Ways to Make Money Blogging

This article covers how to make money blogging using affiliate links, advertising, sponsored posts, memberships, and even sales of digital and physical goods. You’ll learn the many ways to monetize a blog and explore how full-time bloggers combine several income streams into a river of predictable monthly income.

Make Money with Affiliate Links
Affiliate links enable you to make money blogging by featuring products and services sold by other companies in your blog content. Affiliate links are trackable image and text links that you place within your blog posts. When your reader clicks on a link, they’re sent to the affiliate company’s website. Once there, if your reader completes an action, usually a purchase, form submission, or email signup, you get a paid a commission. Affiliate links are an easy and fun way to monetize a blog, and new bloggers can easily get on board.

How to Make Money Blogging Using Affiliate Links
Virtually all large, mid-sized, and small online stores and service providers have affiliate programs, and the process is simple:

• Sign up for an affiliate program (we list options below)
• Create content to highlight affiliate companies’ products or services
• Insert text or image links provided by the affiliate company into your content
• Promote your blog content to your audience via email and social marketing

How to Find Affiliate Partners

Many large online brands and service providers have affiliate programs. Depending on your blog’s focus, top names in your affiliate list might include:

• For products: Amazon Associates, eBay Partner Network, Target, Walmart
• For services: Shopify, GoDaddy, Envato Market, Google G Suite

Affiliate networks are another source you can tap to access a number of potential partners within one system. This is very handy for bloggers seeking the perfect fit. Plus, they ensure you get paid correctly and on time. Here’s a look at a few of the hundreds of affiliate programs listed on ShareASale, a top-rated affiliate network. Note the product-specific links on the left, which help you find the just-right fit in a snap.

Another reason affiliate marketing is so popular is that you can use it to make money blogging from day one. Unlike advertising (which we discuss next), you don’t need a huge audience to make money from affiliate links. If you position carefully curated affiliate products and services in your blog posts, you can see healthy click rates and income from a relatively small audience.

Make Money with Advertising

Advertising is another way you can make money blogging. In most cases, you need a decent amount of traffic before you see any real income from running ads. However, it costs nothing to run ads, plus it’s easy to monetize your blog sidebar or banner real estate with various advertising options.

How to Make Money Blogging Using Advertising

You can set aside ad spots in your website header, sidebar, and footer, and even insert ads within your blog content pages. Pop-ups can also be used for ads, but you don’t want to overdo these or you’ll frustrate your readers. Here’s a good example of a WordPress blog with header and sidebar ads, plus a pop-up footer that your reader can close if they wish.

Most WordPress themes make it easy to reserve specific areas like the ones shown above. Then all you have to do is copy and paste a few lines of code that you get from your advertisers into these spots, and they take care of the rest.

How to Find Advertisers

Some online advertisers, like Google, run their own advertising program, but most bloggers use advertising networks to run a variety of targeted ads. You can also sell these spots yourself. Here’s a closer look at these options:

• Google AdSense – Displaying Google ads is a simple set-it-and-forget-it process, but your blog must be active for at least six months and meet other eligibility factors.
• Advertising networks – Advertising networks like PopAds and RevenueHits offer easier entry for newer blogs with no minimum requirements, unlike Google AdSense.
• Sponsor advertising – Sell ad space yourself to targeted sponsors and partners who pay monthly or quarterly fees to hold featured spots. Local bloggers and those with niche followings can usually find businesses that want to get the word out via sponsorship.
• Affiliate link ads – Many affiliate programs that we covered above also provide sidebar and banner ads that self-refresh, so your blog always shows an updated ad for things like seasonal specials or holiday sales. Amazon Associates offers bloggers a nice selection of affiliate banner and sidebar ads, like these.

