Are you looking for how to make money with blogging? I mean, as much as it’s fun to start a blog, I don’t think there are many people who would like to make at least a little money from their blog!
But how to monetize a blog? Do you consider making a living by dropping pop-up ads?? okay; You can, but if you keep this point in mind – you are at least giving up the methods of invasive monetization.
In this post, we are going to talk about how to make money with a blog. We will cover the most popular methods you already know and what you don’t know. With these methods, you will cover your initial cost of a domain name and WordPress hosting package right away.
Best of all, you can use a variety of monetization methods to monetize your blog. Check them out:
How to Make a WordPress Website: Step-by-Step (Free Guide)
How Much Money Can You Make From Blogging?
Before, going to the main topic, let’s talk about how much money you can earn.
How much money can you make from blogging as a beginner? Making money as a blogger is far more realistic than you think. According to a report that after just 2 years of generating traffic and subscribers, bloggers can easily make over $100,000 a year. Even just after the first year, bloggers can easily earn an extra $1000-$2,000 Monthly.
How much you can make money depends on a few factors, such as:
- Which niche are you choosing?
- How much time are you devoted to learning and practicing?
- How much traffic do you drive to your blog?
- Your ad network
- consistency
- Your personal motivation and goals
- Your Digital Marketing skills
How to Make Money With Blogging – 16 Best ideas
Before I give you ideas, let me give you a quick rundown on how to order them. I will start with the most popular methods of monetization and gradually get narrower as the list goes on. So, let’s start our discussion on how to make money with blogging from beginner to advance.
1. Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
Let’s start with one of the biggest money-making ideas for bloggers, that most people don’t know:
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of digital marketing in which you refer someone to any online products or services and you will get either a flat-rate commission or percentage when that person buys the product as a result of clicking on your recommended link.
For example, you could write a blog post for a product review and you will get paid if someone buys that product with your referral link. An example of this practice is a review of Hostinger (a web hosting company). If someone signs up on Hostinger with our review, we earn a small percentage or commission. You can always refer to more than one product at a time.
Note: The important thing here is that the customer should get the same price, whether he buys any product on the recommendation of an affiliate or directly from the seller.
Most Popular Affiliate Programs
To find affiliate opportunities, search for affiliate marketing programs that may link you to different affiliate partners. Some of the most popular affiliate programs are:
2. Display Google AdSense ads
I personally recommend using Google AdSense Ads because it is the most popular and easy way to make money with a blog. You just need to add a Google AdSense script to your website and then ads will be displayed on your site. A quick example of what Google AdSense ads look like is:
If someone clicks on the ad you will get paid by Google. These ads are called CPC (Cost Per Click) ads.
After Affiliate Marketing, Google AdSense is a great way to monetize your blog for beginners.
3. Display other Network ads
AdSense is technically the most popular ads network. However, AdSense is not the only option to display ads. There are many other networks available where you can start showing ads for your site.
Here are some good AdSense alternatives:
- Media.net
- Infolinks
- Amazon Native Shopping Ads
- criteo
- Monumetric
4. Write Sponsored Posts for Companies
As soon as your blog grows, many companies will contact you for sponsor posts. And If your blog has good traffic, then these companies will pay you a handsome amount for sponsoring the post. This can be an important strategy along the way for you to learn how to make money with blogging.
These posts review the company’s products or services that how you use this. It’s a good idea to recommend products that you really believe in so that you can maintain the trust of your readers. Also, look for partnerships that enable you to create a range of long-sponsored posts. This ensures a periodical source of income.
To get these opportunities, it’s a good idea to create a page for your site that details your traffic stats and rates for sponsored posts. This will make it easier for the sponsors to reach you. And the sponsors are always looking for such opportunities.
5. By selling ads directly
AdSense and other advertising networks look for ads for you so you can learn how to make money with blogging without raising a finger. But in return; those advertisers deduct from what you pay.
So one way to make as much money as possible and to build strong authority over the advertising on your site is to eliminate the middle man. That is, sell ads directly to advertisers.
As with sponsored posts, the great way to capture these opportunities is to build a one-page media kit on your site that includes details about your traffic statistics. But you can also try to reach out to companies yourself.
There are a lot of plugins for WordPress that can help you manage these ads. But here are some good plugins.
