor OneBit, if you are looking for a cheaper solution. If you need a step-by-step guide, continue to this article.
Summary
And that’s pretty much it. These are all the ways bloggers make money. There might be some very niche-specific ones, but those might appear with time.
Hopefully, you learned something valuable here and if you feel especially nice today, a share or two would help me tremendously. If not, consider commenting or joining my mailing list. If you feel like doing either, then no worries. I’m still really happy you got this far. I hope you will have a wonderful day, you beautiful person and maybe check some of my other articles.
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4 thoughts on “How to Make Money Blogging”
Comments are closed.
Hiya! I know this is kinda off topic nevertheless I’d figured I’d ask.
Would you be interested in trading links or maybe guest writing a blog article or vice-versa?
My site goes over a lot of the same topics as yours and
I feel we could greatly benefit from each other.
If you happen to be interested feel free to send me an email.
I look forward to hearing from you! Superb blog by the way!
Thank you. If you would be interested in a talk, feel free to send me an e-mail.
Great delivery. Solid arguments. Keep up the good work.
Thank you. Hopefully it helped in some way.