No matter what type of website you have, a blog is one of those things that you cannot do without these days. Blogs have become easy and simple to set up and a terrific way to make money!
There are many blogs, that after 5 years, are making enough money that the owner can quit his job because the money it makes from the blog.
A blog is the perfect place to share your opinions and thoughts. However, blogs have become so widespread that people who are only posting their opinions no longer get much traffic.
But it is not enough that you just have your own blog. You also need to start making money from the blog.
Here are a few methods to keep some cash flowing in through your blog.
Membership for Monthly Recurring Income
More and more businesses today have subscription models to the extent that people are now calling it “subscription economy.”
One aspect of this subscription economy is the rise of membership sites. A membership website is a gated portion of an online business wherein members can choose to subscribe every month or every year to receive exclusive perks and benefits.
The people within your community share a common interest, and some of the benefits that they can pay for include exclusive reports, articles, advice, in-person meetups, webinars, or simply being around others who understand them.
Membership will not only let you reach out to more people but also give your blog readers a sense of belonging and community.
One of the things you will surely love and appreciate about membership is that every person is a part of the group, and it doesn’t matter if they realize this or not.
This means that if there is something that caught your interest, the world is no longer too big because the internet is here to connect you with other people who might think, act, and believe the same way you do.
Courses that Teach Others What You are An Expert At
Selling or offering digital courses online is another great way to make money doing a blog.
You can create helpful and intuitive courses that offer a significant value.
As long as you put your mind, heart, and soul into the courses you make, you can let them sell on autopilot, which also makes them an ideal avenue to generate passive income.
These courses can work great as far as technical skills are concerned, such as digital marketing, web development, graphic design, and others. However, they can also work in other fields, such as accounting, currency investing, stocks, and finances.
Try to find what you are good at and then conduct some research before you build your course. Make sure that this is better and not a copy of other courses that are already available.
- If you have a blog that shares recipes, you can offer a cooking course.
- If you have a blog about motorcycles, run a course on motorcycle repair.
- If you love to play an online game, develop a course with secrets on how to become a better player of that game.
Coaching Services
The posts on your blog can also serve as an enticing teaser of all the things that your readers can learn from you regarding a specific topic.
If you are writing about how to improve specific skills such as online selling, cooking, music, or sports, your blog posts will only teach readers that much.
If your readers are serious about improving, your coaching services can serve as their guide to achieve success faster.
Think about it. How will you hone your skills in basketball? Is it enough to just read a book on shooting and then practicing these tips on your own?
Or should you read the book and take shooting lessons with an actual basketball player?
When you offer coaching services, your blog will serve as your key asset in marketing.
This will help your prospective clients improve themselves and give them a good glimpse of how life will feel once they reach their life goals.
You can use your blog to inspire your readers to chase their dreams, and your coaching services will be there to help them.
Sell Your Own Products
Another tested and proven method for how to make money doing a blog is by selling your own products to your readers.
If you have already established an audience, selling products directly to them is one of the easiest and most profitable ways of monetizing your blog.
You already earned their trust because you are catering to them, so start paying closer attention to your audience’s problems. Is something you can sell to them to address these issues?
However, there are times when physical products are not enough to solve these issues, and they need digital and software downloads instead.
If you have skills aside from blogging, don’t let them go to waste.
For example, if you have skills and knowledge in coding, why not create WordPress or software plugins and sell them to your blog audience?
And if you don’t have coding knowledge, you can hire a developer to do the job for you.
You can also sell other digital products such as themes, templates, and audience recordings to your readers if these are what they need to solve their problems.
Write a Book To Bring More Traffic To Your Blog
Just like courses and coaching services, writing and selling your own book or eBook is yet another wonderful method for how to make money doing a blog.
But as expected, this may take some time, not to mention that you also need to ensure that you have an audience to whom you can offer your book.
But at the end of the day, writing a book is one of the best ways to make money doing your blog and help your audience see you as an expert and authority in your niche.
Of course, the challenge here is actually writing your book.
Aside from the common pains associated with writing itself, there is also the main concern of what you should put in your book in the first place.
One of the things you can do is repurpose the existing content you have on your blog by gathering and compiling everything to form a book.
Although this may sound too easy and simple to be possible, this is something that many of today’s successful bloggers have been doing for many years.
The book that you make doesn’t have to be the end product though. You can also sell this to serve as an initial touchpoint with your audience and eventually upsell your course to them, if you are using both methods.
Affiliate Sales to Make Money from Your Blog
Affiliate sales are one of the best ways on how to make money doing a blog because in general, it is the easiest one for you to get started with.
Before anything else, however, let us define affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing refers to the process of promoting someone else’s products and receiving a commission from it every time your recommendation leads straight to a successful sale.
Most of the time, commissions from affiliate sales can range from 5% to 75% of the sticker price of digital products. When it comes to physical products, the commission is closer to the 5% mark.
What is important here is the buyer will pay the standard sticker price, which means that the buyer will not be the one to fund your commission.
There are now two primary puzzle pieces that should be put in their right places if you seriously want to know how to make money doing a blog through affiliate sales:
- The affiliate products that you will promote
- How you will promote these products
Thus, the first step here is to know how to look for products that you will be promoting.
All niches and markets have their own common strategies and practices as far as the world of affiliate marketing is concerned.
In general, if the product already has an available affiliate program, this will be mentioned or stated somewhere on the official business website of the company, most likely in the footer or main menu.
There are three golden rules you should remember and follow on how to make money from a blog through affiliate sales:
- Promote only those products that you believe in, know are great, and use yourself.
- Promote only those products that will benefit your audience and that they will enjoy.
- Promote only those products that you will be proud to promote.
While these might sound simple enough, it can still be tricky, particularly if you have a blog under the fitness or personal finance niche.
There are already a lot of products in these niches that have been enticing affiliates with their big payouts even when some of them have poor quality.
This is the reason why the factors of what will benefit your audience and what you personally believe are important.
Advertising
While a lot of people might assume that adding some pay per click (PPC) ads is going to be an easy way to generate lots of cash with their blogs, the income will still be marginal, even at its best, unless you have tens of thousands of daily visitors.
The actual income here will not start until the number of daily visitors reaches 100,000.
But you can negotiate the terms directly and easily with advertisers through the use of display ads instead of pay per click ads.
Provided that the ads are related to your niche, it is possible for you to agree on an amount that is more competitive than the income you could generate from PPC ads.
Paid Sponsors of Posts
Learning how to make money from a blog through paid sponsors of posts and reviews is also possible, although this method is not as popular as the ones above.
This is probably because you can only pull this off if you have credibility and lots of traffic.
With paid sponsors of posts and reviews, you can charge a company to write about the company’s product on your blog and give your opinion of it.
This will be shared with your audience, and the brand will then get new customers and more exposure.
This is considered a form of influencer marketing, and this is seeing substantial popularity these days.
If you feature any products on your blog, see to it that you give honest feedback about if you don’t want to lose your readers’ trust for just a few bucks.
Paid Virtual Summit
If you are keeping up with online trends, chances are you have already heard or even attended a virtual summit before.
Virtual summits are conferences that people can attend online, and they are more engaging and interactive than webinars.
There is a host, multiple speakers, and Q&A sessions that cover a particular topic.
You can host a paid virtual summit that can be available for a limited period of time.
You can earn revenue by selling the all-access pass that allows attendees to review the conference materials anytime they like.
These are just some of the methods on how to from a blog.
Do you have other suggestions that worked for you and your own blog? Share in the comments.