Hey guys, Vishal Rana from PresentBlogging here. Today’s article is going to be all about how you can monetize your blog and all the different options out there that exist for you to make money.

I mean you probably got into blogging because you wanted to make money right or else you probably wouldn’t have agreed to all the sleepless nights or stressing over a business that you haven’t even made any money off of or maybe not.

Maybe you decided to start a blog because you needed an outlet to talk about what it’s like to be a parent or to talk about your basket weaving and that’s cool too but regardless of why you started blogging and what you blog about if you’re bringing in some sort of audience you could be leaving money on the table.

Let’s take James Clear for example.

You might have heard about James Clear on this blog or just in general and it’s because he’s the writer of a very well-known book called atomic habits.

A book that I’ve read many times and thoroughly enjoy well before James Clear wrote atomic habits. He started his blog jamesclear.com. Here he managed to build a massive email list and a big fan base of readers.

With this James Clear was able to turn his passion project into a massive venture that eventually became his course and then on to be atomic habits that has, I’m sure made him a very wealthy man, and things like this are really important.

Monetization is vital to whatever business you decide to start whether it’s online or a physical business. So you should be keeping monetization in the front of your mind whenever you start your blogging business or really just any business in general.

And that’s why in today’s article we’re going to talk about some of the most popular monetization methods.

Method 1: Ads Or Advertisement

Ads, we all know them. We’ve all seen them.

Website ads have been around since pretty much the beginning of the internet you’ve probably seen them and been annoyed by them as often as every other person on the internet that’s too lazy to download an ad blocker.

Ads are most prominent on sites that get tons and tons of viewers and they don’t usually have any higher converting monetization options.

My personal favorite use of ads to make a large amount of money was actually a British entrepreneur who launched a website called the million-dollar home page.

The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a thousand by the thousand-pixel grid and each image base link on its own was sold for a dollar per pixel in 10 by 10 blocks.

The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator.

Well, Alex’s idea worked, and after the last pixel was auctioned it brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross revenue.

While Alex two didn’t necessarily use a blog to fuel his website success. It is a creative way that we can see how you can use ads to make a massive difference in the revenue that your company makes.

I mean everyone knows about the typical way to make ad revenue by just signing up for Google AdSense and sort of taking whatever pennies they’ll give you but there are a ton of options that you might not have thought about.

There are premium ad networks that pay much higher like Ezoic, Adthrive, and Mediavine.

The only downside is that with premium ad networks like these sometimes you have to have a certain threshold of visitors reached before they’ll approve you to be an advertiser with their network so you might want to keep that in mind.

While these ad networks might not pay a million dollars we’ve seen one of our niche sites at its peak reach $8,000 a month on Mediavine.

Now you do want to be sure to pay attention to your traffic and make sure that you’re not losing any traffic or that your readers aren’t having a good experience on your website because if they are you might be overloading them with ads.

You want the ads to create a reasonably good experience still for your readers so make sure while optimizing ads you take into account reader feedback and the behavior of your traffic and aside from these types of ads, a much more less known type of ads you can do.

You can actually sell spots on your website to people that want to advertise in your niche.

These are different from display ads in that they stay the same and they usually have one spot and they stay there and never change.

I’ve personally known finance bloggers who make $1000 – $1500 a month advertising Banners for insurance companies or banks. so while ads can sometimes be seen as like the peanuts of the blogging world.

There are creative ways you can get involved in ads to make the experience good for your readers and to net you some more income.

Method 2: Affiliate Marketing

When it comes to everyday run-of-the-mill bloggers this is typically their bread and butter.

This is where I see most blogs make the majority of their money and while blogs can be monetized in a lot of different ways this is usually the first way that people monetize their blog and when you think about it affiliate marketing is really a sort of natural progression for all online businesses.

Say you had a housekeeper that absolutely crushed it when they cleaned your house. You might let your neighbor know and they might decide to hire the same cleaning service.

You’ve now gotten your housekeeper, a new client and maybe your housekeeper will give you a discount on the next time they clean your house because they appreciate you referring them to someone else and bringing them more business.

