Wondering how to make money with your blog? In this post I’m going to share 6 ways you can make money from your blog. There are multiple blogs and articles on the topic offering you 25 ways or even 50 ways to make money from your blog, but they are basically a regurgitation of the 6 ways that I have mentioned here.
In the beginning when people started blogging, it was for a hobby. People wanted to share their hobbies. They wanted to share their coding expertise or their web design techniques. Some mothers and fathers shared their travails with their kids. Some early bloggers started giving health or self-improvement advice.
As their traffic grew, people began to see the commercial prospects of their blogs, mostly by publishing AdSense ads. People started making money with blogging. Many bloggers made lots of money with AdSense. Some bloggers are making $300-$600 per day from the AdSense ads – or at least that’s what they claim.
I have been publishing a blog on content writing, copywriting and to an extent, content marketing, for more than 10 years now. I never thought of publishing AdSense links because it is a business blog. I mostly use it to promote my content writing services.
My blog has been gradually picking up traffic. My search engine rankings have improved for many related keywords and search terms. Therefore, I get at least two queries from my website asking if I would publish sponsored blog posts.
Sponsored blog posts mean they are ready to pay for the blogs that I publish on my blog (provided by them) along with a “do-follow” link. I turn them down. I create content for my blog on my own. I do accept guest blog posts. But not sponsored blog posts.
If you want to publish a blog and wonder how you can use it commercially, I’m listing 6 ways you can commercially use your blog.
Now, before you can use your blog for making money or for any commercial gains, you need to build traffic. Lots of traffic. Whether you want to make money through advertising, affiliate links, or any other means, you need to build an entire platform where hundreds of thousands of people come to your blog on monthly basis. Even if you’re getting around 1000 visitors every day, it is difficult commercially milk your blog.
Hence, if you want to use your blog to make some decent money, in the beginning don’t get desperate. Focus on the quality of your blog. Provide maximum value. Build traffic. Just focus on that. It may take you a year of regular publishing (1-2 blog posts every day) before you get some decent traffic.
How quickly you can start commercially using your blog also depends on your niche. There is a great chance of early success if you don’t face much competition but there is great demand for the topic you have chosen for your blog.
If the market is quite competitive or saturated, you have got an uphill task for yourself. It will be a bit difficult to make money and you may have to persist for a long time.
For example, if you want to start a technology blog, you should keep in mind that there may be hundreds of thousands of technology blogs. Every major news website or magazine has a technology section. And they are publishing 10-15 updates every day. As a single person, it may not be possible for you to compete. Therefore, before starting a blog, make sure you choose a topic or a field that is less competitive, but people do want it.
With this out of the way, let us go through the 6 ways you can make money from your blog.
1. Use your blog as a business blog
Since I publish a business blog, this is the first topic I want to talk about. Every business these days seems to have a blog. It may be a fad, or they actually see a merit.
Publishing a business blog has multiple benefits:
- It builds an audience.
- It gives people a reason to visit your website frequently.
- Your search engine rankings improve.
- Higher ranking blog posts improve the rankings of even your main website web pages.
- More people link to your website.
- Your prospective customers and clients feel more connected because they are constantly reading your thoughts and observations.
- Search engine crawlers crawl and index your content with greater frequency.
- Your website becomes a knowledge hub and you come to be known as an expert.
- You have original content to share on social media websites.
- People readily subscribe to your mailing list when they see that you are publishing quality content.
2. Publish AdSense and other promotional links
As you know, Google makes most of its money through advertisements people place on the search engine itself as well as on partner websites. These partner websites publish AdSense links. Whenever someone clicks the link, Google makes money.
According to a good AdSense explanation published on the SEMRush blog, Google pays 68% of the click amount. How much advertisers are paying per click depends on the niche. They can range from $0.20 to higher than $25. The above blog post also explains how to find the niche that can make you the most money. It is better to choose a niche that pays you higher per click if publishing a blog for commercial purposes is your primary goal.
AdSense isn’t the only program. This Hubspot blog post has reviewed some great AdSense alternatives for bloggers.
3. Promote affiliate programs
Promoting affiliate programs is one of the earliest forms of making money on the web. Even when there was no blogging, people were making money off affiliate programs. In fact, in a sense, even AdSense is an affiliate program because you are helping Google sell its product, advertising.
In affiliate programs, you don’t need to have a product or a service. Someone else has a product or a service. You simply promote it through your blog. When someone purchases the product or service through your blog, you earn a commission, which is called affiliate commission.
Amazon.com has a widespread affiliate program. People publish reviews of various products and within those reviews they include Amazon links. Once you have created an affiliate account with Amazon, you get custom links that you can include in your blog posts. If someone clicks on those links, goes to Amazon.com and purchases that item, you get a commission.
There are many companies that offer such commissions.
4. Promote your brand
Personal branding can be greatly beneficial. Take for example Seth Godin, a speaker, an author, and a marketing expert. He has been blogging since the inception of blogging. The legend has it that he never misses publishing a blog post.
If you are an expert in a field – leadership, business management, data analytics, politics – you can share your thought leadership blog posts to maintain visibility and establish yourself as an authority figure.
Once your blog becomes famous, you can get book deals and speaking assignments. You can organize seminars and workshops and podcasts and whatnot. Some people have turned their blog posts into books.
If you’re a consultant, it’s very important for you to build your brand through publishing a regular blog displaying your expertise.
5. Publish sponsored blog posts
As I mentioned above, many people approach me to publish sponsored blog posts on my business blog. Once your blog builds traffic, people are ready to pay for getting published there. Many high traffic blogs publish sponsored blog posts, and they mention at the top that it’s a sponsored post.
Suppose someone is launching a product or offering an attractive discount. It will be easy to get exposure on a high traffic niche blog. If you are one of those niche blogs, you can charge a premium for publishing a sponsored blog post or a press release on your blog.
Don’t overdo though. Keep a 9:1 ratio – nine non-sponsored blog posts and then one sponsored blog post.
6. Offer premium content
This is a good way of making money from a blog for people who are experts, and the others are ready to pay to them for their expertise.
Suppose you publish a great blog on web design but there are some much-needed but difficult-to-get techniques that you know but aren’t sharing publicly. You can make them available in a private section on your blog which you can call a premium section. People who subscribe to your monthly updates can get access to that premium content.
Conclusion
Just like any other business venture, it takes hard work to build a blog that can make money for you. A moneymaking blog has the following characteristics:
- Persistently high traffic for relevant keywords.
- A very narrow niche.
- Less competition and more demand.
- High-quality content that is published regularly.
Is there a formula for commercially successful blogs? I cannot say there is a formula, but if your blog has the above-mentioned 4 attributes, you can certainly create a blog that makes money for you.