For many, full-time blogging sounds like the dream. You work from home, typing up all the interesting new tidbits, news, how-to guides, and gossip from within your chosen niche, and then make money.
Maybe you have the earliest steps down. You have enough content that Google loves you, you’ve taken steps to start link building, you’re building an organic email list, and you’re seeing between 500-1,500 visitors per day. Good for you!
But how do you best monetize your blog? If you’re putting that kind of work into your blog, you definitely want to make money from it, right? Here are the best ways to monetize your blog. You may want to monetize in more than one way. Mix and match these methods and see what your audience best responds to.
#1. CPM (Cost Per Thousand) Ads
The most stable form of advertising on your blog is CPM ads. CPM ads are when a website owner gets paid for every 1,000 views of an ad. Because of this, CPM ads usually don’t pay as much as other forms of advertising, but they’re great for generating a stable stream of income provided your traffic doesn’t fluctuate too wildly. Regardless of how many clicks an ad gets, so long as you’re getting at least 1,000 visitors a day, you can calculate how much an ad will pay you.
While many CPM networks can be a pain to get into, Amazon has launched its own CPM network for anyone who’s part of its Amazon Associates program.
Even with Amazon Associates, it’s a good idea to try and join multiple cost-per-thousand networks, such as Criteo and Media.net. They can be good for filling areas of your blog where you don’t need people to pay much attention to the ads or actually click on them. That’s part of the reason why they pay so little, however.
As much as marketers want the clicks and leads, they know that many people who allow CPM ads on their site will put them in areas where their visitor’s eyes don’t necessarily gravitate, knowing full well that they’ll be paid regardless just from having the ad displayed.
#2. CPC (Cost per Click) Ads
Many bloggers and marketers alike have heard of these kinds of ads. These ads typically pay a more handsome sum than CPM ads, but you’ll only be paid when someone actually clicks them. For this reason, it’s especially important that you choose to display ads within your own niche and target your own audience. You would then do well to display them on your page’s prime real estate, so to speak.
If you’ve ever been to the website Forbes, you may have noticed that they have CPC ads front and center on their site. And no wonder! Forbes is a trustworthy site whose operators know will generate clicks. Their ads are placed in interesting ways, sometimes forcing you to click them in order to actually read their content, and even their content is full of ads.
Yet Forbes isn’t considered spam-filled. It’s a trustworthy, high-traffic site that makes sure the ads displayed on it are all still related to finance.
One of the cons of CPC is that some niches just don’t work well with them. Either people aren’t interested in clicking the ads or the competition within your niche is small enough that marketers aren’t paying for ad space on other sites. Low competition can be great for you in other ways, but not within the realm of CPC, unfortunately.
The other con is that you need a lot of traffic to make them work. While these ads are versatile enough that you can constantly tweak where they appear and how they appear in order to tap into more revenue, you need a lot of visitors each day to make it worth your while. Typically, over 1,000 visitors per day are ideal, as getting clicks is a numbers game.
#3. Banner Ads Sold Privately
While all ads can come in the form of banners, there are many networks out there that allow you and another marketer to come to an agreement regarding displaying a certain banner ad on your blog or website. You can also make these deals offline, too. Usually, you’re paid up-front to display a banner for a set amount of time, making this a better option for bloggers just starting out without tons of daily traffic than CPC ads.
The downside to these kinds of deals is that they can take some social networking to acquire, and sometimes you may even have to get on the phone. However, this isn’t always the case, as networks, such as BuySellAds, have become more proactive lately, taking away the need for website owners to reach out to them.
Like CPC ads, your ability to find business owners willing to pay you to display their banners depends largely on your niche. Some niches just aren’t going to have the competition needed to drive this behavior.
#4. Video Display Ads
Display ads can be images, text, or video. Since all the previous forms of advertising count as display ads, it would be good to take a moment to talk about video ads. This isn’t going to go into video ads on YouTube or the ads that interrupt you as you use an app, because those are different mediums.
However, you’ve likely encountered this type of video ad, as they pop up on a lot of websites now. They can be displayed quite prominently at the top of a piece of content or play continuously in the corner of your screen (on desktop) as you scroll through what you’re reading.
The problem with video ads is that people sometimes find them annoying, especially when you’re just trying to read an article and there’s a distracting video.
It can also be a little harder to get clicks from these videos, as they start off muted and many visitors won’t even know what the ad is about unless they’re curious enough to unmute the video. Even then, viewers must wait until the end of the video to hear the CTA.
#5. Sponsored Content
If you have a very popular site, you’re considered an influencer, and other marketers may want to write an article for your site to spread their own brand awareness, build backlinks, or get new leads. This is similar to guest posting, except large blogs expect to be paid for allowing another blog or site the privilege of writing on their blog.
The upside to this is that many companies are willing to pay quite a bit of money for this. Unfortunately, you have to have a very large, very influential site.
#6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products and receive a commission whenever you refer someone who buys that product using your unique link. The beauty of this form of monetization is that it can be scaled, and for many, affiliate marketing alone is a kind of art form.
In fact, many people who do affiliate marketing will actually start doing paid ads and building funnels on their own in order to scale up their income.
If you have a site that’s generating a fair amount of traffic and you know what you’re readers like, you can promote affiliate products. There are many ways to do this, too.
You can have a link to recommended products for your niche and then have a list of good products, linking to the other company’s landing pages. Or you can do review posts in your blog once in a while, highlighting a good product that your readers might be interested in.
If you have an email list or newsletter, you can also send out emails telling your subscribers about a product you’ve discovered and love. There are many possibilities with affiliate marketing.
The downside is that, since bloggers know that they’ll only be paid when people actually buy, they can become quite zealous in their pushing of a certain product, pushing people away. Or their blogs can easily turn into ‘review sites’ in which all of the content just revolves around trying to sell a product, either by constantly pushing it or by giving negative reviews to everything except the products you’re trying to sell.
#7. Selling Your Own Products
These don’t have to be physical products that you’ve created, had vetted by the Shark Tank team, or built with your own fair hands. You can use dropshipping services to sell products such as t-shirts, or sell digital offerings of your own creation.
Here are some ideas:
- T-shirts, mugs, blankets, hats, etc. Use print-on-demand (POD) services to fulfill.
- How-to courses you’ve created.
- Books you’ve written.
- Digital products you’ve created, such as apps, templates, or printables.
Depending on what you sell, you could make quite a lot of money with just a single sale. Print on demand usually doesn’t have a high profit margin (although you can make a lot of money with enough sales) but how-to courses do, for example.
Unfortunately, you’ll have to invest time into creating these products instead of just configuring ads to work. Some products, such as courses or digital downloads that you’ve created, will also mean that you’re in charge of customer service as well.
Print on demand takes care of customer service for you, and if your books are on a third-party retailer, such as Amazon, then that company will take care of customer service. It still takes time to create them, though.
#8. Creating Memberships
Memberships allow your fans to get access to exclusive content. This can be special courses or bundles, access to a forum, or even receiving physical gifts. They have a high perceived value, so with enough visitors and a good email list, you can quickly turn a large profit from them.
The only problem is that they’re very time-consuming. You have to make it worthwhile not just for people to want to pay to become a member, which is usually a monthly fee, but you have to give them a reason to keep finding it worthwhile to subscribe month after month. Some niches also aren’t very receptive to them.
Go Out and Make Money
Hopefully, this list has given you a good idea of how you can use your blog to make money. For most of these, you should focus first and creating content and generating traffic, and it’s also best to have a newsletter so you know that people really like your content. However, a good blog can eventually earn you a living and these are some of the ways you can achieve that.