This in essence is really kind of the same thing as affiliate marketing.

A lot of people call it word-of-mouth marketing and that’s basically um using your platform or your voice. You’re telling people about a product that you personally like or have used or would use again and you’re explaining all the pros and cons of it.

Basically explaining why you feel the way you feel about it giving as much information about that product as possible and you’re actually convincing people to buy that product and return those companies give you a payout.

This is the same reason we read reviews before we purchase something. We want to know what our expectations should be before we purchase it.

Companies like Amazon know this. They know that you don’t want Amazon to sell you on a cool new desk you might need. you want someone you trust, someone you think, that is unbiased to sell you that product.

In fact, in 2021 my close friend made $445,457.72 with affiliate marketing suggesting the exact programs softwares, and tools that he likes to use to run his blogs and whether you’re in the camping niche, the food niche, the arts and crafts niche.

Whatever niche they’re going to be some sort of products physical or digital that you can recommend to your readers that will get you some sort of affiliate sale paying you for advertisement.

My one warning to heed would be don’t get too advertising with it.

You don’t want to get too pushy or get to like overwhelmingly aggressive with the things that you’re suggesting because people want to feel like you’re giving an unbiased review and you really should.

You should recommend the things to your readers that you personally already like or have liked in the past and you should explain to them why you liked them.

It should be genuine and honest.

You tell your readers or your email list about those things just like you would a friend and you let them decide if they want to purchase it which brings me into the next way that you can monetize your blog.

Method 3: Selling Your Own Courses Or Products

While you can make plenty of money doing affiliate marketing at the end of the day you’re only getting a small percentage of the sale that you drove so if you end up convincing someone to spend 200 on an item that they were maybe torn on you might only get $2 or $3 or $4 maybe $5 of that sale.

So in order for affiliate marketing to be uber-successful, you either have to find the people that payout really high amounts or you have to bring in a lot of volumes.

I mean some of these companies are only paying like one to two percent. Yes, I’m talking to you Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, you selfish son of.

Okay sorry, that is a bit much but I’m sure a lot of Amazon affiliates know where I’m coming from.

The truth is when you’re an affiliate for any company you’re at the whims of that company if they decide to cut the amount that you get for every sale you can’t really do anything to change that.

At the end of the day, they’re sort of in control of your income. This is why a lot of people turn to create their own products or their own courses.

I mean just think about it why would you be an affiliate for a course that teaches people how to garden and grow their own garden if you already know good and well that you know plenty about that to teach your own audience instead of referring them to someone else’s product you might stand to make something like $50 or $100 for every ebook you sold.

The course you sold about gardening versus maybe making 5, 10, or 15 bucks from recommending someone else’s.

Not only this but sometimes creating your own product for your course and establishing an incredible affiliate program can drive growth in itself. Let’s take the Amira law for example.

She’s a great example of someone who knew they could make something better than what was already out there with her own legal templates.

She then took that and tacked on an incredible affiliate deal by offering up to 40% from each sale to whoever advertised it. This makes it a no-brainer for everyone who loves her bundle to tell their readers and other bloggers about it.

This drives a substantial amount of traffic to Amir’s website and could largely be attributed as one of the main reasons she’s had so much success some people become famous from their products people like Marie Kondo with her Konmari method and her book the life-changing magic of tidying up.

We also make a large portion of our income at PresentBlogging from core sales even more than our affiliate income and there are plenty of bloggers and online influencers, in general, that could say the same.

In fact, many of them have gone on to launch incredibly successful books or courses, or products that have made them multi-millions.

If there’s something you feel like you’re particularly knowledgeable in whether it’s making coffee, changing your habits, losing weight, or tidying up, you should consider creating your own ebook.

Physical book, course journal calendar, or any product of some sort and start advertising it to your readers so that you can keep the majority of your profits versus advertising as an affiliate for someone else which leads us to sponsored content.

Method 4: Sponsored Content

Sponsored content can take many different forms. You’ve probably already seen it many times and you probably see it every day and sometimes you probably don’t even realize that you’re seeing it.

This is because sponsored posts are actually different from affiliate marketing.

