How to Make Money Blogging: Content Monetization

What are the differences between an enthusiast and a pro blogger? In a nutshell: pros know how to make money blogging.

Content monetization isn’t as hard and as intimidating as it sounds, though. There are easy ways to start, and if you’re serious about making money with your blog, there’s no reason you can’t join the ranks of those content creators making their whole income from their site.

Blogging for Money

Running a site may seem like it’s the kind of thing that can never be a full-time job. I mean, will anyone really pay you for your opinions? For your thoughts? Your products? Your words? Plus, you have to deal with traffic, search engine optimization, banner ads, and a whole lot more.

These are common worries when you first start thinking about making your site your career. While asking these questions may be a good idea from a perspective of making your products more user-friendly, or working out who your target market is, if they are causing you to hold back on following your dream of blogging for a living then they definitely need to be worked around.

Remember, there a few things to consider when going the monetization route. If you can focus on these first and foremost you will be off to a great start to making money blogging.

• Paid hosting
• SEO and keyword research/ Yoast Seo plugin
• Consistency
• Social media marketing

Think you can get these four things right? Then you can absolutely grow your blog to a point where it’s making money for you.

How do Successful Bloggers Make Money?

Blogging is something that can be done at many levels. So many people create a site simply as a hobby, to share something they have a passion for with an audience.

Then you get high-level blogging. This is where the money online comes in. Successful bloggers know that there are ways and means of bringing it in, and these are the same for everyone.

Here a few tried and true ways to monetize your blog. These can be adapted to suit you and your website, of course, but they are methods that work almost every time.

Affiliate Marketing

This strategy is very helpful at the beginning when you’re trying to earn a bit of cash, and your social media game is on point. What affiliate marketing is, in a nutshell, is promoting other people’s products and getting a cut of the profit when someone buys through your link.

The phrase “It takes money to make money” is apt here, as you most likely need to buy the product before promoting it to others. Again, this can be a fantastic source of passive income, though, so you are likely to compensate for what you spent on it in no time.

The quickest, simplest way to begin is to sign up to a few affiliate programs that you like and write reviews on products you’ve bought. Make people aware of why and how this product changed your life, made your day easier, supercharged your productivity, or whatever it may be.

Include your unique affiliate link in your post, and that’s it! All that remains is to share, share, share your post and get eyes on your content.

While affiliate marketing is a super way to make some money from your site, there are some key points to remember when it comes to promoting stuff online:

• Choose products that are relevant to your niche
• Research the demand for products in your niche
• Don’t try to promote everything!
• Get to know the products you’re promoting
• Use various platforms to market your products
• Measure and track your progress
• Be patient
• Promote – don’t sell

Never hide the fact that you have included affiliate links in a blog post. Building a relationship with your readers is best if founded on honesty! If you’re keen on affiliate marketing, make sure you honor the unspoken principles behind it.

Advertising

Another great way of monetizing your blog is by incorporating some type of advertising.

There are two very distinct avenues of advertising you can use. Google Ads (previously known as Adwords) and Google Adsense both help you earn money by advertising, but they work a little differently.

Google Ads (Google Adwords)

In case you’ve done research on Google (who hasn’t), and found that the first few results have a little block underneath them with the words “Ad” in it, then you’ve seen the results of Google Ads. Using Ads will put your link up near the top of the page when someone searches for the related keyword.

When you create an account, you can decide on things like:

• Create targeted ads and ad campaigns (targeted to certain people or specific areas)
• Select the keywords you want your ad to correspond to
• Set an advertising budget

One of the awesome things about Google Ads is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is helpful as you don’t end up spending and getting absolutely no results, although clicks don’t necessarily guarantee business or money-making.

While it may sound counter-productive to your monetization goal to be spending money on getting clicks, this is highly useful to get the right people zoning in on your content. You need to pair this with good sales strategies, though, in order to get the clicker to make the purchase.

Don’t be discouraged – this is a great option to get more of the right eyes on your posts, and the people who are interested in what you’re offering looking at your products.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is slightly different, in that you allow publishers to place ads on your site. When someone clicks on an ad on your page, you get paid a certain fee.

This sounds scary like letting someone else take control of your site, but don’t worry – it is all done through Google Adsense, and nobody will be able to make any changes to your site.

