How to Monetize Your Blog

Although we have our blogs because of a passion we need to make money from it to pay our bills. It is not something we can do over night but if we do it correctly, it is absolutely realistic. After all, why not? There are 100s of websites out there, which offer their products and/or services and find their customers through the Internet. Now it’s about you and how you can make a living with your blog. First and foremost – don’t annoy your readers. I don’t think monetization generally annoys anyone. Why should it? I do understand that people need to make money and if they make it with my help when I click on an Adsense Ad I’m interested in, I’m more than happy to help them. I also don’t mind to purchase a product through an affiliate link because after all, I have no disadvantage doing that. I help the person who has helped me with the information they provided.

So here are some ways how you can monetize your blog

1) Ads

You can put ads on your blog. It is fairly easy to do. You can go to Google AdSense; apply for an account, get the code and put it in your blog – fairly straightforward. The downside with AdSense is, of course, you need a lot of traffic to make a decent amount of money. Also your traffic must also come from the right countries. If your blog caters to a developing country that has traffic but doesn’t have much access to credit cards or just plainly not worth much money to advertisers, then you’re not going to make much money off that traffic. Other ads you could run are cost per acquisition (CPA) or cost per view (CPV) ads from other ad providers. These pay you either for every sale or view you generate. Again, the downside of these is that you need a decent volume of traffic to convert that traffic into money.

2) Sell your own product

Selling your own product through your blog is probably the best way to make money online. It really is, because you just create this product once, and then you sell it many times over. What makes it very appealing to bloggers is that your blog really sells your brand. Your blog is all about your personality and your point of view. Creating your own product is an outgrowth of that point of view and the outgrowth of that particular brand is a natural progression. Additionally, it’s easier for you to sell your own product that you’ve written yourself. Selling an affiliate product is a great way to monetize your blog as well, but you must keep in mind that you don’t have any influence on that product. When the merchant decides to stop selling it or offers bad customer service you gave your users a bad recommendation. So make sure you know what you recommend wether by selling your own product (which makes you the most money of course) or by selling as an affiliate.

3) Coaching

Coaching is a fast-growing way to make money online. With coaching, you personally tell people how to do certain things, solve certain problems, and you’re basically selling your time. The downside to coaching is, of course, your time. You can only sell it at a certain rate, it’s not like selling your own digital product where you just put the work on it once but you make money many times over. With coaching, you have to actually hold somebody by the hand through the process, and it costs a lot of money because it costs you your time. It is not the most effective way to make money, but for me it is the most full-filling way. Coaching someone and getting him or her to the point where he makes a living from what I taught him is very full-filling.

I do that partly in the Living For Mondays Academy, check it out here.

4) Product recommendations

I mentioned this shortly in no.2 but actually selling products you are not the manufacturer is another way to make money online. It is called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing had for a long time this shady image – marketers would sell you all kind of products all day long just to make a few dollars. Recently, affiliate marketing changed for the good. Marketers mostly don’t go for the quick buck anymore but are willing to put in time, effort and support to help their users making the right decision. They recommend but they don’t push people to buy something they don’t need. They show them what they use to accomplish a specific goal, but they don’t email their lists three times per day to do the same. I like this approach much more. It is ok to sell something but not to “talk people into it”.  After all, it hurts your brand.

If you like to learn more about affiliate marketing you might want to check out my all-time favorite book “The Super Affiliate Handbook” by Rosalind Gardner.

Filed in: Internet Marketing
Tagged with: monetization • monetization strategy • monetize your blog