When it comes to sponsored posts a website or an influencer or a blogger is paid an agreed upon the cost to then turn and make content involving whoever is sponsoring them and a lot of times they make these advertisements in their own style.

The company is usually looking for you to sort of personalize or create a personal advertisement of why you use this product.

This is usually a little less salesy than affiliate marketing and it’s meant to be like a really honest and personal review or suggestion for a product that’s more so targeted on changing how people view that product or changing the culture around it.

You see people who are sponsored all the time especially athletes athletes like LeBron James who’s sponsored by Beats by Dre.

They aren’t necessarily just like posting an affiliate link you know on their website for you to go buy those headphones but they are wearing them and they are posting videos and pictures of themselves wearing those products.

They’re showing you that they use them and by doing that they’re shifting your perceptions on that product.

You might have seen bows in the store and thought, oh they, they might look kind of bulky or something like that but when you see lebron wearing them you’re like hey them headphones look good and that’s because it’s kind of like a popular kid in school wearing something.

Eventually, everyone else in the school might start wearing those things too and companies know this and they want to use the influence or power that these athletes have and companies that hire bloggers or websites or just influencers in general they want to use the audience that they have to shift perceptions on that item and make it more attractive by using their platform.

Sponsored posts are becoming increasingly popular with influencer marketing on platforms like Instagram and tick-tock I mean some people like Kim Kardashian are even making up to a million dollars for a single post but they can be really lucrative for bloggers as well.

I personally know bloggers that have made up to $15,000 for writing sponsored posts for different companies and for a lot of bloggers that’s actually their bread and butter or how they make most of their money.

You just want to keep in mind that with sponsored posts you will actually usually have to negotiate with a company about what you’re going to get paid unlike affiliate marketing where it’s set out for the same for everyone.

You actually have to work with a marketing team to find a number that makes sense for both of you so keep in mind sponsored posts can be a little bit of a process and for bloggers, you know sometimes a sponsored post may make sense to you in the first 6 months of your blogging but then a year later you wouldn’t do a sponsored post for that price.

Um, it might change but keep in mind that you’re going to be the one often working with these companies to find an agreed upon number that makes sense for y’all and sometimes it might not always work out and that’s okay or they might not be consistent sponsorships or even permanent.

In fact oftentimes more than not I find that these are a lot of one-time deals so keep all of that in mind when you’re thinking about advertising with sponsored content and the last step that we’re going to talk about today is services

Method 5: Services

We all know what services are and a lot of you may already work in service based industries and offering services on your website or blog can end up netting you a lot of money and the plus side is sometimes you don’t even need traffic to do it.

A lot of people think that this won’t make you a lot of money because you’re sort of trading your time for money and there’s only so much time you have so there’s a little bit of a cap of how much you can make with services.

But the reality is I’ve seen bloggers and influencers and just people with brands in general become wildly successful from offering services.

In fact Marie Kondo who I mentioned earlier launched her entire successful multi-million dollar empire just from offering the service of tidying up and teaching people how to tidy and keep their own houses clean.

I’ve seen people offer it services, website maintenance, web development, proofreading writing services and heck even I make a large portion of my income from offering SEO consultation services.

So, while you’re working on your blog or your website or whatever platform you’re on you may want to consider offering some sort of services that can not only give you practice in whatever field you’re in but also can net you some extra money on the side.

For example, I got into giving seo consultation services because I was already learning SEO for my own blog.

A great example would be if you’re starting and scaling your own youtube channel you might want to offer video editing services for someone else.

This will give you practice and video editing but it’ll also net you some income so that you can quit your job or maybe take less hours so that you have more time to focus on your own business or company.

Conclusion

At the end of the day blogging is business and business is about making money. We all want to make money and see a return on our hard work.

So, I hope that this article gives you guys some ideas on how you can monetize your platform or your website or blog and start bringing in money.

If maybe you’re not there yet hopefully it gives you guys an idea of what you can do in the future what you should be working towards so that you can end up making a very successful business in the future.

I really appreciate you guys reading this article and I’m looking forward to the next one until then y’all take it easy.