Running a profitable blog is like having a business on auto-pilot. It is one of the best ways to make money online. The work is relatively easy as much of the hard work can be outsourced and your profits can be scaled quickly.
All this sounds good when you have a good flow going. For the new bloggers though, they still need to find their own way. To make things easy, we are compiling some of the ways in which a blog can make money online. The steps are simple but it will still require some hard work and the most important thing here is patience.
Here’s the Top 10 ways in which you can make money from your blog:
1. Selling your own services: When you start off as a new blogger your blog will require a lot of work and the results that you get in terms of traffic and profits will be low. It takes time for a blog to gain authority, organic traffic etc. In times like these, your best option to make money online is by selling your services. If you are a designer, or a content writer, you can easily provide these services as a freelancer and get more clients directly from your blog.
2. Contextual Ads: Once you start to gain organic traffic via. search engines, it will become easy to put ads such as Adsense or Infolinks and make money from it.
Most contextual ad networks like to work with niche specific sites that get traffic from search engines. If the traffic sources aren’t clean, such as referral traffic or social media traffic that usually does not convert well then many such networks close the publisher accounts or puts them on hold.
3. Paid Guest Posts: Paid guest posts are yet another method to boost blogging income. Guest posts are meant to be free and in a perfect world it might be true but lately with way too many pitches and the content publishing queues of blogs, most people are moving to paid guest blogging. This way, advertisers can bypass the queues and gain guest posts quickly and the bloggers are able to make a quick buck.
If you plan to accept paid guest posts, make sure that the content that you are getting along with the money is good quality or you can opt. to write the post yourself or at least proofread it for spelling and grammar.
4. Affiliate Marketing: There are many things that are easy to sell online for example web hosting packages, email marketing packages, grammar checking tools, SEO tools etc. If you search deeply you can find such popular affiliate selling stuff on your niche as well.
5. Referring Products and services: It is easy to sell other people’s products and services than to start your own. Making something from scratch is expensive and time consuming, but if there’s something in the market which is both established and good quality which you can recommend then making an extra income by selling other people’s product is a good idea.
6. Sponsored Posts: As a blogger and an influencer, you will always find people who are looking for sponsored posts. This is not just for the link value of your blog, but you as an authority blogger can recommend something and the advertisers are ready to buy this for their products.
This works both ways because advertiser can reach you and you can reach out to them as well. There are a number of platforms that has both advertisers and blog publishers which allows the buy and sell of sponsored posts via. those platforms.
7. Write and Sell your eBooks: Most bloggers are good writers too and even if you are new to blogging or writing, in time you will be able to write well. Writing eBook on a topic you are comfortable with, isn’t as difficult as it might appear. Yes, you have to write a lot to finish an eBook but if you take it chapter wise, it is like writing several articles, one after the other.
Eventually when you have completed your eBook, you can sell it from Amazon and promote it from your own blog. Later on it can also be used as a gift for signing up on your newsletter.
8. Launch Your Course: As a niche blogger you will gain enough knowledge about your niche. If you feel that you are ready to teach others about the things that you know about your niche, then it is time to start planning on a course. Design the course in a way that other people who are starting on your niche does not have to face the same difficulties that you have faced yourself.
Courses that are built by experts are often successful because it reflects the experience a niche expert has on topics that he is considered an authority.
9. Make a Membership Option: This option of blog monetization is perhaps one of the best ways to monetize a blog because the income you will generate this way, won’t be a onetime sale. As a paid member on a monthly subscription, your customer will keep paying as long as they remain a member.
The secret here is to keep the membership’s monthly fees as low as possible. If it is only a few dollars, most people with simply signup to support a blogger whose content they like to read. Most people don’t bother to turn off these subscriptions which results in recurring income for years to come.
10. Accept Donations: This is a unique way to make money online. You might think that people like to donate because they like to support a cause but you will be surprised to know that a lot of people like to make these donations if they connect well with the bloggers and their content.
Do note that most people does not really expect anything in return for their donations, it still makes sense to thank them personally for the money they are sending your way.
Not all tips works for everyone and depending on your niche certain tips will work more compared to the other ones. If you have enough traffic coming from search engines then contextual ads will work out better, if your audience is more loyal to you then affiliate marketing might be a good option. Always opt. for more than one source of blogging income so that your channels of incoming money are diverse and if something happens to your main source of income, other sources might make up for your lost income channel.