How To Make Money Blogging Actually!
If you are wondering how to make money blogging, you’re in good company.
Because monetizing blogs is my specialty. I’ve been earning a full-time living as a blogger for a number of years now.
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I run a few different websites which contribute to my overall income. There’s this one HerPaperRoute.com, NicheInvestor.com and a number of other niche sites.
You will hear a lot of people claiming to have the secret sauce for how to make money blogging. I don’t have any “secret” to success, just plain and simple, basic business sense which I enjoy teaching others. So, you’ll get lots of straightforward no BS money-making tips to help you monetize your blog today.
How Do Bloggers Earn Money?
There are several ways that you can learn how to make money blogging, and legitimately make money online.
In fact, you can earn a full-time income working from home by blogging.
It takes a bit of time and dedicated effort on your part to get started, but once you have built your profitable blog’s foundation, it becomes a passive revenue source where truly the sky’s the limit for how much you can earn.
If you have the desire and drive to put in the work now, there’s no stopping you from making a lot of money as a blogger.
For a step-by-step tutorial on starting a blog correctly, so it is capable of making money, check out this free guide!
How To Make Money Blogging, Actually!
About Blog Income Reports
You may have seen the monthly income reports that bloggers are sharing lately, some bringing in $1000, $5000, $20,000, $100,00 or more per month and thought to yourself,
“Just how on earth are they making that much money blogging? Where is it coming from?!”
Those numbers seem pretty crazy, right? It’s no surprise if you are wondering how the heck they do that.
And the answer is actually fairly simple. It’s a combination of having any number or all of the following things actively bringing in money on their blog:
- Affiliate Links
- Sponsored Posts
- Ads
- Ebooks
- Courses
- Own Services/Products
A typical blogger will have some or all of these revenue sources included in their blog posts, which generate income. Each revenue source adds up to the blogger’s overall monthly profit.
As mentioned, I utilize all 6 of these revenue types.
Read on to explore each of these revenue sources in detail, and discover how you can use them to monetize your blog.
How To Make Money Blogging Too
If you have a blog already or are thinking of starting one, you could be making money too.
The first step in order to be able to make money blogging, is you need a blog, and you need to own your own domain/hosting.
This is called self-hosting.
Free sites like Tumblr and Blogger don’t let you run ads, and unless you own your website, companies won’t partner with you as an affiliate.
This is essential. You may think that you are saving money by using a free hosting site, but it isn’t really free at all if you are losing out on the ability to make money on it!
How To Make Money Blogging: You Need A Blog Set Up The Right Way
To set up your blog the right way for monetization, check out my free Start A Blog & Monetize It guide. If your blog is already set up correctly, read on!
Monetizing Your Blog: Provide Value, Build Trust
The most important thing when it comes to blogging, especially if you are trying to make a living at it, is providing value to your readers by giving them quality and honest information.
As a rule, you want to provide awesome content to your readers, with information about products that will be relevant and helpful to them. You want to provide value.
You should only recommend a product that you actually use, and that you actually like. If you are just posting about anything and everything and your blog is one big ad, visitors to your site will see through it, and probably won’t come back.
Creating honest blog content with relevant and helpful product information will build trust with your audience.
Building trust is crucial in any business, your blog is no different!
For example, I don’t know anything about cars, so you won’t find any articles on my blog talking about cars or linking to products for them.
It would be dishonest of me if I were to create content with affiliate links to something I’m not actually familiar with.
What I do know, is profitable blogging, marketing, and social media so that is what I blog about here.
I share with my readers the tools and products that I actually use and believe in.
When I share a link to a product, my readers can be certain my recommendation is my honest opinion of it.
Related: Learn the business of profitable blogging in this online course
Ok, Let’s Monetize! …Um…What Does Monetize Mean?
Monetizing your blog means, literally, means making it run as a source of income.
As mentioned above, you can monetize your blog in a variety of ways, the most common being:
6 Ways To Monetize Your Blog
- Affiliate Links
- Sponsored Posts
- Ads
- Ebooks
- Courses
- Own Services/Products
I recommend you monetize your blog from day one. You don’t need to wait until you are a “bigger blogger” to do it, just woman up and monetize it now!
You can also make money blogging by growing your blog for a few months and then selling it for profit. Just recently I sold one of my blogs for $50,000. You can read all about how here.
Have you got your FREE copy of my Blog Monetization Cheatsheet yet? This book covers everything you need to do to set up your blog to bring in the big $$$. Let me know where I should your free copy!