Advertising Costs & Income Potential

Like affiliate links, advertising has no up-front cost. How much you can make depends on your visitor volume and the types of ads you’re running. Some ads pay based on the number of ads, or impressions, that your readers see, others on the number of times readers click on the ad. Still others operate under an affiliate model and pay when a reader completes an action, like a purchase or sign up. Here’s a closer look at your income potential for each:

• Pay-per-thousand (PPM) – This type of blog advertising pays based on the number of total ad impressions your blog displays, and usually runs just a few dollars per thousand. If you don’t have a lot of traffic, you won’t make much using PPM advertising.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) – Pay-per-click can bring in more advertising income on less blog traffic, especially if you closely target PPC ads to match your content topics. Google AdSense provides set-it-and-forget-it content matching for PPC ads.
• Pay-per-action (PPA) – Pay-per-action typically pays the highest rates, but requires that your reader clicks on a link and completes an action, like filling out a form, signing up for a service, or making a purchase. These are also called performance campaigns, and some pay as much as $50 or more per completed action.

Since advertising is a volume game, few small and mid-sized bloggers make the majority of their income through advertising. But it’s an income stream any growing blogger should consider. Like affiliate marketing, blog advertising is easy to match to your blog’s unique message and audience, requires little upkeep month over month, and costs you nothing.

Make Money with Sponsored Content

We mentioned sponsor ads above, but that’s not all you can do to generate income streams with select partners. With sponsored content, a company pays you to craft soft-sell blog content centering on their product or service. Most bloggers find sponsored content a fun and rewarding way to make money from blogging.

How to Make Money Blogging Using Sponsored Content

Sponsored content can be a blog post, video, or podcast that you are paid to create in order to present a specific company’s product or service to your readers. Sponsored content generally matches your usual content format, with the exception that the message focuses on what your sponsor wants to convey. Because of this, it’s imperative that you clearly state that you’ve been paid to create information on behalf of your sponsor. If you don’t, you can quickly break your readers’ trust with your blog brand and run afoul of FTC guidelines.

How to Find Sponsors

To entice sponsors to pay you to feature their products or services, you need to have a track record of publishing quality articles and attracting a sizable, targeted audience. Once you’ve been blogging for a while, have good content to tout, and can show respectable readership, you’re ready to seek sponsors.

There are different ways to approach this, but most of it is good-old-fashioned research and pitching. Blogger-sponsorship matching networks like these can help you get started:

• Blog Meets Brand – Sign up to be an influencer for potential sponsors seeking hyper-targeted bloggers to create sponsored content
• Blogsvertise – This network offers both advertising and sponsored post opportunities with major brands
• IZEA – Connects bloggers, vloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters with major brands looking to place sponsored content
• TapInfluence – Connects you to both blogging and social post sponsor opportunities

Once you’ve dipped your toe into sponsored content using the blogger networks, you can also research potential partners that align with your blog brand and pitch them directly.

Sponsored Content Costs & Income Potential

Acquiring sponsors and crafting posts to meet their needs takes work, but the income can meet or beat affiliate and advertising dollars if you do it right. It costs nothing to join most networks as a publisher, but you’ll put time into finding sponsors and crafting posts that meet their approval. So you should place a dollar value on the time you spend to best gauge your ROI on sponsored posts.

Since you need to craft fresh content for your blog anyway, why not get paid for it? Over time, most bloggers develop relationships with a few well-aligned brands, which helps increase their per-post income plus makes approvals quick and easy.

Make Money with Memberships & Subscriptions

Many successful bloggers create educational content and earn money by selling access to members-only content sections on their website. Things like online courses, video tutorials, and subscription-based coaching work well for this income stream, as you can see on this music instruction website

To monetize an instructional blog, you need content that’s delivered in components, like lesson posts, videos, webinars, and downloadable PDF files. Plus, you need to add capabilities to your blog to present members-only content to subscribers.

How to Craft Membership-worthy Content

This income-generating content can take many forms, from simple downloadable PDF files and e-books to ongoing video series, live and replayable webinars, and online classes. Typically this content is delivered in one or more paid subscription levels using the tools provided in a membership platform. Content access can also be timed-release, which is called “drip content” in membership and subscription lingo.

