Every now and then I get a question from someone who wants to know about starting a blog. Sometimes they ask how much it costs or what it takes as far as technical know-how. But most often, people want to know if they can make money.
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Are you tired of the daily grind? With a laptop and an internet connection I built a small website to generate income, and my life completely changed. Let me show you exactly how I’ve been doing it for more than 13 years.
The answer is yes, you really can make money with your blog. In fact, it’s how I’ve earned my living for the past 4 years.
However, there are a lot of ways to do it, so you have to follow a method that suits you. This post will help you do just that, including links to further training, 13 more methods of earning, and how to get help building your first blog.
Making Money With Your Blog
It might surprise you to know that there is practically an endless number of ways to monetize a blog, including using a donation button. So many in fact, that you could easily get stuck trying to learn or choose from all of them.
That is exactly what happens to a lot of new bloggers, and it’s exactly what I don’t want to happen to you.
So instead of spouting off a list of strategies, we’re going to look at only the most effective methods used by successful bloggers. We will start with advertisements because it’s a method everyone knows about.
Making Money with Ads on Your Blog
If you’re thinking of trying to make money with ads on your blog you will most likely use Google’s Adsense program. There are plenty of other ad programs to choose from but Adsense is the most popular, highest paying, and easiest to use. Chitika doesn’t pay well. Media.net is Microsoft’s version. The pay isn’t bad, depending on your niche and ad placement. Here’s a full list of 50 Adsense alternatives.
There is no cost to sign up for Adsense (or any other ad program that I know of). All you need to do is complete an application to provide information about your blog. When you’re done, you will get a piece of code to paste on your blog. That code is what displays the ads on your blog.
From there, it’s a matter of gaining traffic to make the ads profitable. More traffic = more ad revenue. That’s part of the beauty of monetizing with ads like this – the business model is simple.
That’s how big sites like Huffington Post, Forbes, Buzzfeed, and all these other sites make money, and why they are so desperate for your views and clicks.
Of course, there’s a little more to it than just traffic. You will also want to think strategically about where to place the ads, how many to use, and a variety of other things that could maximize your efforts. I’m currently working on a website monetized only by display ads, and ad placement is a pretty big part of optimizing for clicks and ad revenue!
How Much Can You Make with Ads?
There is no set rate for ad earnings. Your blog’s topic, visitor engagement, and of course the number of visits to your blog are all factors that affect how much you can earn. However, it is possible to get a rough idea of what you might earn.
Recently on Quora (a question and answer site), one user posted a question to Adsense members, asking how much money he could make with the program. Here’s the answer he got…
As you can see, this answer discusses some of the factors I mentioned above (topic, engagement, number of visits, etc). The answer also gives us an estimated earning based on those factors.
This user gave a CPM rate of $1, but your CPM rate could be higher or lower. Again, there is no set rate for this. If you don’t know, “CPM” means Cost Per Thousand.
The example in the image is based on this:
- 1,000 visitors
- Each visiting 3 pages on your blog
- With each page containing 2 ads
2 ads x 3 pages x $1 CPM = $6
A thousand visitors may not seem like a lot, but for a new blogger, it might as well be a million. That doesn’t mean you can’t eventually get to that point, but it will take some time.
To give you a bit of context, The Huffington Post receives about 25 million monthly visitors. They also average only two pages per visitor, as opposed to the two pages in the example above.
I think I saw a blog post once that said you need 100,000 visits per day to make $10,000 per month from Adsense. I dunno, “potential” earnings seem to be all over the place.
The point is, you need a lot. But it’s a super-easy way to start. My one site monetized with display ads has about 100 visits a day and makes $0.12 per day from Google and $0.16 per day from Amazon CPM.
With some hard work and patience, you could make money with ads on your blog, but I don’t recommend it if you are a newbie. There is nothing wrong with being a newbie, but it is important to get some money coming in quickly, just so you can see that it is possible.
Waiting on ad revenue could discourage you. So let’s take a look at some other methods.
Offering Services on Your Blog
One way you can make money from a new blog is to offer services to your visitors. A lot of bloggers, newbies, and veterans, like this option because it is easy to get started with. All you really need is a “Hire Me” page with your contact information so people can reach you.
The type of service(s) you decide to offer is completely up to you. The only real requirement is that the service needs to be related to the topic you blog about. Otherwise, you will confuse your readers and potential buyers.
What Type of Services Make Money?
Coaching is a great service to offer anyone who reads your blog. Blog readers are looking for information and many of them will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for coaching.
Freelancing is another service you can offer to make money with your blog. The majority of bloggers either are or were freelancers at one time. Good freelancers are in high demand in almost every market.
