You love writing about what you do – that’s why you blog right? You either enjoy teaching people about finance, reviewing books (c’est moi), giving people advice on blogging based on your experience (that’s me also), talking about tech, talking about investing, talking about fitness, or whatever else it may be you like writing about.
But what if I told you you could make money from it? And what if I told you there are some blogs out there that actually make quite a significant amount of money from blogging?
“Brilliant! But how?” I hear you say. Well, if you’re still here and haven’t scrolled down to the first number in the list then you can now scroll down a bit to that number to find out some of the ways you can earn money by blogging.
1. Affiliate marketing
There’re a lot of affiliate marketing companies out there that will give you a commission when someone buys their product via your link. For example, on my book reviews, I link through to the book on Amazon so if anyone navigates to that book via my link, I get a (very) small percentage of that sale.
There are companies out there such as ShareASale, Awin and Clickbank are some of the bigger names out there that focus on giving you companies who want to sell their products and are offering commission if people buy their content via your links. I’d suggest signing up to all of them and just checking through to see if there is any content relevant to your blog.
2. Ads
Something else I’d suggest you do after a couple of weeks of setting up your blog is setting up your Google Adsense account and getting your sign-up to MediaVine underway. Google Adsense is easy enough and doesn’t require you to have a certain amount of visitors to your page to be enabled. Though they are quite strict on the level of content. It took me around 25 posts before I was accepted for Google Adsense.
With a lot of ad companies (excluding Google AdSense), they do require you to have a bit of a following beforehand. This is likely due to them needing to guarantee to the companies who want their branding advertised that it’ll be seen. Mediavine is one of the big companies that offer premium advertising on blogs. Though I believe they require around 50,000 monthly sessions or so. Which for some of you may not be a lot. However, if you’re just starting out and your audience growth hasn’t exploded then this may not be feasible. However, it’s definitely something worth considering when your blog does become more popular as I believe the brands are slightly higher paying than those you’ll get on Google AdSense.
3. Start a digital shop
Something I knew I wanted to do when I started my blog was to showcase some of my graphic design abilities. My day job requires me to often create graphics, posters, or edit photographs and I love it! Therefore I wanted to start finding a way of creating something I could make a small amount of money off on my blog. After a bit of browsing other blogs, I saw that people were selling digital bookmarks for really cheap. The benefit of a digital product is that there’s no shipping required and no physical product to sort – you’re simply selling people a PDF of your design that they can print off themselves. Due to this – you can’t really charge the same premium price you would for a physical product but you also have absolutely no hassle with shipping. Looking to do the same? Why not check out my Guide to Setting Up a Shop on Your Blog.
4. Sell a course
So I don’t know very much about selling courses as I’m yet to set one up. However, if you visit any semi-successful blog, they’ll have some sort of course likely set up. I’ve recently found Sarah Cordiner who offers some free courses for setting up courses (ironically). hear that courses are one of the best ways to earn income on Blogs. Writing content that teaches people things is great, but if people want to really feel like they’re getting professional and high-quality teaching, they’ll want to pay for something far more substantial.
I imagine courses take more time to set up – I imagine you may need to have some basic understanding of video editing and such, but once they’re set up and live on your website, they essentially work like passive income.
Summary
There are plenty of other ways of earning money from your blog too, especially if you have a social media following that would attract sponsors and such. I’ll be publishing an article in the coming weeks with some more ideas, once I’ve done my research! Until then, why not try setting up some of the methods above and letting me know how they go?
