Starting and making money with a blog has never been easier than it is today.
Not long ago, starting a blog would have cost you thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars to set up and maintain.
Generating income from the blog was just as tricky. PayPal was still in its infancy, Stripe did not exist, and email marketing was not nearly as flexible as it is now.
Nowadays, however, you can start a blog on WordPress with just a few hundred dollars or less, maintain it, and make money with it (this can vary based on what you want to do).
But just because it’s more comfortable to make money with your blog nowadays, that doesn’t mean that most bloggers do make money.
Most of the professional bloggers make more than $100,000 per month while most of the other bloggers struggle to make money from their blog. Most of them don’t even make a single penny from their blog.
This is not good, especially when you consider that most bloggers start a blog so they can be their own boss and quit their boring 9 to 5 job.
So how do you go from an amateur blogger to one of the professionals who earn one hundred thousand dollars every year?
Well, you need a solid marketing plan that includes content, a profitable niche, and a significant revenue generating strategy.
You also have to make some calculations.
When should you start making your Blog profitable?
There is no specific number for how much traffic or how large an email list should be to make money with your blog because it all depends on what you sell and how you sell it.
However, if you have taken these two things first, this will help a lot:
- You have regular traffic: you don’t need tens of thousands of visitors, but at least a thousand visitors per month mean that you are doing something right.
- Increase your email list: again, you don’t have to aim for an exact number. We show examples of people with a small list but always used them to their advantage.
These two things matter, but it’s mainly about your blog’s numbers.
Suppose you want to earn $3,000 with your blog:
- You can sell a $ 200 product (for example, a course) to 15 people.
- Sell a course of $ 600 to 5 people.
- Or by charging $ 3,000 for a consultation with a customer.
Generating income is math, not magic. You must choose a strategy that fits your goals.
This does not mean that the key to generating income is to raise the prices of what you are selling.
Instead, it means that you have to choose a revenue-generating strategy that matches where your blog is now or where you want it to be in the future.
In this article, we show you how you can generate income with a blog and make money online, regardless of whether you have thousands of page views per month or are just starting.
I am going to show some solid strategies that other bloggers have used to generate income from their blogs in different niches and to teach you how to do the same with your blog.
- Become an Affiliate Marketer
- Sell e-books to your audience
- Create and sell online courses
- Offer a paid membership
- Earn money with display ads (banner ads)
#1 Become an Affiliate Marketer
You cannot have a blog post about making money online without mentioning affiliate marketing.
It is one of the most common and effective ways that bloggers make money online.
With affiliate marketing, you can promote the products of other companies, and you receive a commission for every sale that you have generated.
Affiliate marketers work in the same way as most sellers. They help to promote and sell a company’s product and receive a commission when someone buys something.
Here is a visual analysis of how this works:
It’s that simple. Suppose you get $ 5 commission for every sale, and you get 200 people to buy that product, you’ve earned $ 1000.
What attracts the people to affiliate marketing is that you can find the right product and sell it to your audience.
For Affiliate marketing, you only need three things.
- A niche (This often comes back, right? ????).
- An affiliate product.
- Audience to promote the product.
You build your audience by writing on topics related to your niche, and once you have an audience, you can find products within affiliate networks such as:
- Amazon affiliate
- ShareASale
- Clickbank affiliate
- MaxBounty and much more
One thing to keep in mind when generating income with your blog through affiliate marketing is that you should focus on providing value to your readers and not just promoting products so that you can make a sale.
The best affiliate marketers do not even come across as affiliate marketers.
Take Ryan Robinson, for example, who earns tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate income every month through his blog.
Ryan makes a lot of valuable content for his readers and placing products that he likes and uses feels like a natural part of it.
Because more and more companies now have affiliate programs, you can start promoting products regardless of which niche.
#2 Sell e-books to your audience.
Selling e-books is one of the most popular ways bloggers choose to earn money with their blogs.
It is perfect because they are relatively easy to make and are usually priced so that most visitors can buy them.
