How do Bloggers get paid? 6 ways to make money with your blog

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This is PART 4 of 6 part series.

To checkout the rest of the series, find the links at the end of this post!

COMING ONTO THIS POST!

Making money with a blog seems like such a great way to earn some passive income. I mean can you imagine making money for an article that you wrote a year back?

Amazing right?

And more and more people are publishing their blog income reports and making people believe that making money through a blog is possible. And it is. But about 80% of the blogs out there, never make any money.

You know why?

When you see these income reports, they mention all the different income sources they have. And it can seem a little confusing as you have no idea where to begin.

In this post, I am hoping we can clear those doubts for you. How you can figure out which ways are best for you to monetise your blog. Because trust me, what worked for someone might not work for you.

However, if you are not making any money from your blog yet, make sure you are not making one of these mistakes.

So here are all the ways in which you can monetise your blog and which ones you should focus on:

1.AD revenue:

One of the things that most bloggers think of first when trying to monetise is by using ads. There are a couple of ad network that accept new bloggers too like google adsense.

And then they put ads everywhere in order to make money through those ads.

But let me give it to you straight, Ads will not make you money unless your traffic is huge.

When you have anywhere more than 10k Page views and you get accepted in one of the more premium ad network, then yes, you can think about ads.

But if you are just starting out and get accepted into ad sense, placing even 10 ads will not make you any money. It will instead irritate your readers and you will struggle with building an audience because it looks really spammy.

However, if you have good traffic and have more than 10k page views per month, you can apply for premium ad networks, which pay more for the same ads.

WHEN TO GO FOR AD Networks?

Focus on building your traffic first. If you have a substantial traffic, then putting ads makes sense. Otherwise, not so much.

But you can start with ads from the beginning if you don’t focus on returning visitors to your site and most of your traffic is new visitors. This would work if you write posts around a certain problem and are providing solution to that problem.

And the people who are visiting just care about the solution and not so much about where they are getting the information from.

But if most of your audience never visits you again, you will not be able to monetise using some of the other methods.

So it depends on what your content strategy is. If you want to build a relationship and trust with your audience and if you want them to keep coming back to your blog, don’t stuff their faces with ads everywhere.

Related: Our pining strategy that helped us grow blog traffic

2.Affiliate Marketing:

This is probably one of the most common way that new bloggers make money. Mostly because it is possible to make money with affiliate marketing even with a small audience.

What is affiliate marketing?

If you have no idea what affiliate marketing is, it is essentially recommending products that you love and sharing your link. SO when someone buys something using your link, you get a small commission from that sale, at no extra cost to your readers.

Now when you are just starting out, the best affiliate programs are the ones that you use yourself to build up your blog. Maybe you love the hosting provider that you use? Try searching if they have an affiliate program.

The best place to start is probably Amazon because everyone uses amazon and no matter what your blog is about, you can always find some products on amazon that you can recommend to your audience.

Now one thing that you need to consider with affiliate marketing is what percentage of your audience is returning visitors. Because the audience that keep coming back to your blog will be the people who buy through your affiliate links.

Because these days so many people are doing affiliate marketing, so it is important that you take time to build a trust with the audience before asking them to buy through your link.

Who should consider Affilliate Marketing?

Honestly, everyone who has a blog. But I’d suggest that you focus on the writing first. When you write good quality content that people find useful, the tend to come back. And as the returning visitors increase, you start building a relationship and trust with your readers. And these readers are more likely to buy through your affiliate link.

3.Sponsored Posts:

Sponsored posts are when a company pays you to write about their product/service. These kind of posts are particularly famous among lifestyle bloggers who often write review posts of products.

If you really like a product, you can email their marketing rep to see if there are any opportunities to collaborate. And can go forward from there. Some times you will also be contacted by the brands to see if you do sponsored posts. And if that happens, it is always a good idea to have a Media Kit ready.

It makes you look more professional and makes it easy to reply to collaborations emails.

Writing sponsored posts isn’t the best strategy for monetising in the very beginning though. Because it isn’t very consistent and the money that you make through these sponsored posts will vary month to month depending on the number of sponsored posts. And they will be difficult to come by unless you have an established blog.

4.Selling your products/Courses:

If you have a blog that has a niche and if you have extensive knowledge on a particular topic, this is the way to go.