Speaking, if you aren’t too shy, is a very lucrative service, especially in B2B markets. Speakers get to travel the world and demand premium rates at the same time.
Here’s just a few niches you could apply to your coaching, freelancing or speaking service:
- Travel
- Design
- Beauty
- Fitness
- Finance
- Writing
- Marketing
- Photography
- And specialty niches can pay even more!
Make Money Selling Products
You probably already know that you can sell products from your blog. Maybe you have your own products, like homemade soaps that you want to sell on your blog. That’s great! Blogging about topics related to products you make yourself is a smart way to earn money.
But selling your own products isn’t the only choice you have. In fact, you can sell pretty much any product you can think of from your blog. But you want to be careful about what you choose to sell. Why?
- Choosing the wrong products — things your visitors aren’t interested in — is a huge waste of time. With a little trial and error, you can figure that out pretty quickly though.
- Choosing products you have to ship or store can be expensive and time-consuming! Ordering in bulk, then storing, paying for packing, shipping, returns, etc is a full-time job. It can be done, but you need a plan.
You could try drop shipping as well, but again, it’s another aspect of your business that you’ll need to learn about. There’s more than just blogging!
You’ll need to source products, set up an eCommerce site, and get everything in motion on how to communicate between your website and the product maker. Will you place the orders? Will orders go directly to the shipper? Are you white-labeling the products?
Though Proven Amazon Course doesn’t talk about blogging or owning a website per se, they do a great job discussing selling on Amazon, and have drop shipping training you could make use of as well. It’s an excellent course, with very good reviews and an active support community to help you get your business going.
Affiliate Blogging
Affiliate blogging (or affiliate marketing) is the one method that many successful bloggers use to make up at least part of their income. In fact, I use it for 100% of my income.
You can look for yourself. Visit any successful blog, and you will see links to products being sold at places like Amazon, Walmart, and just about every other online retail website, big or small. Even podcasts will encourage you to go to their website and click their Amazon link, or purchase with a “discount code”.
Those codes are not just to help you save money…the podcaster is earning money from each sale they help produce and the code tracks sales.
Most blogs even include an affiliate notice, which is simply there to let you know they earn money through those links.
Affiliate blogging is simple, it works just like any of the other methods. The only difference is you link to specific products you use or recommend. It’s much more targeted.
Rather than have random ads placed on your website based on a user’s search and purchase history, you can make specific recommendations based on what the visitor is reading.
If someone is reading an article you wrote about how to build a birdhouse, you can recommend a birdhouse building kit you think is great. When they buy that kit from Amazon or wherever you’ll make a percentage of the sale.
You just need to join the affiliate programs that offer the products you want to sell. Though your unique affiliate link, you get credit for clicks, referrals, and sales.
Affiliate programs are free to join but each one pays a little differently. For example, Amazon has the most popular affiliate program, but they only pay up to 4-10% on each sale.
If you blog about car repairs, you might be better off joining Auto Zone’s affiliate program, which starts at 8% and goes up according to performance. Some digital products pay 75%! On pricey items like video courses which can cost $300+, you can make hundreds of dollars per sale and several sales per day.
You can also combine affiliate blogging with other methods mentioned above to increase earnings!
Getting Started Earning With A Blog
There a lot of ways to make money with your blog. It would be impossible to list them all in one post, but the ones above are definitely the most popular and effective.
I’ve written another post discussing a full 13 ways to earn money with a WordPress Blog. WordPress is one of the easiest ways to make your first blog/website, and it’s the website builder I use on a daily basis!
Affiliate marketing has always been the best way for me to earn money online. You’ll notice I don’t have any display ads on my blog because I don’t want to waste the time with them. But the great thing about owning a blog is you don’t necessarily have to choose one method or the other.
In fact, the most successful people all agree that you must have multiple income sources.
The more years I gain in this business, the more I realize how true that is. This is why I started the second website that earns with display ads (discussed earlier), so I can diversify my income.
That said, all these options can leave you feeling overwhelmed, unsure of how to move forward. And that’s the worst thing you can do. You have to get started.
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great” ~ Zig Ziglar
There are two great ways to get started.
- You can read my book Money Blog. It’s available on Kindle (from Amazon). It costs $9.99, and discusses, in extensive detail, how to start a website and earn money from it. The good thing is that it’s cheap and reveals all my methods of earning a living through affiliate marketing. However, there’s no personal support included in the book. You’ll need to be an independent learner and supplement your journey with outside research.