1. Affiliate Links
What is an affiliate program?
Most companies will have an affiliate program where they pay a commission to you for referring a new customer to them.
If you blog about your favorite coffee brand, you should apply to that company to become an affiliate for their brand.
Your blog posts about coffee are helping your readers with the information they need, and you are referring business to that coffee company.
When you are an affiliate, you will post links in your blog posts to the coffee brand’s website.
Anytime one of your readers clicks your link and then buys the coffee, that coffee company will pay you a percentage of the sale.
LTK (Reward Style) is an awesome affiliate network. I would recommend that you apply as soon as you have a bit of a following on social media.
Some affiliate programs will even pay you a recurring commission, CreativeLive is one that pays 30% recurring commission every month.
Check out this list of other High Paying Affiliate Programs Bloggers Can Join!
Start thinking about products that are relevant to your blog content, so that you can start earning money by referring the products you love to your readers.
Look through all of your blog posts, did you mention any companies, products, or tools in any of your posts?
Start by making a list of companies you already blog about, because you will want to apply to their affiliate programs first.
Click here for a complete guide on affiliate marketing for beginners.
How Do You Apply To Be An Affiliate?
Once you have a list of companies in mind, usually it’s as easy as going to their website and looking for anything referring to ‘Affiliate’ in their website’s footer or contact page.
In most cases, you can apply to become an affiliate right there on their website. If there is no mention of an affiliate program though, you can always do a google search of the Company Name + “Affiliate Program” and see if anything comes up.
Take a look at this list of some of my favorite high-paying affiliate programs, which you can join.
Another way to find affiliate programs is to join an affiliate referring network. These are websites that you become a member of (for free) and have access to several companies looking for affiliates.
There are a lot of these affiliate referring websites online, my favorites are listed below.
Becoming an affiliate is fairly easy, and you don’t need a ton of page views or followers to be approved by most companies.
The amount of income you earn from your affiliate links once you’ve posted them depends on how well you’ve written your content to engage your readers, and how well you promote your posts to bring in more readers.
Remember, you don’t need to wait until you have a ‘bigger blog’ to join affiliate programs, you should join them as soon as you start blogging from day 1.
My Favorite Affiliate Networks:
Awin is my favorite affiliate network. There are so many awesome programs hosted here. Big brands like Nasty Gal and ASOS host their affiliate programs here, in fact!
The commissions vary depending on which brands you work with, as each program within the network will pay it’s own commission.
There is a temporary $5 charge to join the network, but you get it credited back to you once you are approved.
ShareASale – I love this one because it makes joining and keeping track of several affiliate programs super easy. You can earn cash pretty quick with this site if you are actively promoting your affiliate links.
HerPaperRoute I have an affiliate program for my courses that pays 30% commission. Apply to my program here and tell me a bit about yourself and your blog. I look forward to working with you!
To learn more about affiliate marketing, read this free Affiliate Marketing For Beginners Guide.
2. Sponsored Posts & Being An Influencer
The next step above being an affiliate is being an influencer, where you/your blog has a big enough following for brands to want to pay you a set rate in advance to post about them/their product.
Think of all of those pretty girls on Instagram holding some tea product claiming to be a weight loss solution – those are all sponsored posts. The tea company is paying the Influencer for posting that photo.
Related: How to create a great media kit and work with brands
Companies and brands will also pay influencers to write posts just for their product. A great way to find paid blogging jobs is by joining an influencer agency.
The great thing about influencer marketing is that you don’t need a million Instagram followers to be able to make money as an influencer, as there is a big demand for Micro-Influencers too!
What Are Micro-Influencers?
Micro-Influencers have smaller social followings, typically 1,000 – 20,000 social media followers.
Brands love working with Micro-Influencers because their audiences tend to be more engaged, targeted and niche. Consumers are more likely to buy what a Micro-Influencer recommends or is seen using, than a big celebrity is seen endorsing.
Micro-Influencers earn a living from their bijou online following, getting paid to blog and post on Instagram via sponsored brand partnership while gaining a ton of free products along the way.
Joining an influencer network is a good way to find brands for paid sponsorships. Make sure you have your media kit ready to go!
Earning A Good Living As A Micro-Influencer
Earning money from sponsored posts can be an excellent source of revenue for you.
To learn how to position yourself as a Micro-Influencer, enroll in this Micro-Influencer Marketing course: The Micro-Influencer’s Handbook.
How Much Should You Charge For A Sponsored Post?
A typical rule for sponsorship pricing is: number of followers X 10% or $10 for every 1000 page views your blog gets in a month.
