13 Ways to Make Money From Your Blog
Many bloggers continually look for new ways to monetize their blogs. For them, it’s a way to get compensated for their efforts creating content and building a readership. Making money with a blog was a popular topic at BlogWorld Expo New York.
13 Ways to earn money from your blog.
Bloggers can generate both passive income, where you set up the revenue generating mechanism and it continues to yield money with little or no further intervention, and active income, where you must do further work to earn the money. Here are thirteen ways to make money from your blog.
- Sell merchandise. If your blog is integrated with an etailer or other merchant, incorporate your products into your content creation process. Use an editorial calendar to ensure that appropriate content is developed to support your product offering.
- Affiliate marketing. Get paid for lead generation when readers leave your blog to buy from a retailer. There is a wide offering of products. This is useful if you review products on your site. Alternatively, consider having a special deals page. Check out how Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income earns over $20,000 per month in blog affiliate marketing.
- Membership Offer premium content, webinars and discussion boards that readers pay for on a monthly basis. Readers get enriched content and support from both the community and the organizer.
- Subscription. Provide special content that’s delivered to readers on a regular schedule for a fee.
- Google AdSense. While it’s easy to add to your blog, these ads require high traffic volumes to generate significant revenue. While Google AdSense can contribute to the revenue generating potential of your blog, it can also irritate your readers.
- Banner advertising. Like a traditional media site, offer ads. Outsource advertising to a specialized blog advertising company like BlogAds or Pheedo, or manage the process yourself.
- Sponsorships. This a special form of advertising where a firm promotes their name and its association with your blog and point of view. It’s like supporting a sports event or naming a stadium. Assess which companies would benefit from the content on your blog and talk to their marketing department.
- Online paid content. The benefit of online paid content is that you sell direct to the consumer and as a result can make more revenue. Bear in mind that you’ll need to purchase the services that a third party would provide like editorial editing. E-books and webinars were two of the options discussed.
- Print book. Use your blog to attract a publisher for an old, dead tree media—a book. Most publishers expect you’ll provide a good portion of the marketing support and have a built-in audience.
- Other writing assignments. Promote your availability for other types of writing such as blog posts, copywriting and white papers.
- Consulting. Use your blog to showcase your expertise for your consulting business. In this case, your blog may not directly generate revenues but it drives warm leads and raises your visibility. It’s useful to have a targeted page to support your consulting practice.
- Speaking. Like consulting, use your blog to promote your speaking business for a fee. Many bloggers who do this have a static page on their blog outlining the titles of talks they’ve given.
- Donations. Keep a tip jar on your blog. It can also raise funds for a special not-for-profit by asking readers to contribute if they like your content.
3 Money-making considerations
Before you convert your blog into a money machine, go back and examine your blog goals since how you monetize your blog will change the look and feel and may have an impact on your readers. To this end, answer the following questions.
- What type of products will you accept on your blog for affiliate programs? Many bloggers feel that it’s critical that they use and like the product. Also determine how you’ll alert readers as required by the FTC.
- What types of advertising will you accept on your blog? Think in terms of broad categories of ads that you’ll accept and how these relate to your target audience. Also, what categories do you consider to be related to your niche? What types of ads will you veto having on your blog? It’s helpful to define your advertising policy.
- Who will handle the business side of your blog? Will you handle everything yourself or will you outsource it?
As a blogger, you can choose to use one or more ways to generate income from your blog. Your decision should take into consideration your blog goals and the amount time needed to support these efforts.
Do you have any other blog revenue generating ideas? If so, would you please add them in the comment section below.
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
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