But e-books do more than ensure that bloggers can quickly earn money with their blogs.
If a blogger sells an e-book, this can be a quick way to test whether people are interested in what you have to say to pay for it.
ebooks are also a way for your visitors to be able to estimate with a low risk the value that you have before they buy more expensive products.
You doesn’t need to have much traffic on your blog to sell your ebook.
Lets assume you have an ebook about Landing page optimization. Here are some quick tips to kick start your ebook sales
- Ask you subscribers of your blog about their landing page, give them free tips, and then point them to your book.
- Answer questions and provide feedback on landing pages on Quora and Reddit and then indicated your book as an additional source of information.
- Also offer your book on Product Hunt.
- Even more impressive trick is to email companies and gave them free feedback on their landing page, then reply to the responses and promote your book.
- So don’t need to have much traffic to generate sales, but you have to do a lot of work.
Where do you sell your ebooks
You can choose to sell your ebook directly on your blog or through platforms such as Amazon.
Selling ebooks on your own blog can be beneficial because you can keep 100% of the profit. For example, Harsh Agrawal from ShoutMeLoud has devoted an entire section of his website to his various ebooks.
You can make this simple with the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin.
If you choose to publish your ebook as an Amazon Kindle, you can only keep 70% of the profit, but it has the added advantage that the more books you sell, the more exposure you get, leading to even more sales.
Selling ebooks is not limited to a specific niche. There are ebooks about blogging, photography, fitness and everything else you can imagine.
For example, if you have a blog where you garden, you can sell an ebook that teaches your audience in more detail how you can grow your own garden or plant.
You can even reuse some of the content you’ve already written on your blog and then add more detail and context.
How do you make the book?
If you don’t have the time or skill to write a book yourself, you can hire ghostwriters to do this for you.
You can find ghostwriters on LinkedIn, Scripted, Upwork and even Fiverr. Keep in mind that, like everything else, you get what you pay for. More experienced ghostwriters will cost you more than beginners.
You can also make the book cover yourself with tools such as Canva, Photoshop, and Snappa. Or you pay for a service like 99designs and let a professional do it.
#3 Create and sell online courses
Another way to make money from your blog is to sell courses online. What keeps most bloggers from creating their own course is that they think you have to be an expert to create a course.
This is not true; all you need to really create a course is to know more than the people you teach and to present the information in a way that people can get value from.
Ramit Sethi of IWT earns millions from the courses he takes, not because he is a certified financial planner, instead he helps people to eliminate problems in their lives.
You don’t have to be an expert to create a course that teaches people how to cook. If you can prepare better than most people and you can make your course material in a way that really teaches people how to cook, there is nothing to stop you from making your course.
People are taking more online courses than ever before; the e-learning industry is expected to grow to around $325 billion in 2025.
You don’t have to be an influencer like Ramit Sethi to earn a decent income from your courses.
There are people like Joseph Michael, who earned $40k by teaching new writers how to use the popular writing software, Scrivener.
Joseph did not have thousands of visitors or a gigantic email list. He sold his course by making contact with influencers and promoting his course on webinars where he spoke.
How do you get ideas for courses
If you already have an audience, you have to identify a problem that many of them have and that you can solve.
Ways to identify the pain points of your audience:
Create a survey: The quickest way to know what problems people have in your audience is to ask them. You can do this by sending a simple survey by e-mail.
Here is an example of Ramit Sethi who did this in one of his emails just before the new year:
Read the comments on blogs: Your comment section can contain a wealth of ideas if you pay attention to it.
And if you don’t have that many comments on your blog, you can read comments from other blogs in your niche.
However, if you don’t have an audience, you can come up with course ideas by brainstorming about things you do better than most people.
Here are some questions to help you figure this out:
- What do your friends compliment you?
- What kind of advice do people ask to you?
- What does everyone around you complain about, but you don’t seem to have a problem with that?
- What did you learn from your previous job?
- What can you do better than other people you know?
