How to Make Money Blogging

Blogging is a legitimate way to make money online. However, you shouldn’t treat it as a ‘Get rich quick’ program. Blogging is one of those online money making methods, which require time, effort, and dedication. If you are willing to put in your effort, blogging can turn out to be a regular source of income for you.

Here, we will discuss a wide range of methods to make money blogging. However, in order to use most of these methods, you must own a WordPress blog (self-hosted).

So, without any further ado, let’s see what we got here!

Table of Contents

1. Google AdSense
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Sell Ads Directly
4. Sponsored Blog Posts
5. Sell Online Courses
6. Sell Products Online
7. Final Thoughts

1. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a popular and effective way to make money via blogging. Also, displaying ads on your blog is easy with Google AdSense. You just need to add a script to your website to show the different ad slots you want and start serving the ads. Depending on the type of ads and the volume of your traffic, you can earn a handsome income through this source.

Here are the eligibility requirements for AdSense:

• You must own and control your site
• You are 18 years of age.
• Your site must have unique and interesting content.
• The content must comply with the policies of AdSense Program.

Although AdSense doesn’t have a minimum traffic threshold, there must be a decent amount of traffic in order to earn a reasonable income through Google AdSense. For example, if the Page Revenue per Thousand Impressions (RPM) is $2.75, the estimated monthly traffic of over 36,000 visitors per day is required to earn a least $100 a day in AdSense.

If your blog has just started receiving a good amount of traffic, Google AdSense can serve as a great way to earn some passive income.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is basically referring someone to a vendor and getting paid a commission if they end up making a purchase from that vendor. Therefore, Affiliate Marketing works well if you can recommend to your audience different products or solutions that relate to your blog subjects and at the same time adds value to your readers. You will first need to select the affiliate marketing program you are interested in and apply for it to get your unique affiliate tracking link. This link will be used in your blog for the readers to click on and redirect to the vendor’s website where they will be tracked through a cookie for a period of 15-30 days usually and if they make a purchase within that period, then you will get paid a commission based on what the program is offering since they were referred by your blog.

There is a wide range of online products and services offering affiliate programs. However, you need to choose products that are related to your blog’s niche. In addition, keep in mind the preferences of your audience when looking for affiliate products or services.

Here are some of the most popular destinations to find products and affiliate programs:

• Amazon
• Commission Junction
• ShareASale 

In short, affiliate marketing serves as the easiest and most lucrative way to make money blogging. This is so, as you can promote a huge variety of products or services that can be included in almost every blog post.

3. Sell Ads Directly

Although Google AdSense ensures a hassle-free way to earn money via blogging, it is somewhat limited when it comes to earning capacity unless you were able to build a huge amount of traffic to your blog. On the contrary, if your audience is engaged with your content and you have a good amount of traffic that you can utilize, you are better off selling ads directly to advertisers specifically targeting your relevant audience. This can substantially increase your blog’s revenue since you can charge much higher rates than what you are getting with Google AdSence for example, and you won’t have to share any of your revenue with them.

You can use either CPC or CPM models for selling direct banner ads. With CPC (Cost Per Click) ads, you will get paid when a user clicks on the ad, whereas with CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) you will be paid for one thousand ad views. Therefore, charging a flat rate might be more viable as you don’t have to keep track of clicks or views. However, you have to do some additional work when directly selling ads. For instance, you will need to reach out or respond to potential clients, negotiate the terms and rate of the agreement along with some additional administrative tasks.

To make things easier to handle, you can use an ad management plugin such as AdSanity. It helps you manage your own ads as well as those offered by Google AdSense.

4. Sponsored Blog Posts

Not all bloggers are interested in generating income through ads. If you are one of them, publishing sponsored blog posts can be a viable way to earn money blogging. Here, a brand pays you for promoting its products via blog posts.

To put it simply, you need to talk about the product and introduce it to your audience. You can find a sponsor if you have good traffic stats and sufficient followings on social media. When confident, you can approach different companies and negotiate with them.

Similarly, if you have a good amount of traffic, you can offer blog posts as a backlinking option for other websites where they can offer you a blog post that is related to your niche and include in it one or two relevant links that redirects to their website to improve their organic search ranking. 

5. Sell Online Courses

This is another impressive way to make money blogging. You can create your own course and sell your expertise in a particular niche on your blog. To make your course a sellable product, make sure to use some tools that can help you create a comprehensive and professional course including design templates, checklists, videos, and downloadable slides or content to help your students get the most value out of the course and recommend it to others.

In addition, you can also offer multiple versions of the same course. For instance, you can offer two basic short version of the course that is free of cost and a premium comprehensive course that you can charge a fee for. The only trick here is to make the free version of the course enticing enough for the readers to want to purchase the premium version to get all the additional details and benefits.

6. Sell Products Online

Selling products online is the most lucrative way to make money blogging. There are multiple ways to start selling your own products on the website but an easy approach if you have a WordPress blog would be adding the WooCommerce plugin. This method will involve some additional effort in terms of product hunting and marketing once your setup to sell products is complete.

You have to promote your products through engaging blog posts. Make sure to provide all the information that your audience wants to know about a product listed in your shop. Selling physical products is rewarding, as it serves as a substantial source of income, but it does require more time and effort than the other methods.

Final Thoughts

After going through the above ways to make money blogging, it would be much easier for you to choose the most suitable option for your blog. However, you need to show patience and dedication when looking forward to use blogging as a stable stream of income.

If writing is your passion, it won’t be that difficult to run a successful blog that generates revenue. Apart from this, blogging also helps to refine your writing skills over time. In short, you won’t regret dedicating yourself to blogging.