How do bloggers make money? Are you looking for ways to add offers & monetize your blog?
There are more than 600 million active blogs right now out of the 1.7 billion sites on the internet, and this means you have to stay up to date on the strategies that work in growing your blog.
Setting up a successful and profitable blog requires treating your blog as a business, forming partnerships, and setting up systems. And we recommend each blog post solves the reader's issue. Whatever readers search for, they land on your blog, solve their problem, and move on.
Right?
In this article, I’ll be covering ways on how you can make money from your blog, whether full time or part-time, as you concentrate on creating content for the readers.
1. Affiliate Marketing
The primary way bloggers make money is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products and earning commissions on any referred sales.
A blog's reader performs an action like purchasing, downloading, or subscribing to a product through a special coded affiliate link and they pay you a commission per action.
For example, let's say you start a “hosting review comparison” blog. Each hosting company will pay you when you refer customers their way.
Siteground has an affiliate program that pays a flat fee of $50 per referral. When you refer over 20 customers in a 30-day span, they double your affiliate commissions.
Let's say you refer 20 customers to Siteground each month.
20 x $50 = $1,000.
You just made $1,000 in affiliate commissions from one offer. And who needs hosting? Everyone with a website!
If you haven't started a blog, we recommend Siteground as your hosting company and if you click on our link, we earn a commission that pays for our writers & goes back into this community. Thank you!
How To Find Products to Promote
There are two ways to find products to promote. First, when you search for related products and services, you can usually find a link in a brand's footer that says, “Affiliates”.
That will disclose how to promote as an affiliate and earn commissions. The second way is finding an affiliate network that works with a wide range of brands. See our affiliate marketing guide to get started in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Network Examples
Some of the top affiliate networks that we work with are:
- ShareaSale
- Clickbank
- CJ
- Impact
- Flex Offers
Examples of Top Paying Affiliate Niches
- Hosting Companies
- Marketing & Website Software
- Weight Loss & Supplements
- Forex
- Business & Entrepreneurship
- Dating & Romance
- Gaming
- Survivalist
Check out my recent post on the blogs that make the most money and check their niche.
How To Choose The Best Affiliate Program
Picking the right affiliate program can be time-consuming for beginners.
Bloggers are not limited to how many programs they can join. You can join as many affiliate sites as you wish. The more products and services you promote on your site, the more money you can make.
To maximize your potential income, consider the following factors.
- Commissions: Check commission amounts.
- Competition: High competition signifies demand for the products.
- Reputation: Confirm the company has a good reputation with customers.
- Quality: Check the quality of the product because what you promote is a reflection of YOUR brand.
A successful blogger can make over $100,000 a month in affiliate commissions. If you're serious about making money with affiliate programs on your blog, make sure to check out our affiliate marketing training.
2. Sponsored Posts
A guest post (also called a sponsored post) is a blog post that reads like an educational article but is sponsored by a company in order to promote their product or service.
As a blogger, you can make money offering guest posts on your site to companies who are looking to promote their products & services.
The two main ways to accept a sponsored post are:
- Guest Posting Marketplace
- In-House Advertising
Using Guest Post Marketplaces
Guest Post Marketplaces list your blog in the marketplace and companies and brands can instantly purchase a “guest post” listing inside the marketplace.
Guest Post Marketplace Examples:
Some of these sites include;
- Accessily.com
- ReviewMe.com
- PayPerPost.com
- BloggerOutreach.com
- BlogDash.com
- LinkWorth.com
- PayU2blog.com
In-House Sponsored Post
Now, you can also include a link directly on your website and mark it “advertising”. Create a buy now link or create options to write the sponsored post or accept the sponsored post depending on your brand's publishing standard.
How To Charge For A Sponsored Post
Sponsored reviews are priced at
- $40-$100 for smaller traffic blogs
- $200 to $1,000 for medium-size traffic blogs
- $1,100 to $2,200 for large-size traffic blogs
Tip: Create an advertising page for your blog so that advertisers can see you are open to sponsored articles without having to inquire.
You can lower your prices if you are new and increase as your traffic increases. This will help you get started and build relationships with brands that want repeat articles published on your site.
3. Online Courses
One of the best ways to monetize your blog is by creating your own course. Each course you add to your site is another evergreen income stream that pays you all of the profits.
You'll need an online platform where your online course will live. One of the best online course platforms is Thinkific.
Thinkfic has helped over 51,000 course creators generate over $340 million dollars in total sales. It's also free to create your first course & there's no revenue split. Check out how Thinkific Review for more info.
Other Online Teaching Platforms
- Teachable
- BuddySchool
- Chegg Tutors
- Tutor.com
- Studydraft
- RCampus
- Learnopia
- Udacity
4. Display Banner Advertising
Display advertising is the number one go-to form of advertising for most companies today, including the blogs that make the most money.
This form of banner advertising lets you focus on creating great content for your readers without worrying about how to make sales from the blog.
If you have installed WordPress, then you can use a plugin to display banner ads two ways:
- Banners will display automatically (or manually set the locations).
- Accept payment to display a brand's banner on your website.
Ad Networks for Display Advertising
Below is a list of the best ad networks you can check out and start making money with your blog;
Google Adsense
Google Adsense serves more than 2 million advertisers and effective and driving traffic to sponsors.
To apply, go to the website and fill in your details including the blog you wish to show ads from and wait for the approval process.
Approvals take between 2-7 business days on normal working hours.
- Ad formats: Native (Video, headers, widget, sidebar, In-article)
- Bidding model: CPC (Cost Per Click)
Adsterra
Adsterra Serves over 20 billion impressions per month to their advertisers.
To Get Started. Click the link below and signup as a publisher.
