10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog
You’ve created a blog. You’ve worked hard to create quality, engaging content for your audience that’s search engine friendly. Your blog is even generating decent traffic (at least 100 visitors a day). Therefore, you are interested in monetizing your traffic to make money online. Luckily, there are several lucrative ways that you can monetize your blog that cost little-to-no money upfront.
1. Sell Physical Products
Selling physical products is one of the oldest ways to make money online. In fact, Amazon’s original business was selling books to its customers. Luckily, if you have physical products that appeal to your target audience, you can still make a lot of money selling them. However, before you can monetize your blog by turning it into an eCommerce store, you will need to answer these important questions:
- What are the most profitable products to sell from your niche?.
- What’s the best payment processor to use to collect payments from your customers?
- Do you plan to fulfill orders yourself or outsource that to a third-party?
- How do you plan to promote your products on your blog?
The answers to those questions depend on your niche and your personal preferences. Therefore, the only way that you can answer them is to do further research online to determine what works best for your blog.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to monetize a blog. First, you will need to select an affiliate marketing program related to your niche. Next, you will need to pick the best products to promote to your audience. Then, you will embed your affiliate links into your blog’s content. Each time one of your blog’s visitors clicks on an affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will earn a commission from the sale.
3. Promote Online Auctions
If affiliate marketing sounds like a good way to monetize your blog’s traffic, then you might like promoting online auctions too. You can join the eBay affiliate program, and earn a commission each time one of your visitors wins an eBay auction. When you join eBay’s affiliate program, you will be given a special code that you can embed in your blog’s code to display auctions in real-time on your blog. That way, your visitors can directly bid on auctions without leaving your blog. You can learn how to embed code on your blog by researching the process online. You could even hire a web programmer to do it for you.
4. Sell Information Products
Selling information products like eBooks, audiobooks, and videos is a highly lucrative way to make money online. In fact, it has become very common for bloggers to sell eBooks related to their niche. For example, let’s say that you run a blog about job hunting. You could sell eBooks and videos on topics related to job searches, resume writing, and interviewing. The best place to find information products is on websites that sell private label rights content that you are allowed to resell.
5. Join an Ad Network
If you don’t mind sharing space on your blog with advertisements from other brands, you can monetize your blog by joining an ad network. For example, Google and Bing both have ad networks that offer what’s known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you join one of their ad networks, advertisements will be displayed on your blog. Then, you will earn money each time one of your visitors clicks on an ad. The amount you earn depends on many factors. You can learn more about Google and Bing’s respective ad networks by researching them online.
6. Sell Paid Ads
If you like the idea of displaying advertisements on your blog, but you would like to cut out the middleman to make more money, you could sell ad space directly to brands. The ads could be in the form of banners, videos, and even links. However, your blog will likely need to generate a lot of traffic (over 1,000 visitors a day) before a brand would consider buying ad space from you. Furthermore, you will need to find brands from your niche.
7. Offer Paid Sponsorships
Many bloggers monetize their blog by creating content around product and service reviews. For example, let’s say your blog is about camping. You could earn money from camping-related companies by writing reviews about their products. However, there are a few important tips you must follow to make money online from paid sponsors:
- Disclose your relationship to the sponsor with a disclaimer that lets readers know you are getting paid for your review.
- Only publish honest reviews of products or services that you have actually used.
- Avoid sounding overly promotional in your content.
- Find ways to make the content more valuable to your readers.
8. Offer Coaching
If you have a substantial amount of knowledge and experience in your niche, you might be able to position yourself as an authority on topics related to your niche. In other words, your audience will look to you as someone they trust when it comes to answering their questions related to your niche. If you can be seen as an authority figure, then you could offer coaching services to those willing to pay you for your insights. If offering coaching services sounds like an interesting idea, you can learn more about it online.
9. Sell Restricted Access to Your Premium Content
Just because you have a blog, it doesn’t mean that you have to make all of your content free for visitors – especially if you can create premium content. For example, you could ask your audience to pay for the following kinds of content:
- Video Courses
- Tutorials
- Training Materials
- Audiobooks
- eBooks
Of course, you will have to convince your audience that your content is valuable enough for them to pay for it. The best way to do that is to give them some free samples. For instance, let’s say that you create a video course. You could let them watch the first lesson for free. If you are selling an eBook, you could let them read a chapter for free.
10. Sell Technology Solutions
Finally, if you are a tech-savvy person who likes creating innovative solutions for problems, then you could sell technology solutions to your audience. However, your blog would need to be in a tech-related niche. Also, you would need to offer technology solutions that your audience finds valuable enough to pay you for. Therefore, you might start out by offering free trials to gain exposure and build interest.
In short, you can monetize your blog by selling your own physical and digital products to your audience. Furthermore, you can make money online by promoting someone else’s products – known as affiliate marketing – and by selling advertising space on your blog. If you are good at writing product reviews, you might be able to land a few paid sponsorships. If you are good at creating technology solutions, you could sell them to your audience.
