Have you struggled with how to make money with your blog?
Today, we are covering 14 different ways to do it.
These ideas aren’t necessarily the same as making money ON your blog, but also include leveraging your blog. Also, these are action items that you can start working on today!
As you read through this list, I want you to keep in mind which ones YOU in particular should be focusing on. And that really depends on your current traffic.
- When you have really low traffic, if you want to make a meaningful income in the short term, it’s going to be easier to sell things that cost a little bit more. If I can sell two coaching clients and make a few thousand dollars, obviously, that’s going to be really nice with a small audience.
- By contrast, If I have a large audience, I may want to focus my efforts on affiliates or tripwire offers.
The point is, what you sell is partially determined by how high your current traffic is, and how big your current audience is, and what your goals are:
- Do you want to make a little bit of money soon?
- Do you want to make as much money as fast as possible?
- Are you willing to do a little bit of work that might be uncomfortable?
The other thing you need to think about when you are deciding how to make money with your blog or by leveraging your blog is your level of understanding.
When you are looking for the low-hanging fruit, it needs to be something that makes sense to you and that you already have some skills in place to implement. If I explain a concept and it just isn’t clicking with you?
That may not be your low-hanging fruit.
Here are the best ways to make money with your blog:
1. Display Ads
Display ads are onsite ads, like from Google AdSense. Google ads the most common ones – they just show up on your site after you sign up for them. You can manually place them, or you can have them placed by using a feature called auto ads.
One of my success stories in the Monetization Accelerator Program used auto ads with a new site that was getting really good traffic, and made about $5 or $10 a day. That’s a lot of passive income for a brand new site!
The downside of auto ads, though, is that they don’t look pretty. If you already don’t like how ads look on your blog, it’s probably not going to be for you, because they will squeeze an ad literally anywhere they can.
Personally, I don’t mind if it makes the site look a little bit ugly because I put out a lot of free content, and I feel really confident about the value that I’m giving my readers. So I don’t mind having a few ads on there.
That said, for my coaching business, I don’t have ads on my site, because I have very specific things I want people to do on the site. On my high volume blogs or the blogs that will be high volume eventually, I put ads on, because I know I’m going to need a lot of little ways to make money over time. So it just depends on your goals.
Other kinds of ads
Google ads are not the only display ads – just the most popular ones. You can also do ads privately or through alternate networks.
For private ads, an individual goes to another individual and says, “I would like to pay you a monthly fee to have an ad on your site.” That’s a private ad. It’s usually individuals working together, instead of working with a bigger company like AdSense or Mediavine.
If you’re going to do private ad placements for the first time, I would probably say something like this:
“What I’d like to charge you is (X), but I’m going to do 50% off of that for the first month, because I’ve never done this before, and I want to see how much traffic we can get.”
Then, you can charge something like $1 or $2 a click. You can see what that ends up being, and set your future prices accordingly. You just want to make sure that you’re pricing your placements competitively to what they would get with any other kind of click or traffic campaign.
2. Reviews/sponsorships
Another way that you can leverage your blog is by doing reviews and sponsored posts.
A sponsorship is when somebody pays you money to create content that features whatever it is that they want you to feature.
I have a client who got paid $750 to do a sponsorship, just to make an educational video about a product. The company wanted a third party educational resource for their tool, and she has a good size audience and a lot of experience, so they were willing to pay her a good amount of money. That’s a sponsorship.
A lot of Instagram influencers use sponsorships – they’re getting paid to feature products, stay at Airbnb’s, or whatever the case may be.
You can also write a review about a product. There are several ways you can get paid through doing that:
- affiliate links
- sponsored posts
- giveaways. This is another kind of sponsorship. You do have to be careful about disclosures when you’re doing giveaways, so be sure you understand how to do that.
3. Affiliate links
Next up: how to make money with your blog though affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is really popular because it’s very passive, and there’s a lot of really, really huge success stories with affiliate marketing. This is because as you grow your traffic, especially really high quality organic traffic from Google, you can make a lot of money with affiliates.
