Blogging has gone from a hobby to a profession, and it’s all thanks to one simple fact: you can make money doing it. When people realized that they could start a blog and make money to support themselves, a family, and their work from home lifestyle, blogging took off, and for good reason.

Let’s take a look at the many ways you can start making money from doing what you love. Once your blog is up and running, you can start implementing these strategies immediately.

5 Ways to Start Making Money From Your Blog

Starting a blog is something that takes mere minutes with today’s simple and easy tools. Once you have it up and running, you’ll need to start generating content. Creating useful, helpful, and interesting posts will garner you an audience.

Marketing your content on social media, building an email list, all of these things will need to happen before you can start bringing in money for your efforts. Once you have a good library of content and some followers at your side, you can start employing these methods.

1. Sell Ads

Advertisements are a great way to start bringing an income from your blog, but they should be used lightly. No one likes a page with tons of ads that obscure the content. That being said, most people start with an ad network and then move into private ads that provide more revenue.

Here’s a breakdown of your options for ads:

• Start with Google Adsense, which gives you a quick and automated solution for employing ads on your blog.
• Once your traffic and brand begins to grow, you can switch to selling private ad space on your blog.

Something to consider, are the number and concentration of ads you have above the fold. Google prefers that you don’t have too many ads as it can hamper the user experience and leave visitors with a bad taste in their mouths.

You can sell private ad space in banners, buttons, or in the form of links. You can also have them sponsor posts or content that you produce. Even better, offer them space in your email newsletters, videos, or on social media.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing essentially allows you to recommend or promote a product/service and receive a commission for each one you sell. The important things to remember, are not to constantly promote your affiliates, and only choose ones that make sense for your readers and your blog’s topics.

Once you’ve partnered with an affiliate (which can be anything from a single service, to a product on Amazon), you can they place links with your affiliate code in the blog’s content. When someone clicks it, they are taking to the purchasing screen and if they buy, you get a cut.

3. Digital Goods

It’s entirely possible to sell digital items on your blog. It all depends on what you do, and what your audience would want to purchase. One of the most popular options is to sell an eBook. These are easy because they can be original content you put together, like a guide or explanation on something in your industry.

They can also be collections of posts that performed well, or a compilation of email newsletters that you wanted to put together into a single book. Many bloggers make money through sales on books like these.

Here are some other potential options:

• Online courses or workshops
• Apps, plugins, themes
• Images, video, or music that you created and want to license.
• Sell domains that you don’t need (or buy and sell them)
• Memberships and subscriptions

4. Physical Sales

If you’re not feeling the idea of an eBook, you could always sell a physical one. Some people prefer the feeling of paper in their hands. You can also decide to host physical conferences or classes. Rent out a space, sell tickets, and host a live event.

If you have a knack for making things by hand, you can easily sell your custom crafts on places like Etsy as well. Setting up a shop, connecting it to your blog, and promoting it is both easy and profitable.

Selling physical products on your blog, be they manufactured by others or ordered yourself, also works like a charm if you have the right business model and a good following.

5. Services/Subscriptions

This is possibly the best option for making continuous money on your blog. Also known as recurring income, this is what happens when you sell audience services or memberships that have a monthly fee. As each month passes, those monthly charges will continue to generate commissions and revenue for you.

These types of recurring incomes can come from monthly payments, annual subscriptions, premium content, or some kind of ongoing service.

Final Thoughts

Making money online is easier than it’s ever been. With these strategies, you can start bringing in an income from your website and enjoy a work-from-home lifestyle. How do you bring an income in from your blog? Let us know in the comments!

Categories: General