The key goal is to present instructional content in short bites so members continually come back for more. One tactic that’s widely successful in building membership is a free giveaway in exchange for an email address. Offering a valuable bite of content for free, like an e-book or video how-to, is pure gold when it comes to building an email list. Be sure to craft a few free items to entice potential subscribers to join your email list so you can then market the benefits of your paid service.

Make Money Selling Products

Many bloggers successfully turn their viewing audience into shoppers by selling all sorts of products right on their WordPress blog. How you approach this depends on several different factors. Your audience and brand, the money you have to invest in products, and how hard you want to work all play a role in monetizing a blog through product sales.

How to Make Money Blogging by Selling Products

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to buy, store, pack, and ship products yourself to sell products on your blog. You can of course, and many do, but that’s not your only option. Here are several ways to sell products on your blog and be as hands-off or hands-on as you wish: Hands-off product sales options for bloggers

• Sell digital products – Downloadable items like e-books, music, podcasts, WordPress themes, photos, graphic design, and artwork are easy to list and sell on a blog.
• Sell print-on-demand (POD) items – Your original artwork, images, and funny or thoughtful phrases can be printed onto T-shirts, mugs, totes, and more with POD vendors who make and ship goods straight to your buyers.
• Drop-ship items – Drop-ship vendors let you list products to sell, then when they sell, they ship them to your customers for you.

Hands-on product sales options for bloggers

• Make products to sell – Many crafters and artisan bloggers make goods to sell on their blog, or sell crafting or recipe kits that are tied to blog content.
• Private-label cosmetics and personal care items – Beauty, health, and lifestyle bloggers can easily expand their blog brand into products using private label manufacturers. Once you’ve developed your selection to match your brand, you can store and ship products yourself or use a fulfillment service.
• Sell wholesale goods – You can buy goods to sell on your blog and store and ship them yourself or have a fulfillment company handle the storage and shipping for you.
• Subscription boxes – Many bloggers find that subscription boxes are a great middle-ground. It’s a tightly-branded physical product to sell, but the selling, sourcing, and shipping are done on a monthly schedule, not day-to-day, which leaves more time for blogging

To do all of this, you need to be able to accept orders, process payments, and in some cases, print shipping labels. E-commerce plug-ins are what you use to add these functions to your WordPress blog. Visit our WordPress e-commerce guide to learn more about top options and our guide to selling on WordPress to learn just how to do it.

Product Sales Costs & Income Potential

When looking at how to make money blogging, selling products can have the highest upfront costs—or none at all. Learning how to make money blogging by selling products can provide a healthy income, but you have to balance what you make against your purchasing, fulfillment, shipping costs, and time spent managing it all.

Hands-off products have little upfront costs. Digital products tend to have the lowest creation costs and therefore the highest profit margins. Dropship and print-on-demand products carry little to no upfront costs, but vendors do charge you each time you sell a product. Plus, you have to handle customer service issues yourself, and that takes time away from blogging.

Hands-on products have higher overall costs since you need to purchase raw materials or buy goods from suppliers. Plus, you have to store and ship goods to your customers. This places you into a whole new segment of e-commerce that involves fulfillment operations and shipping costs. Many bloggers who go this route use fulfillment companies to handle the day-to-day tasks so they can focus on growing their blog and other income streams, too.

The Bottom Line

Bloggers have many different income streams at their disposal, and money-making bloggers all have one piece of advice: Variety is the key. Blogging is an ever-changing medium and your content, audience, and market are also constantly changing. In learning how to make money blogging, rule one is this: Always be ready to test new blog monetization options and adjust your strategies.

Plan to combine different income streams in a mix that works for your unique content focus and target audience. For some, it may be affiliate marketing and sponsored posts, for others it might be memberships and monthly subscription boxes. Whatever it is, make the most of your income streams by continually crafting content that rocks.

How do you make money blogging? Do you use any of the blog monetization strategies discussed here, or have you found another golden nugget? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.