3. Sprinkling Ads Into Your Blog
I use the word ‘sprinkling’ because less is more when it comes to ads. You don’t want to overdo it!
Having a few visually appealing advertisements that relate to your niche added into your blog post or sidebar is great, but having a ton of ads all over the place for anything and everything is not!
Too many ads on your blog distract from your own content, could look tacky, and will likely be a turn off to your readers.
See that Tailwind ad above this paragraph? That is an example of a classy ad, it doesn’t take up much space, and it is related to the content of my blog.
Plus it’s advertising something that I personally use, Tailwind has helped my Pinterest traffic skyrocket over the years!
You can usually get ads directly from the affiliate programs you are part of. Simply logging into your affiliate network ( Awin / ShareASale ) and copy and pasting the code to your website is all that is needed.
With these types of ads you will earn a commission whenever someone buys something after clicking on the ad.
Another way to earn money from ads is to use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, which pays you a few cents anytime someone clicks on your ad, regardless if they go on to make a purchase or not.
You earn more money depending on how many page views your website gets, but you don’t earn a commission if there is a sale.
Google Adsense and Monumetric are two PPC networks you can join to get these types of ads on your website. Monumetric pays better.
4. Sell An eBook
You are probably an expert at something, no matter how niche it may be, and if so, you could probably write a book about it. Creating an eBook and selling it on your website is a great way to earn passive income.
You write it once, put it up for sale, and then (hopefully) it sells over and over again, without you having to do anything, your readers are able to pay for and download it directly from your site.
You could easily create your ebook in Canva for free and then sell it on your own website, or sell it on Amazon, Apple, ect.
5. Teach An Online Course
Creating a course on a topic you are passionate about can be a very profitable source of passive income.
You create lessons, usually in video segments and your students pay a fee to watch them.
Usually, you will offer a worksheet with course material and notes too. I teach a few courses on profitable blogging and making money online, you can access my courses here.
This is the platform I run my courses on.
Some of the courses I used to offer:
Check out the programs I offer now, here.
If you have ever thought about creating and selling your own online course, this is a fantastic platform to use.
6. Offering Your Own Services & Products
Are you a Photographer? Web Designer? Fortune Teller? Be sure to have a Work With Me page on your website that clearly describes your services and what they cost.
You will be surprised how many people are looking to hire someone who does just what you do, you just need to direct them to find you.
Do you make something? Clothes? Postcards? Hats for squirrels? Perhaps you run a dropshipping business?
Set up a shop on your website and sell directly to your readers. Shopify is an awesome place to run your online shop, it is so user-friendly!
Shopify allows you to create a beautiful, responsive storefront, give you a ton of features and offers easy integration with several payment options. It is the go-to for many business owners big and small.
You can learn more about starting an online store and get Shopify FREE here.
BONUS! How To Make Money Blogging: Create A Membership Program
You can create a membership program on your own WordPress site with Thrivecart as well!
This allows you to generate income from members of your site who pay a subscription to you. You could offer a stock photo library subscription for example, that members would pay to have access to.
Podia is incredibly easy to install and use too. You don’t need any developer skills, just add your products and start collecting the money.
Phew! That’s A Lot Of Info… What Else?
As you can see there are many ways to monetize your website, and many ways to answer the question “How to make money blogging?”
In fact, there are even more ways to make money blogging, but these are the most common. How much you earn from blogging depends on you and how well you promote your content.
You could have every affiliate link and sales funnel set up on your website, but if no one is seeing it, you won’t make a cent.
You need to actively market your website every day to consistently attract people to visit it. That is why social media marketing is so important.
If you haven’t already, you will need to develop a social media marketing strategy. I can help you create one! Check out this post: Create A Social Media Game-Plan Strategy for more on that!
Also, enroll in my professional mastermind for creators.
I teach everything you need to run a profitable blog, all in one place. The mastermind includes live calls, as well as digital training that covers blog creation, content creation, SEO, social media marketing, writing, design & branding, business plans, affiliate marketing, list building, sales and more!
You will learn how to make an income blogging from the start, even if your following is small, or nil! You won’t find this much information and value all in one place for such an affordable price.
Seriously, you will be glad you did!
Keep Reading
- Free Course: How To Start A Money-Making Blog Step-By-Step
- 13+ Best Feminine WordPress Themes
- After Installing WordPress: 30+ Important Things To Do Now
- 10 Expert Ways To Monetize Blog Niches
- List Of High-Paying Affiliate Programs
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