Joseph, for example, he knew how to use Scrivener, which most people found too complicated. In your case, it might be playing an instrument or dressing fashionably.
As long as you can do better than most people, you can teach them.
Host Your Courses
You can opt to host your courses on WordPress, in which case you would keep the most profit out of your course, but then you have to set everything up yourself or hire a developer to help you with that.
There are also third-party platforms on which you can host your courses.
These platforms charge a monthly amount or a percentage of sales, and in return, you can get a more professional and easily manageable platform to host your course.
The one and only platform I recommend for you to host your courses is Teachable.
#4 Offer a paid membership
Businesses with subscription models are becoming increasingly popular, so much so that some people have come to call it the subscription economy.
Everything from Netflix, hosting providers, and membership sites are part of the subscription economy.
A membership site is a closed section within your online business where members sign up on a monthly or annual basis to receive exclusive benefits.
The people in the community share a common interest, and the benefits for which they pay can be exclusive articles, advice, reports, webinars, personal meetings, and being surrounded by like-minded people.
With membership sites, you can not only reach more people, but everyone also gets a sense of community and connectedness.
The main thing I love about membership sites is that everyone is part of a group, whether they realize it or not.
That means that when you are interested in something, the world is so big and the internet is so connected that you can still find other people who are just like you.
Ryan Levesque, for example, loved Orchids and knew how to grow them, so he made Orchids made easy where he offers exclusive content for his members and gives them a platform where they can meet, share and learn from other Orchid lovers.
Ryan’s members pay $ 9.95 each month, and since he has 1,800 members, his earnings are at $ 18k per month.
What’s even better, based on how much you charge for membership, you may not need that much traffic.
You can create a paid membership site for almost anything as long as the people you target have money and are dedicated.
For example, tennis players practice for hours to be good at tennis, so they do everything they can. Like spending money on tennis clothes, so they have money that they can spend.
Golfers are another great example. Golfers are willing to put effort into improving their skills and also spend money on equipment.
That is probably why Breaking Eighty’s Sean Ogle was able to allow 150 members to join within eight months of starting his blog. Breaking Eighty members pay between $ 250 and $ 500 annually.
If you have an audience that is dedicated and already spending money to improve, then creating a membership site is perhaps the most valuable thing you can do. You can easily earn thousands of dollars from just a few hundred members.
While it comes to creating and managing your membership site effectively, you can use WordPress plugins or third-party platforms.
Manage membership sites on WordPress
- Learndash
- s2Member
- Memberpress
- Ultimate Membership Pro
Manage membership sites via external platforms
- Uscreen : When you mainly have video content
- Stages
- Kajabi
- Wild Apricot
#5 Earn money with Display Ads (Banner advertising)
There is a lot of hate for display ads in the blogging community. Most people say that making money through ads is a bad strategy because you can’t make a decent amount with it.
In most cases, they are right, but there is a reason why display ads are still popular despite all the criticism they have is that they work and are the fastest, if not the most profitable, way to make money with a blog.
Some bloggers begin with display ads until they can find more profitable monetizing strategies.
For others, those first few dollars give them enough motivation to continue with the blog.
There are bloggers making more than $10k per month through AdSense.
The successful bloggers say that the secret to their AdSense success is optimal ad placement.
A best free WordPress plug-in that you can use to optimize ad placements is Ad Inserter.
It allows you to easily test your A/B ads to see which features perform better and you can even set how and where the ads appear on your website.
For, eg, if you want an ad to appear in your blog post, but only after the first two paragraphs of content, you can easily do that.
With advertisements, you don’t have to sell your own product, but you do need traffic and the more traffic you can generate, the better you perform.
It may take a while for ads to start working for you as you grow your blog and improve content marketing, but eventually, you will get there.
Advertisements don’t even have to be permanent; it can only be a temporary way to make money with your blog until you can find a better way to make money.
Let’s Share the Journey to Make Money Blogging
I hope that this article had helped you to know different ways to make money from your blog. Please Comment below and let me know how much you have earned from your blog
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