Last Updated on February 23, 2024
Every beginner blogger usually thinks that there’s only one main way of making money from blogging. And that thing is advertising.
This is simply not true.
And please don’t get me wrong. It’s not that you can’t make money from advertising … you sure can (I do). The thing is that advertising is not the sole blog monetization method. There’s also a number of other solutions, most of the time they’re even more suitable for most blogs (and more profitable).
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is kind of new in the blogging world. The whole idea is that you – the affiliate – get paid every time one of your visitors performs a given action after clicking your affiliate link.
The most common scenario is for someone to simply buy the product you’re promoting. As a result, you get a commission, sometimes even 80% of the price tag.
How to do that? There are two kinds of affiliate marketing: indirect affiliate marketing, and direct affiliate marketing.
But they both start in the same location – finding some affiliate products to promote.
One of the easiest ways is to visit some of the following locations, sign up as an affiliate, pick some products to promote that are relevant to your niche, and get going right away. Here are the most popular affiliate networks:
- Clickbank – a wide scope of digital products (PDFs, software, apps) for virtually any niche.
- Amazon Associates – promote everything that’s sold at Amazon and get a percentage of the sale.
- Commission Junction – promote physical products on a revenue share basis.
Once you know what you want to promote you can choose the indirect or the direct approach (or both), and start your campaigns.
Indirect promotion is when you just use text links and banners to bring some attention to the affiliate product. These are basically ads, but instead of being connected to AdSense, for example, they point to affiliate products and you can place them wherever you want (within your site).
Direct promotion is when you speak about the products openly. You can write a review, or interview the creator, or whatever else you find suitable. Of course, at the end of the review or the interview you simply link to the product through your affiliate link.
Freelance writing and other services
As a blogger, you’re probably fairly comfortable with writing. This creates a lot of opportunities in the freelancing space. You can make money writing articles online by finding work through online job boards, or create a page on your site titled “hire me” where you can list some basic info about yourself and how to get a hold of you.
You can also offer other services that go well in your specific niche. For instance, if you’re blogging about guitar playing, then maybe offering some guitar lessons in your area? Just an idea, but I’m sure you get the point.
Also, don’t forget about LinkedIn. It is a really powerful professional social network, which you can use to find tons of contacts you can leverage later on.
Now, I want to make this post complete and cover all basic methods of making money through a blog, so forgive me for this last point:
Advertising
Yes, we’re back to advertising. Even though in most cases it’s not the most profitable approach at monetizing a blog, it still is one of the fastest ones to get started with.
The easiest approach is to sign up to AdSense, get the code, and start displaying ads right away.
For some niches, this works very well, especially if you can’t find any relevant affiliate products. However, chances are that if there are some, you will be able to make much more money by promoting them instead of displaying ads.
I would advise treating ads as a supplemental stream of income, and that’s basically what this whole post is about – diversifying your income streams and not just focusing on one single thing.
The more of these elements you implement, the better.
Feel free to comment and tell me what you think about this. Also, how do you monetize your blog right now?
Check out our previous articles:
- Top 10 Tips for Building a Strong Online Community
- How to Write Hard Hitting Headlines That Work
- The History of Ghostwriting
- Drive Traffic and Build Links with Google News
- Should You Self-Publish Your Book?
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