12+ Clever Ways to Make Money Blogging

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How to make money blogging is a question many people ask.

There are many ways to make money blogging. Some are easier to implement than others.

You want to build a blog that best fits your interest, your site, and your niche. When choosing ways to monetize your blog or website, make sure you target your audience and offer quality products or services that will benefit them.

Monetizing a blog doesn't have to take a lot of time. When you find quality targeted products or ads, they can work for you for a long time. You want to test several offers and see which products convert best. Once in a while, you may want to replace less converting offers with others but you only have to do this occasionally.

I'll elaborate on each of those now.

12 Popular Ways to Make Money Blogging

There are many ways to make money from your blog or website. Here are some of the most popular ones:

1. Make money selling services

Show your expertise and build authority by providing great information on your site/blog and providing related services.

In-demand services include transcription, virtual assistant services, administrative services, freelance writing, proofreading, editing, internet marketing services, social media management, web design, graphic design, programming, translating, customer service, and more. (See the resources below to find out how you can provide some of these services).
Offer, training, coaching or consulting services to clients that solve their problems and needs.
Promote your public speaking services.
Promote webinars or live events.

2 – Make money selling products

You can sell your own products or other people’s products.

You can sell other people's products as an affiliate. If you’re interested in selling other people’s products or services, check out the section under affiliate marketing.

Another way to sell other people’s products is with dropshipping.

You can sell physical products or digital products.

Sell electronic information products. Examples of digital products include ebooks, reports, software (plugins, apps), audio, video, templates, webinars, online courses, video tutorials, and paid memberships. If you don’t want to create your own digital products, check out the information about PLR products below.
Sell physical products, e.g. hardcover books, DVDs, or other merchandise.

3- Make money with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online and one of the most popular methods for monetizing a blog.

Affiliate marketing provides one of the fastest and best ways to get started in online marketing and can be VERY profitable.

Affiliates earn commissions for generating sales or leads for someone else’s products.

Affiliate marketing makes it possible to start monetizing your blog right away even if you don’t have your own products. You don’t have to create, purchase, stock, or ship products. You don’t need a merchant account or set up a shopping cart. You don’t have to spend time processing orders, refunds, or returns. But even if you have your own products, you should offer related products or services through affiliate programs so you’ll have more resources to offer to your audience.

Affiliate marketing can provide you with a great lifestyle. You can work anywhere on your own schedule. It’s passive income. Don’t get me wrong. It will take plenty of work to get started in affiliate marketing and you’ll have to occasionally add new products and new information and update some information. But once your blog is set up with plenty of content and affiliate links, you can literally make money while you sleep.

Affiliate marketing can be very profitable. If you don’t realize the huge income potential of affiliate marketing, start reading income reports from successful affiliates. Not only will those income numbers inspire you, but they can also contain some great information and ideas for your affiliate promotions.

For example, Michelle Schroeder states in her income reports that she is consistently making $100,000 a month from affiliate marketing and she’s doing it while traveling full time.

Michelle is not the only one making this kind of money. I was intrigued by her income reports and bought Michelle’s course in December. I highly recommend her course for beginning affiliate marketers. You can read my review of her course here.

If you want to learn from someone who’s doing really well in affiliate marketing, check out Michelle’s course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.

Recommended reading about affiliate marketing:

Because affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online, I wrote several articles about affiliate marketing.

4 – Make money with PLR products

If you don’t have your own products, consider selling (Private Label Rights) PLR ebooks, videos, and software to monetize your blog and bring in instant cash. When buying PRL, you buy the rights to a product so you can brand it and sell it as your own.

Selling PRL products makes it possible to start making money right away when you don’t have your own products. I recommend modifying the PLR to differentiate yourself from others who sell the same product. You can read more about customizing PLR in my other blog post, 5 Ways to Customize a PLR ebook to make it your own.

Besides creating products with private label content, there are many other ways you can benefit from private label.

You can read more details about making money with PLR in my blog post, 15 Ways to Make Money with PRL products.

5- Make money with Google AdSense

AdSense is an easy way to earn extra income, especially when you are just starting out.

Many bloggers monetize their blogs with Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an advertising program provided by Google that allows web publishers to serve automatic text, video, image, and interactive media advertisements on their site.

How it works: You sign up for a free Google Adsense account. You have to apply, meet Google’s guidelines, and be approved by Google Adsense before you can start adding ads to your site. After you’re approved, Google provides a code that you put on your site.

Google ads can generate automatic revenue on either a per-impression or a per-click basis.

Some of the benefits of placing AdSense ads on your site:

They accept almost all the blogs/websites that abide by their TOS.
AdSense does NOT have any traffic requirement (no minimum pageviews required).
You don’t have to sell; you get paid for clicks even if nobody buys anything.
It is easy to set up.
Google targets the ads to your keywords which means that the ads are targeted to your content and audience.
The ads update automatically.

Although you don’t need a minimum amount of traffic to qualify for AdSense, you need a lot of traffic to make good money with Adsense. And when you have a lot of traffic, you'll make more from other networks.

If you’re active on social media and have regular traffic to your blog, Google AdSense is an easy way to earn some extra income from your blog. However, the profit from AdSense is smaller than what you can make from other advertising networks. You’ll want to check out other advertising networks that pay more once you get a certain amount of page views.

6. Make money by placing ads from advertising networks

The easiest way you can make money from blogging is by driving traffic to your blog and making money from advertising. Advertising is a great way to create passive income with your blog and you can make substantial earnings from advertising if you have a high amount of traffic and qualify for well-paying advertising networks.