- Ads Pro Plugin
- AdSanity
- AdRotate
6. Sell digital products, such as eBooks
Talking about eliminating brokers; Instead of totally dependent on affiliate marketing to sell other’s products, you can build your own digital products like eBooks (a book in electronic form that can be easily read on a computer) that you sell directly to your audience. Although it takes some initial work, it is actually a very popular way to earn money from your blog.
We recommend “Easy Digital Downloads” for digital downloads. It is very easy to use and includes all the features required for a good online store.
7. Work as a freelance blogger
If you are interested in blogging, you can attract more clients to advertise on your blog. You can start making money from your blog by presenting your skills and abilities as a freelancer.
Freelancing is one of the most popular ways to make money online because it does not require time or money. Just you can start offering services to your existing audience and make money.
Once you become a freelancer, you need a way to collect payments from clients. Here are some WordPress plugins that help you do just that:
- WP Simple Pay
- FreshBooks
8. Sell online courses
Like eBook, another most popular way to make money from your blog is to start your own e-course. Again, think about what you specialize in and offer your readers a course.
Like eBooks, these courses are sold at very high prices. You can make a premium charge for your skills.
First, you need to start your own online courses, then you can add any supporting materials, such as downloads, slides, templates, checklists, etc.
Here are some plugins to help you deliver your course to clients:
- Learning Management system (LMS)
- MemberPress
9. Start a membership site
A full membership site includes both ebooks and online courses. With a membership site, your readers pay a monthly fee to access your course.
For a practical example, see Digital Marketer’s “Lab” site. With this Lab, readers can pay a fee every month to access premium content:
10. Sell WordPress Themes
If you enjoy web designing, then you can start developing your own WordPress themes for sale. This is also the most popular method to monetize your blog.
For this, you need to be an expert in both technical skills and design. You need to know how to create an attractive design and code it for WordPress.
Using WordPress theme frameworks like Divi, and Themify can give you an important start. Then you need to design and code a good-looking theme.
11. Create a podcast
The more people who like to read your blog posts, the less time they have to look at the words on the screen. So why not reach them with an audio podcast in another medium? Nowadays podcasting is exploding and many bloggers are jumping into it.
The best example of Podcast Hosting is “Buzzsprout”:
Once you have gained an audience for your podcast blog, then you can start monetizing your podcast and make money from your blog.
12. Accept donations
One of the most popular ways to make money from your blog is to ask for donations. A lot of bloggers use this strategy for those blogs whose niches are hard to monetize.
You can use different ways to accept donations from your audience. You could use different plugins (Like as PayPal Donations and, Stripe Donations) to add donate button on your blog. These plugins help to increase your income as well as ease the audience to donate funds.
13. Sell Coaching Services
A real-life coach gives us the best guidance we can to achieve our goals and make our lives better. There are many types of coaches, such as sports coaches, writing coaches, and, blog coaches.
If you are not interested in freelance bloggers, then you can use your blog to sell coaching services. As a coach, you can make a handsome amount from your blog.
14. Get Paid to Write Reviews
Like sponsored posts for companies, you can also write product reviews and get paid by different companies.
There is a little bit different method than an affiliate marketing site with affiliate links, as already described above.
Instead, write reviews of your niche products for free, you can charge to write reviews.
The process of getting this job is similar to sponsored posts. You should always write reviews of the products in which your audience is interested.
For this, you can use the PayPerPost website that helps to connect your business with interested companies.
15. Create a job board
If a large number of your audience is interested in a particular topic, you can use your audience to create job boards. For this, you can charge companies for job ad campaigns.
Here is a list of some job board websites:
16. Sell Your Blog and Make Money
And last but not least, this gives us the nuclear option for how to make money with blogging:
If you are in a position where you just want to make money (or if you think you can get back to that position in the future), then selling your blog will give you a huge amount of money for all the efforts you put into it.
How much do you expect from your blog? It all depends on your blog’s growth, life, income, content, and consistency.
For example, WPLift is a most popular blog, sold massively in 2016 for $205,000.
As far as selling your blog is concerned, you can either try to find direct buyers or use third party marketing, such as:
Conclusion
You saw it here! 16 best ways how to make money with blogging. All this cannot be done in a specific situation, but you should feel easy to use these ideas to create a diverse chain of monetization.
If you rely on one way or another to make money online, you risk putting your income on the line. But if you say: write sponsored posts, promote affiliate products, generate some ads revenue, sell digital products such as eBooks, keep one podcast at a time, it will be hard for you to manage all of them. As result, your all audience and revenue will be lost overnight!