- Minimum payout: $50
PopAds
They specialize in pop-up/ pop-under advertisements.
The platform is easy to use as you can set how you’d like the ads to display on your site and their frequency.
The approval process is fast.
ExoClick
ExoClick has served more than 200 billion impressions and offers excellent tracking tools to advertisers.
The company is based in Barcelona and provides online advertising globally. The website’s interface offers a clear and intuitive interface for creating and monitoring ad campaigns
PropellerAds
The company offers a variety of targeting options and is an excellent choice for both beginners and established bloggers.
The platform enables you to edit your preferences as to the kind of ads you’d like shown on your blog and targets matching advertisers to your preference settings.
The approval process is quick.
Other Ad Networks For Bloggers
- Infolinks
- Media.net
- Ezoic
- Adthrive
- MGID
- Revenue Hits
- Adcash
- RichPush
- Mobidea Push
- ZeroPark
- Traffic Stars
- AdMaven
If you're looking to display the banners, then check out this article for the 15 Best WordPress Banner Ad Plugins and Software. Most of these plugins allow you to sell ads from your website.
5. Selling Digital Products
Unlike advertising, you can create your digital products and sell them to your community of readers or sell other people's products as an affiliate.
The main benefits to selling digital products is no inventory is required and readers can pay & download the e-book or training online without the need for physical fulfillment.
Digital Product Examples:
Digital Product examples include;
- Online courses
- EBooks
- Pintable’s such as wall art
- Stock photos
- Edited presets
- Website templates
Our goal here at I Love Making Money is to make sure each blog post answers the readers question. Our rule is to make sure no reader ever clicks the back button to look elsewhere for their answer.
Make sure you are providing quality content & building relationships with your readers. Make that your top priority.
Other Ways to Make Money on Your Blog
- Sell Merchandise
- Create a Paid Job Board
- Dropship Products
- Create a Podcast
- Sell Consulting Services
- Accept Donations
- Start a Patreon & Charge a Monthly Fee
Frequently Asked Questions About Making Money Blogging
Blogging is profitable in 2020, as more people are joining the industry and sharing their opinions.
The first step to creating a profitable blog is by creating content that engages and answers reader's questions.
Yes, Google blogger offers Adsense advertising to publishers that are interested.
To activate ads on your Google blogger hosted blog;
· Go to Monetize tab in your blogger settings
· Choose where you’d like to show the ads
· Login to your Adsense account and link it to the blog
Beginner bloggers use advertising networks such as Google AdSense to show ads on their blogs or writing sponsored reviews for company products.
The sky is the limit for how much bloggers can earn.
Some make more than $2 million per month, while others make less than $100 a year from their blogs. It all depends on how much time you are willing to put in your blogging business or you still are taking it as a hobby
Give yourself probably five months to build a loyal readership and gradually grow your blog's traffic.
For some, this might take longer while others a short time by using strategies that gains them popularity over a short period.
Bloggers make money through these five ways:
1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Sponsored Content
3. Online Courses
4. Banner Advertising
5. Digital Products
6. Coaching & Consulting
7. Monthly Membership
8. Online Merch
9. Paid Job Boards
10. Podcast Sponsors
11. Donations and Patreon
If you know anyone looking for ways to make money blogging, please share this page with them.
Hi Mike.
I saw this article through your Linkedin profile and I must say thank you for taking the time to write all this.
One question though, how would you compare affiliate marketing with dropshipping? which one is the easiest according to you and takes little time to monitor or make any profits?
I started blogging on blogger but gave up because i never made any money despite the hard work i put in. I wish to soon get motivation to start again.
Blogging has turned into:
1. One traffic strategy.
2. Connect with high demand crowd.
If you look at the major blogs, while they NOW have multiple traffic sources, it is usually ONE that pushed their business into the stratosphere.
I believe you have to work on that one big traffic strategy like: Podcasting, YouTube Channel, TikTok, Facebook Group, Backlinking Partnerships to be successful at blogging.
Hello Lucy.
Its good to know that you enjoyed this content.
For starters, I’d recommend you start off with affiliate marketing as you learn the skills of marketing your products online.
Both business models are viable as they require no inventory and can be done on Autopilot as you get to do other things.
But with dropshipping, you’ll have to also consider things such as damages, returns which lead to refunds, and items going out of stock which is quite uncommon in affiliate marketing especially while promoting digital products.
Hello there,
I found you on google search,
I’m Srikrishna a SEO and digital marketer who can transform the fortunes of any online business. I am also an expert at enhancing the backlink profile of a web site, the better backlink profile the better web site will rank and so link building is very important.
My link building is all about quality, I do not simply build thousands of cheap links (which would almost certainly lead to a Google penalty) but rather build high quality and relevant links that the search engines will value and so enhance your web site’s ranking. I also build other types of links, for example, if your site is new or you have some news then I can produce a high-quality press release, one that will actually go out to relevant journalists and so actually get some good coverage and links.
Here are my top 5 blogs:
1) Entrepreneur.com
2) Thelondoneconomic.com
3) Ccn.com
4) World.edu
5) Fusionnews.net
Social media is also a very important part of SEO and online marketing and so I can also work with you to ensure that you have a very good following.
I am a very friendly and approachable person who works from home and so I like to feel that I am very good to work with and previous clients definitively agree with that.
Best Regards,
Srikrishna Banerjee.
Good article. I will be experiencing many of these issues as well..
I have taken a few blogging courses and noticed an interesting marketing scheme with bloggers. They sell links within one article then hire a great writer to publish on a site. So if the writer is $3,000 – they raise the money by selling links within that article. That way – everyone gets a backlink within a keyword rich 10,000 word article.
Can you make money writing for blogs or how does that work?
Check out our most popular articles about making money with blogs here.