Here’s how this works in some more detail:

• You own a food blog
• Advertiser X owns a low-calorie condiment company
• Advertiser X uses Adwords and pays a certain amount for each click on their ad
• Google sticks some of their ads on your website
• Each time a click happens on your site, you get somewhere around 68% of the amount Advertiser X pays, and Google gets the rest

You can use both of these simultaneously with your site. Bear in mind though, that they serve completely different purposes and can’t really be used in conjunction with one another. Separately, though, they give you two chances to earn a bit of cash on the side using your site.

Selling Your Own Digital Products

If you’re wondering why this specifies digital products, it’s because we want you to understand that there are ways of making money with your site that really require little to no work and capital from your side.

Selling physical products is, of course, a legitimate way of making money, but selling digital products means that:

• There’s no limit on how many times you can sell the product
• There is little to no production cost
• You are developing a passive income stream

What do we mean when “digital products”?

• Ebooks
• Online courses
• Cheat sheets
• Lists
• Step-by-step guides
• Group memberships
• One-on-one coaching sessions

Anything that is utilized online or on a computer counts as a digital product. The above-mentioned types of products cost little to produce (except perhaps for your time), and even less to ship to your customers, making them the perfect kind of product to earn you some cash with your site.

Other Ways

While the above ways of earning money are the most prominent and most likely to get you started off, there are a few other ways to make money:

Sponsored posts

This is when you pitch a post idea to another website, and they pay you for your work. Think of this as a way of making connections and forming relationships with other content creators in your niche!

Email lists

Building an email list is important for keeping up with your audience and keeping them informed of new things going on on your blog. Email lists are great for promoting products if you use affiliate marketing.

There are ways of doing it that are effective and ways that are less effective, and you can read up in some more detail here if you’re interested in this avenue of monetizing your blog.

Can you Make Money Blogging (Really)?

Even if you’re already knee-deep in the journey towards monetizing your blog, you may have frequent moments of freezing and panicking and wondering if you can really do this. Can you really make money blogging? Sometimes this just sounds too great to be real.

This sneaky thing called Imposter Syndrome is something none of us are immune to. It is, however, something that gets easier to deal with as time goes on.

Here are a couple of ideas to help you along the way and get you in a space that will help build your confidence in making a living out of blogging:

Connect to blogger communities

Surround yourself with people in the field, like-minded people with knowledge of what you’re going through, and people who are already successful bloggers. In your everyday life, surround yourself with people who support and encourage you.

Ask others for advice

Never be afraid to ask questions, especially to others who have made this journey before you. Most of them are more than willing to give some advice, and you may end up making some invaluable contacts along the way.

Advance your craft

Take a couple of courses that improve your skills. You’ll feel better about your skill, and put your new knowledge to use straight away!

Research!

Google your worries. You can find all of your questions’ answers out there. The web has advice on what to do and what not to do, and new things to try.

Celebrate your victories

Congratulate yourself on your wins! Set goals and set rewards alongside them. It may be something as small as “I will buy myself my favorite chocolate bar when I get 10 shares of my post on social media”. Do this from the start, and you’ll basically train yourself to be super excited about reaching your goals.

How Much do Bloggers Make: A Blogger Salary

This is hard to say, as it really depends on what you do to make your money. A 10-page ebook is likely to sell for less than a course with 4 hours of content, but what the creator earns at the end of the month is dependent not only on their product but also on how many they sell.

Of course, if you use affiliate marketing and advertising as well, your income is going to be higher. How much higher is also difficult to ascertain, because that depends on the traffic to your website, the number of clicks on your ads, or how many affiliate sales you make (as well as what affiliate program you’re using and what their offer is).

Bear in mind though, that while you’re building up your site and getting established as an expert in your niche, you are not likely to be earning top dollar. The more known you become, and the more connections and contacts you make, the more traffic you’ll be getting, which leads to more clicks and more sales.

This article from Blog Tyrant shows some statistics for 2018, including how much creators typically earn. Other things they run through include how much they spent getting their blogs started, what they spend money on when it comes to their blog, and whether or not blogging is their sole income, or they rely on other income sources.

Conclusion

Blogging for money is totally doable if you have the passion and put in the time. It’s a simple case of creating amazing content and getting yourself out there while following the proven systems for bringing money in using your site.

You need to be committed to making this work, though. Making money blogging can be fun, and it is easier than most people realize, but just like any job, you need to put in the hours to see the results!

Do you have any other tips for making money online? Let us know in the comments!