- You can sign up for the online business community where I got my start. I didn’t start out as a marketing genius or computer guru. I had to start out just like everyone else, including yourself. Through focused lessons, dedicated time to learning, and consistent work I was able to build my online business to more than six figures in less than 2 years.
Make Money with Your Blog
Newbie Friendly
Cheap To Start
Easy To Scale
Income Potential
Final Review
There are thousands of different side hustles you could do to earn some extra money on the side, and which one "clicks" for you depends on your personality and goals. However, there's one side hustle that makes an insane amount of money and works for anyone.
Starting an affiliate website is an incredible way to earn extra money because you can do it from your home on a laptop, and work on your business in the evenings and on weekends. The income potential is huge, and it's easy to scale
Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
Can You Really Make Money With Your Opinion?
Sonny
Thank you for the information as I have always wanted to make money online and I was just thinking is it really possible to do?
Your website has opened my eyes as to making a living online opposed to working a regular job.
I choose a different path now and a change of career is a refreshing thought.
Nathaniell
A lot of people think of blogging as just a way to talk about what you ate for breakfast, or how you feel about school and work. True, blogging started out that way – like an online journal. But now, blogging is a HUGE business opportunity if you know how to produce content that ranks, and how to find offers that match what you’re writing about.
Rendall
Hello Nathaniell,
This is really great information about the strategy to monetizing the blog in all angles. I just launched my very new website in the past 3 months ago and to get the high amount of organic traffic seems very hard because I need to add content regularly to improve my site ranking and fight with the strong competitors. At first, I am going to improve my ranking as well before I make money and the problem is now is my niche competition. Do you have any brilliant Idea how to be the best among them?
Thanks 🙂
Nathaniell
Getting traffic to your blog or website is definitely one of the most challenging tasks to take on! Writing for yourself and your friends is fun, and you can do it casually, but once you start turning it into a business, suddenly you’ll start to see how there’s a lot of stiff competition out there. Anyone with a personal blog that wants to turn it into a website should also look at targeting their site to a specific audience, not necessarily product focused, but at least towards a specific group of people.
The good thing about competition is that it means people are making money. As for beating out your competition…you just have to do everything better than them (or at least smarter). They may have a better looking website, but you can write more in-depth content!
You can also spend more time researching topics they haven’t covered yet, and get ranked for things that they are not even ranking for. Once you start ranking for much smaller and less competitive terms, you can then leverage that traffic and funnel it to more competitive keyword pages, thus improving rank, and competing for tougher spots.
Travis Smithers
Excellent article to help clarify some of the options available for making money online. From everything you have mentioned two essential things need to be addressed before your going to get anywhere with making money online.
Creating and learning all about building a proper website to get started and secondly to find out how and get as much traffic as possible to your site.
I can see once you have an overall plan as you mentioned and got the first two steps of site and traffic going, you’ll be able to see about making money online.
Nathaniell
If you are looking to make money with a WordPress Website there are so many ways to do it. I say WordPress specifically, because all forms of ecommerce can be integrated with your blog with a plugin. Some other website building places like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace are not as versatile, so I always stick with WordPress.
Traffic is tough for anyone though, and it doesn’t matter what type of website builder you’re using. With traffic, you can pick any type of monetization and experiment with it for a bit, then change it up. My personal favorite is affiliate marketing, but I know that some people love using plain old ads just as much!
Tom
I have been recently been thinking of getting an ad sense account for my blog but I have heard that it can be hard to get them to approve your website. What are the minimal qualifications to get my website approved? Can I get approved having only had my website for a few months.
Nathaniell
Oh, it’s very easy to get approved for adsense. If your website has been up for a few months, that’s a good sign too. I would say that quality does play an important role though. If this is your first website, maybe have someone take a look at it with a bit more experience to see what they think. Someone in the WA community can definitely help.
The main issue I see with some newbies is that they don’t have enough content on the site, or it’s very low quality, like just 100 words and no images in a post.
Anyway, with some very basic content you can still get approved.
But if you’re a complete newbie, just make sure to NOT click your own ads! It can get you banned.
Elmarie
Hi Nathaniell
Wow what a lot of interesting information you have. I have already done the affiliate marketing but has yet to cash in. I was not aware of the Google’s Adsense program and will be sure to give it a try. Thank you for this valuable information as a “newby” I found it very useful.
Nathaniell
There really is a ton of ways to make money from a website! The problem is never IF you can make money, it’s which way of earning you plan to stick to! Sometimes things don’t work on the first try, but if you keep trying, you can find a way to make them work. But of course, if some time down the road you figure out that it really isn’t worth continuing with that method, then you can try one of these other 13 methods.