5 Common Ways To Make Money From Your Blog

If you’re running a blog or thinking about running a blog you’ll probably want to make some money from it. It might not be today, today you might think, who cares about making a few bucks from my site. But, at some point down the road, it’s going to cross your mind and when it does you’ll need to be armed with the information with how to go about it.

This article is going to discuss 5 of the major routes people go down when they want to make money from blogging. All of the items listed below have the ability to generate you as little as to pay for your car’s gas on your next trip right through to turning you into a multi-millionaire. It all depends on your traffic, but regardless of your traffic, all of the methods listed below can be considered viable ways to make money with your blog.

Sponsored Posts

This is a great way to make money from your blog without masses of traffic. A sponsored post is where a third party pays you to place content on your blog. It could be content they’ve written or content they have you write. Typically the sponsored content will advertise their product or service, or it may simply contain a link back to their website. It will always be based on the niche/topic of your blog though and if it isn’t you should not accept it. There is nothing worse from the standpoint of your readership than viewing off topic content. Your visitors visit your blog for a reason, you need to be careful as not to lose them by posting irrelevant content.

Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales are basically where you get paid a % (a commission) on a sale you’re responsible for generating with a third party. To elaborate, if you run a ski blog, and you have a banner or text link to purchase a snowboard from a third party site for $200 – that third party site will pay you a % of the sale, typically between 5 and 10% – so you could make $20 for the sale and so on. Obviously the higher value the product, the more you make, but you need to consider how many of your visitors are likely to buy a higher value product in comparison to a lower value one. It’s not uncommon for affiliates to make huge money by referring people who buy low-value products or services simply because of the sheer volume. Of course, it all depends on the traffic your blog can yield.

Teach People How to Blog

This, in particular, is one for the make money / save money style blogs. Pretty much all of them have posted on how to get started blogging and teaching people how to profit from blogging etc. Content such as this gets a lot of traffic and you can be sure a lot of your readership will have an interest in it. You can typically make money by referring people to those who provide what the would be blogger needs to get started such as domain names and web hosting, search engine optimisation tools, content, etc. If you have the right audience, this can be a great earner.

AdSense/Paid Click Ads

AdSense or any paid click ad provider can also be a great way to make money. But you do need a lot of traffic to make anything significant. The model, in theory, is simple. Each time one of your visitors clicks an ad on your site, you get paid. It doesn’t matter what they do after, whether they go on to buy is irrelevant, unlike affiliate sales. Clicks can range from 1c to a few dollars depending on the product advertised but like with any ad model, you need to closely match what you offer to your audience as off topic ads do not work at all.

Direct Ad Sales

This is where someone will pay you to rent an ad block. If you had space for a 300×250 sidebar ad for example. A company may pay you $XXX per month to place an ad there, regardless of how many clicks it generates or how many people follow through to buy. This can be a great way to monetise traffic which isn’t performing well via affiliate sales.

Conclusion

The opportunities are somewhat limitless with regards to turning revenue, and all of the items listed above could be expanded upon as each has a fairly wide scope. I hope I’ve covered the basics though, and perhaps the above has given you something else to think about with regards to your blog income.

It’s important to remember that you don’t simply have to choose one method or the other when it comes to monetising your blog. Every blog out there has some affiliate links, some sponsored posts and has at some point sold advertising directly. Your visitors are going to have a preference as to what products they buy or how they like to be advertised to so it’s really in your best interests to combine all of the above – assuming your blog allows for it. Too many adverts may scare off your visitors!