You can join revenue-sharing advertising networks and place ads from those networks on your blog. There are many advertising networks to choose from depending on the amount of traffic your site is getting.

Media.net is a good option for new bloggers. They don't require a minimum number of pageviews. It's a great alternative to AdSense. Media.net offers highly relevant ads for your blog and adds value to your reader while you earn revenue. You must receive the majority of your traffic from the US, UK, and Canada and have a reasonable volume of visitors.

With WordAds, you’re generally paid per impression (when the ad is seen by a visitor) – not by click. That means the more visits you get, and the more each visitor uses your site, the more you’ll earn.

Other great options are Adthrive and Mediavine.

Many bloggers report making good money from Mediavine. To apply with Mediavine, your site must have a minimum of 50,000 sessions a month (per Google Analytics) and be in good standing with Google AdSense. You'll generally get a high RPM. RPM is your revenue per 1,000 sessions or pageviews (depending on which platform you use). Being active on Pinterest can help you get traffic.

Adthrive requires 100,000 monthly pageviews.

More advertising options include:

VigLink – No minimum pageviews
Pop Ads -No minimum pageviews
Ezoic – an average of 10,000 sessions per month.
Monumetic

Different types of ad networks

There are different types of ad networks serving different types of ads, including CPM Ads (you get paid by impression), CPA Ads (cost per action), CPC Ads (CPC stands for “Cost Per Click” and you get paid when someone clicks on the ad), In-Text Ads and Contextual Ads. Other advertising includes Banner Ads, Pop-Under Ads, Affiliate Networks, and Native Ads.

In-text ads: Infolinks uses in-text ads and is friendly for new bloggers.

CPC ads: CPC stands for “Cost Per Click”. This is one of the most popular methods to make money with a blog. Relevant ads are placed on your blog and you get paid for every click.

CPA ads/CPA Affiliate Networks. CPA stands for “Cost Per Action.” You're getting paid by action. You don't have to make a sale to make money! CPA ads pay you when someone takes a particular action such as providing their email address, zip code, or signing up for a free trial offer. CPA ads can make a great deal of money, but they often expire quickly so you must check them and update them often.

CPM ads. CPM stands for Cost per mile which means cost per thousand. CPM ads are also called CPI (cost per impression).

Here are some tips on getting the best results from advertising:

Match the look of the ads to the look of your content (color of links, font type, text size, etc) as much as possible. Making your ads look like internal links rather than ads will increase your clickthrough rate and your earnings.
Insert the ads in your content.

How much you’ll make depends on the advertising network you're using, how much traffic you’re getting, the kind of traffic you’re getting, and the value of the keywords in your niche. Other factors include the ad format, ad placement, ad size, colors, and the number of ads you’re using.

7. Make money by selling ad space on your blog

You can also sell advertising to advertisers. If you have a niche audience, selling ad space can be pretty lucrative. Advertisers are interested in advertising on blogs that have the same audience but have non-competing products. Platforms like BuySellAds can help you with direct advertising.

The amount of traffic you're getting will affect how much you can charge. You can check other sites in your niche to get an idea of how much they charge to advertise with them.

8. Make money with sponsored posts

Did you know that you can get money for writing and publishing a sponsored post on your site?

Sponsored posts can be articles. You can charge for publishing only. And you can charge additional money if you're writing the post.

Sponsored posts can also be a mention and a link or a review. Rates for sponsored content varies wildly. Here's an article about sponsored posts that also offers a free guide about sponsored posts.

9. Set up an affiliate program for your products

If you have your own products, set up an affiliate program for your products so that affiliates can sell your products. This will give you additional sales from sources you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. This is one of the most popular ways to make additional money from a website.

10. Make money from memberships and recurrent commissions

One of the best ways to get steady, recurring income each month is by creating a membership program filled with quality content that gives your members a ton of value. When promoting memberships, you'll earn recurrent income and make money every month as long as people belong to the membership. You'll need specialized software to create a membership site and it's best to have some Internet marketing experience before setting up your own membership. To keep people in the membership, you'll have to offer value to your members and provide new quality content on a regular basis.

An easier way for beginners is to promote people's memberships as an affiliate. Affiliate programs that offer memberships and recurring affiliate income include some web hosting, software, and courses.

Bluehost, the hosting I use and recommend has a recurring affiliate program.
Aweber, and most other popular autoresponders have recurring affiliate programs.

11. Get donations

Asking for donations on your blog is a great way to generate money for non-profit organizations but any website can request donations.

Check out Paypal’s donation button which is an easy and inexpensive way to set up donation requests.

12. Increase sales by building a list and automating your follow up

Building a list of targeted, prospective customers is one of the most powerful methods to make money with your niche blog.

Use an opt-in form to entice people to provide their email address by offering a valuable freebie such as a free mini-course, ebook, report, newsletter, templates, software, or other. When you have the email address you can keep following up with them, and send them your newsletter, product offers affiliate promotions, and plenty of useful, free info to build rapport.

Automate your email marketing with autoresponders. Popular autoresponder services to automate your list building include Aweber & ConvertKit.

Read How to Turn Visitors into Buyers with Autoresponders.

BLOGGING RESOURCES

Recommended hosting for beginners: Bluehost.
WordPress themes: ElegantTheme, GeneratePress, Genesis & Thesis – DIYThemes.
Popular autoresponders: ConvertKit, Aweber, GetResponse, and MailChimp.
The best online spelling and grammar checker: Grammarly.
Best Pinterest scheduler: Try Tailwind with the free Tailwind trial.
Easy-to-use software to design blog and social media images: Canva.
30 Surefire Ways to Build and Grow Your Email List Fast.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing .