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Four Fast & Immediate Ways to Make Money Blogging

Published on September 12, 2020
by Contributor, Kit Elliott

Looking for ways to make money blogging? Learning and implementing new knowledge is the number one skill I use everyday to make money. I want to continue to learn & continue to grow in the 2020's while also increasing passive residual income.

But how do you make money blogging? How do you implement the “make money” part?

When I first started blogging in 2005, every few months a new monetization method popped up.

Banner Space
Guest Posting
Selling Backlinks
Promote Every Launch

It got overwhelming because none of it quite worked as well as the guru's who were pitching the ideas.

What is working now? Let's break through any insecurities and any feelings of overwhelm. I have narrowed it down to the top “six” ways to monetize your blog if you're just starting out.

Affiliate Marketing
Courses & Infoproducts

I'm going to add four new ones to this list for 2020, and I'll explain in a bit why.

Coaching & Consulting
Freelancing
Guest Posts
Article Backlinks

In this blog post, you'll find out the best ways to make money with your blog with these six methods:

Affiliate Marketing
Courses & Infoproducts
Coaching & Consulting
Freelancing
Guest Posting
Article Backlinking

How to Make Money Blogging with Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is selling other company's products and services and getting paid a referral commission. Affiliate Marketers join affiliate programs and find reputable products to promote and then recommend and share those products with their community.

I first fell in love with affiliate marketing in 2004 when I made my first affiliate commission with a simple 2-step system that I just made up. since it was eight years before Lead Pages and ten years before Clickfunnels.

Back then, I placed tiny magazine ads and sent visitors to a capture page & then, setup my emails to recommend everything within that topic. Those emails would auto-drip everyday for 90 days. It was messy.

It worked because I would find a problem that needed solving like upset stomachs and early onset balding and then desperately create blog posts, blog ads, pinterest ads, blog training and blog reviews on products and techniques that worked. This process still works today.

Second, I recommend promoting products within your niche that you already know and trust. Watch out for the “promote BECAUSE it pays a commission” VERSUS “promote BECAUSE you love the product” trap. If you promote a product because it pays a commission, then you WILL lose trust with your audience.

Blogging in the 2020's is about cultivating a community and building a community based on the values and principles

Quick Shortcut to How Affiliate Marketing Works

When you join a brand's affiliate program, you are known as an affiliate. You will be given a unique to you affiliate URL to use to promote the brand's products or services.
You include that link in your blog training, your blog reviews and content (and even in your email marketing) and create a call to action to direct people to the solution via your affiliate link.
When potential buyers click through your affiliate link, an affiliate cookie is placed on their computer that automatically tells the brand YOU get credit for the future sale.
When that buyer completes a purchase, the brand's affiliate software automatically tracks and records the affiliate commission.
That affiliate commission shows up in your affiliate dashboard & is paid out according to the brand's terms.
You as the affiliate can request to be out usually by check, direct deposit or Paypal.

Quick Shortcut to Finding Google Affiliate Products

If you're just starting out with zero products and zero idea of what products to promote, then go to Google.com and type in:

“affiliate program” + (any topic within your niche)

If your blogging about dogs, then you would type in: “affiliate programs” + dog food and that will list the top three affiliate programs that pay you a commission.

Then, run it through a simple will it fly list.

Does it offer a money back guarantee?
Do they provide good customer support?
Will your readers like THIS product?
Is there any controversy related to THIS product that will get you “cancelled”? Yes, cancelled culture is a real-thing to worry about in the 2020's.

And then, the FTC requires that you disclose that you're getting a benefit of any kind. Click here for how to add affiliate disclosures to your blog.

How to Make Money with Your Own Course

As a former sixth grade Science teacher, I always had in the back of my head that I should bring my curriculum online and start charging people who want to learn about what I know.

And then, I thought – are people really paying to learn about the Scientific Method on a 6th grade level? Or when I created my first blog in 2004, do people want to know how to start a blog? Or when I first made a million with affiliate marketing, can people duplicate that success?

The answer is YES and it lies in positioning. There are ways to position yourself as the expert, the trainer, the coach or the tutor in areas that you are comfortable in. Before spending six months on an idea, you can quickly validate any idea by setting up a simple capture page & video using LeadPages.

How to Validate Your Course Idea

I have daily “money-making” ideas, but I have to say NO to the majority of them because they don't pass the “worth my time” test. You could come up with a great idea, spend 3-4 months building it out and then, spend another month creating sales letters and videos JUST to have it flop with zero interest. You need to validate your idea first.

So I placed a few ads targeting “6th grade tutoring” or “science tutoring” keywords and drove traffic to this simple 2-step process. If you have an email list, YOU can also send traffic through this validation process. I quickly had a ton of interested students willing to pay for my training.

However, I over-estimated how much they would pay. Pricing is incredibly important when you create your own course. With a tutoring group like this, I could easily charge $9 per month and reach a massive worldwide audience with 50,000 students. Right?

What Platform Do You Use for Your Course

As a blogger, you could create a course that works for your niche. I recently took my affiliate marketing course from a complete membership site that I built to a “done-for-you” course platform called Thinkific.

Thinkific is a platform that enables you to create, market and sell and deliver your course. They allow THREE free courses with ZERO revenue split. That means you can setup your course for free. A few of my mentors recommended it; so I signed up with Thinkific.

And I was blown away.

I was surprised how easy they made it from copy and pasting my course content to how fast uploading videos to easily creating a sales letter for my online course. Thinkific made it super simple and super fast.

If you need a complete on-demand training for affiliate marketing, then, I recommend taking my online course called Unstoppable Affiliate. I train you on my simple affiliate marketing blueprint that has allowed me to work full-time as an affiliate marketer for the last 15 years straight. All of this is built using Thinkific's platform so you can start making money with affiliate marketing & see their platform in action.

Click here to take the affiliate marketing course.

I want to challenge you to really think of a skill or a hobby that you really enjoy. I've helped many students realize that their passion lies in gardening or sewing or home improvement projects or even, power washing decks. The majority of online courses are built around hobbies and passions and interests. Here are a few:

Can you really make money with your online course? YES! Build it around what you love to talk about & then, create a community of like-minded people who waiting to learn from you.

Is the online course world oversaturated? There are 7.5 billion people in the world. Just because your competition enrolled 10,000 students last month doesn't mean you can't enroll the same 10,000 students THIS month. You can do very well with a small number of students who enroll every week or every month.

Quick Coaching Session on Money

The way you create wealth in this world is by creating value in the world. The more value I create, the more money I make. I create money through my abundance mindset. When you blog from a place of scarcity, wanting to make sure you get every single commission or get paid for every single piece of content you create, then, you stop creating value and you live in a place where you trade time for a paycheck.

I've lived in that “small world” & know that this scarcity mindset actually shrinks your world. I want you to go into this with a joint venture mindset where you're creating content, helping as many people, providing value to the world & joint venturing with your competition to do the same.

Quick Marketing Strategy for Your Online Course

I want to share with you a quick tip on how to grow your enrollment for your online course. If you have a ongoing skill like sewing, then I recommend charging a smaller monthly fee & keep that evergreen up and running. That way – people can pay you a small fee to immediately join your course & your new community.

If you have a one & done problem fixed type of course, then I recommend charging a higher fee. For example, if you specialize in helping people stop drinking alcohol, you can charge a higher fee to help them STOP drinking. Right?

If you have an ongoing problem like weight loss, the best way to market this course is to open and close your enrollment. Pick 3-4 times throughout the year to open & launch your enrollment. Let your email list know what to expect. Let your social media following know what to expect. Then, launch it during a 10 day period and truly close it down. Then, put up a “waiting list” until the next launch. As you continue this method, you'll see more and more enrollments for each launch.

How to Make Money Blogging with Consulting & Coaching

Now, your blog is making money with affiliate marketing. You've launched your online course to your email list & placed it on your menu & wrote a few blog series that push your online course out. Then, you add pay per click advertising & schedule guest interviews to promote your new online course. And you're opening and closing your enrollment periods for your online course.

Then, to continue monetizing your blog, people will pay you MORE for one on one coaching or even, group coaching.

I recently ran into a coach who lost 100 pounds and now, runs a monthly group coaching program called Phit n Phat. She charges a monthly fee to coach people through their thoughts about losing weight. For $49 per month, she has around 20,000 members paying her a monthly coaching fee. She's hitting around $5 million dollars a year with a coaching program and she's a badass at what she does. She runs this like a business and the practice, finding mentors, and getting her certification has helped her become a huge successful business owner. Check out her coaching program here.

I recently had a reader pay me $2,500 for a two-hour question and answer consulting gig. Once you start sharing your skills, people will reach out to you for additional help. That expertise is another way you can monetize your business.

How to Make Money Freelancing

Then, send your earnings into overdrive by freelancing. The best way now to make money as a freelancer is to signup as a Fiverr seller. Now that Fiverr has evolved their marketplace to bring buyers & sellers together, they have also increased earning potential by offering additional upsells & Pro status.

If you're looking to become a freelance digital assistant AKA virtual assistant, then check out the best platforms to find digital assistant freelance jobs. If you have web development skills, then you can find freelance jobs at the best platform to find freelance jobs for web developers.

Freelancing is big business. Now with upsells and Fiverr's Pro marketplace, you can charge higher prices like this one below:

Related Article:

You Can Work from Home with Fiverr

The Hidden Secret Behind Making Money with Your Blog

As this site has grown over the past six months, I've discovered two additional ways that bloggers make money. One of the fastest ways to grow your blog is by guest posting on higher ranked blogs. You do this by joint venturing with the products and services that you promote. Those JV become your partners.

You and your team write content for your partners' blogs. Within this content, you'll link back to your content. That causes a huge spike in Google rankings. Within each guest post, you'll also sell backlinks to your other partners who also want a backlink.

When you sell that backlink, then you can also pay big bucks to guest post on the higher price websites. That allows you to get free advertising for your site by offsetting any costs.

And then, that opens up paid guest posts on your own blog. You can now charge other brands to run sponsored content on your own blog. If you're just starting out, you can charge $75 to $100 per article and as your traffic grows, you can increase your prices.

To Recap:

These are the main ways bloggers make money:

Affiliate Marketing
Courses
Digital Products
Coaching & Consulting
Guest Posting
Selling Backlinks
Sponsors
TikTok Creator Fund
YouTube Ad Revenue

Additional Ways Bloggers Make Money:

Selling Merch
Online Courses
Banner Advertising
Google Adsense
Ad Networks
Paid Job Boards
Donation or Patreon
Email Sponsored Ads
Podcast Sponsors
Premium Gated Content
Dropship Products
Resource & Recommended Tools Page

If you haven't started your own blog, here are some relevant training and articles that will help you start a blog and grow your blogging business.

Make sure you bookmark this page as I’ll be updating it as often as I can to keep you informed on making money.

If you know anyone looking to make money blogging, please share this page with them.