However, affiliates are problematic for small audiences. Unless you find an affiliate that pays out really well, your affiliate commissions with low traffic are usually going to be pretty small.
I remember the first time I got an affiliate commission; my first payout was $4, and I thought, well, it’s going to take a lot of these to get to a full-time income! But then, I became an affiliate of BetterHelp, which is online counseling, and it was something that I personally use and wrote a review on. Their payout has gone up and down a lot, but when I ended the program, sold the blog and gave access to that affiliate program to the buyer, the payout was over $200.
So, if you can find a really good affiliate that:
- has a decent payout
- is really relevant to your audience
- you can confidently stand behind
Then, it really makes sense. My audience was small, and I made a pretty good income with that affiliate.
4. Joint Venture Partnerships
Joint venture partnerships are similar to affiliate marketing, but as the name implies, you’re partnering with someone – teaming up in some way. You might partner together on a larger promotions to sell both your products, or one partner might provide the product while the other handles the promotion.
5. Courses
Courses are another thing you can sell.
The main thing I want to say about courses is that I think people get really narrow in what a course can be.
In reality, there are a lot of options. You can have:
- a course that’s just like a standard course, maybe 20 videos, five sections, certificate at the end.
- mini courses.
- workshops, which would have something like one video, one handout, one bonus. Keep it really simple.
6. Printables and eBooks
People really love to have things that are done for them!
Printables can make sense if you have a lot of educational blog posts. You can have a checklist printable with how to implement the thing you’re teaching, and people can download a PDF to print off.
The main differentiator between a printable and an eBook is that an eBook can be quite a lot longer. If an eBook is over 15 pages, I say you probably need to charge for it.
Since a lot of people do eBooks for free, if you’re going to sell an eBook, just make sure that it’s really high value.
7. Leveraging your blog
The following are some examples of where we’re leveraging a blog, rather than how to make money directly on it. This will be with things like coaching, products, services, and memberships.
- Coaching is usually going to be a higher ticket offer that you’re doing one-on-one or in a small group.
- Products are going to be physical products. I have several clients who are artisans; they make bath bombs or soap. Some are retailers, like a LuLaRoe retailer. They leverage blogs to sell physical products.
- Services are going to be done-for-you things. Examples might be copywriting, Facebook advertising, building websites, audits of different kinds, graphic design, animation, video editing.
- For a membership, you’re selling something at a monthly price, and people can join for as long as they want to. Memberships can be for physical products, for ongoing content, for accountability, for coaching, or for assets. Assets (printables or stock photos, for example) are a very common reason to sell a membership.
8. Email list rentals
Email list rental is a less widely known method of monetization.
This is a form of a sponsorship. So, let’s say somebody wants to send a promotion to my email list, but they don’t want to give me an affiliate link or do a joint venture. I can charge them to send an email to my email list.
The benefit to you of sending an affiliate sale or doing a joint venture instead of doing a list rental is that there’s no ceiling on how much money you can make. Whereas, with a list rental, you make a flat fee.
If you’re doing a list rental, if you’re sending an email and charging someone for it, you’re not getting an affiliate commission.
So those are a bunch of different ways that you can make money on your blog, now.
9. It’s good to try to think about three options to utilize to monetize your blog.
I don’t want you to think that you need to do all of these things. That’s a mistake – trying to do too many things and not getting results in any area because you aren’t focused enough.
At the same time, I don’t want you to limit yourself and just say, for example, all I’m going to do is coaching. Stacking your income with a few different methods is the ideal.
For example, the main thing I personally do is coaching. I also have courses thrown in here and there. Then, because I work with clients all the time who are building things for their business, I do have some affiliate sales that I get from tools that I recommend, like ActiveCampaign or ClickFunnels.
That combination works extremely well for me! It’s just a matter of finding your groove.
NEED MORE SUPPORT?
If you need some help deciding how to make money with YOUR blog, feel free to drop me a comment below.
And, if you are interested in working with me for monetization coaching, book a chat with me at: https://AlisonReeves.Co/strategy-call
