“How do I make money on my blog?” This is probably the number one question I get asked.
The fact is, it’s easy to start a blog. But it is not so easy to make money from it. Monetizing a blog is something that takes time, but more importantly, the right actions.
In this post, I will share with you some ideas for how to monetize your blog. Before I get into how I want to make a couple of points.
How to Make Money on Your Blog
Once you have some decent traffic and subscribers in decent numbers, here are the ways you can monetize your blog.
Advertising
This should be at the bottom of the list. Ads will usually (I say usually because it depends on your content) bring you the least amount of revenue, no matter how big your following is.
There are not a lot of options for blog advertising. Google AdSense is so good for bloggers. Furthermore, you can also advertise your content through social media post on various social platforms. You can promote your posts on Facebook and Instagram to get more eyes on your content. Buy Instagram views are a great option to make your content more visible.
There are other options as well but keep in mind that no advertising is going to bring in the bulk of your income. It is only one revenue stream, so you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on it.
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs can be very lucrative – if you are selling high ticket items and you get a sizable percentage of the sale. If the average sale is $25 or $50 and you get 5-10% per sale as an affiliate, it is hard to make any real money from affiliate programs, even if you have a big readership.
Say you get 1,000 people to click through on an affiliate link (1% of 100,000 readers is 1,000). If 20% of those folks convert and buy the product, that’s 200 sales. If the average sale price is $25 and you get 10%, you only make $500.
Paid Content
Paid content is, far and away, the most important revenue stream. As I said above, they’re all important, but this one is king.
Blogs are about providing information. Take the same information that you’ve provided on your blog and repurpose it as paid content.
You may think to yourself, “Why would people pay me for the same stuff they can already get on my blog?”
Here are some ideas for paid content:
- E-books
- Print books
- Exclusive podcasts and videos
- Classes – online and offline
- In-person events and conferences
- Subscription-based members-only content and community areas
- Repackaged articles from your blog made into a downloadable e-book or print book – or even an audiobook
A note on this last idea repackaged articles: I’ve only seen one person do this so far, Jenny at Nourished Kitchen, but it’s a very smart idea. When I find a blog I like, it’s hard to go back and read all the posts. I would easily pay somewhere between $10-30 per year for a blog archive (depending on how much content). I’d pay even more for an audio version. Of course, it depends what kind of content you write but I’m sure this would work for a lot of blogs.