When you have expertise in a niche, you can create products/courses around that particular topic and monetise your blog. Of course this takes a lot of hard work, because any products that you put out for your readers to buy have to be of highest quality and have to deliver value for them.

WHAT PRODUCTS CAN I SELL?

Well, it depends on what niche do you blog in. For example, if your niche is health and fitness, you can sell a meal plan or a weight loss guide. Or if your niche is minimalism you can sell an ebook on how to become a minimalist with your expert tips.

A lot of bloggers also sell their online courses on how to start a profitable blog or on how to grow using Pinterest. But one tip that we would like to give here is that if you are selling a course, make sure it is packed with value. If some information can be easily shared in a blogpost, do so. Make sure that who ever buys your ebook or takes your course believe that it was worth their money.

Before selling your course to someone ask yourself if you would find value in the course if you bought it from someone. This is the best way to turn your readers into buyers and into raving fans.

This is what will differentiate your products from hundreds that are available online and this will allow you to build trust with your audience. By doing this, you also ensure that the readers will also buy other courses from you in the future if you ever come up with new courses.

5.Selling your Services:

This is also quite common among bloggers. A lot of bloggers sell their services like blog audit, Pinterest audits and even sell services related to making pins.

Of course it doesn’t have to be just Pinterest related. Try and think of what knowledge you could give to someone for a price. If you are a registered nutritionist maybe consider coaching clients. Or if you specialise in growth hacking, you could sell those services too.

A lot of personal nutritionists and dieticians also sell consultation by hour. So think of what value you can provide to your readers. Of course it will take time to build your clients and you will have to provide a lot of valuable information for free through your blogs or other media, for your audience to trust you and your knowledge of the topic.

6.Freelance Writing/Guest Posts:

Some bigger blogs pay people for writing blogposts for their blogs/ online magazines and you could get paid anywhere between $50 to $300 for a single blogpost.

The best way to find these opportunities is through the websites themselves. A lot of bloggers also find these opportunities through websites like fiverr and upwork etc. although I haven’t tried this one myself.

Checkout this post to see a list of all the sites that pay you to blog.

There you have it. All the ways in which you can monetise your blog.

The last tip here is to focus on one or two of these methods in the very beginning. Don’t try to do everything. And once you have established one source, you can then venture to other streams of income.

RELATED: How to make a full time income from BLOG

That’s it for this part. Select one of the links below to check the part that you want to go to. All these parts will go over important topics such as monetising your blog, driving traffic to your website and your content strategy etc.

• Part 1: How to start a blog the right way
• Part 2: How to install a theme and make the blog look professional
• Part 3 a):Everything you need to do BEFORE you publish a blogpost
• Part 3 b):Everything you need to do AFTER you publish a blogpost
• Part 4:How bloggers Monetise their blogs
• Part 5: Pinterest Marketing strategy
• Part 6: Workflow as a blogger

However, if you wish to get exclusive and exhaustive information on how we set up our blog and grow it to earn a full time income in 6 months, sign up for the FREE 7 day EMAIL course on “How to Start a profitable blog”below! We will be more than happy to help 🙂

The FREE 7 day email course to starting a PROFITABLE blog will cover:

• DAY 1: How to set up your blog right:
  • Everything about hosting, plans, domain names and niches
• DAY 2: How to make your blog look professional:
  • Setting it up the right way, themes and plug-ins you will need
• DAY 3: All the tools and resources you will need as a blogger.
  • All the tools that have helped us grow our blog and monetise it. All the essential plug-ins and everything we need to make pins for our blog.
• DAY 4: How to write quality content:
  • Everything from structuring the blogposts, to finding content ideas, and optimising your posts for Search engines
• DAY 5: How to monetise your blog & ways to monetise:
  • How bloggers monetise their blogs and selecting which one is best for you
  • Our list of the best affiliate networks to join.
• DAY 6: How to market your content and drive traffic from social media:
  • How to set up your Pinterest the right way
  • How to get rich pins
  • How to use keywords to increase your reach on Pinterest
  • Everything you need to know to drive traffic while you sleep: Pinterest Marketing strategy
• DAY 7: How to stay motivated as a content creator and my top tips and tricks to stay productive and on top of your game as a blogger

If you have any questions, leave them down below! We will be more than happy to help 🙂

What income streams do you currently have? Let me know in the comments below! 🙂

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