Are you a stay at home busy mom? Does staying home take its toll on your finances? Do you like to write and would like to make money from your blog? I bet you would like to do something to earn while being there for your kids. Are you looking for a real and tested way to earn livable income from the comfort of your own home?
The answer?
START A BLOG & MONETIZE IT!
Blogging is very popular these days. You can find blogs on any and every topic out there. Some bloggers are professionals and will have huge readership and social media following.
Other bloggers are starting from scratch, hoping to gain a following. These bloggers are either hobby bloggers, just because they enjoy writing, or they are trying to make some money.
Either way, when you have a blog, the next reasonable step would be to make money with it.
How do you do it?
There are several legitimate ways to earn with your blog. The methods differ depending on blog traffic, subscriber numbers, and social media exposure.
Here are 5 Ways to Monetize Your Blog and Earn Livable Income
Keep in mind that not every option will work for everyone, so pick and choose based on your capabilities.
Affiliate Marketing and Sales
Affiliate marketing is a great way to tap into a money earning venture. According to Neil Patel, affiliate marketing is the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across different parties, where each party receives a share of the revenue according to their contribution.
Basically, when a business or an entrepreneur creates a product or a service, they need to constantly market the product, gain following, and offer it to a new audience.
Even if you are not the one who created the product, you can still have a share of the revenue.
How? By marketing the product or service, and selling it to your audience.
There are numerous ways you can promote it on your own blog without having to email and call all your contacts and telling them “buy this please.”
- Write a product review or share as a video
- Write a “how-to” guide on the product and offer ways to use it and solutions to certain problems through the product
- A blog titled “10 Reasons Why You Should Buy this Product”
If you need more help in marketing and selling, you can read these ten pointers on selling better. Keep in mind that it’s not the product that you should market, as much as why that product is the solution to a problem. For the sake of your audience, and for a better chance at success, it is a good idea to choose affiliates that align with the core message of your blog.
In her blog titled How I Quadrupled my Affiliate Sales in Under One Month, Alyssa from The Simply Serene Blog includes Pinterest related affiliates, especially since the blog talks about Pinterest strategies.
In fact, some bloggers have resource pages on their blogs that not only talk about their favorite tools and resources, but act as an affiliate link too. April D Lewis has a resource page with a list of tools, resources, courses, apps, & programs that she says she has personally vetted.
Make money as an in-demand Freelance Blogger
Believe it or not, there are bloggers out there who make a lot of money. The one well-known tip for growing your audience, attracting attention, and being an authority on a certain topic is to narrow down your niche.
Blog not getting enough traffic despite great content? Are you making any of these mistakes?
How can you grow interest and loyalty amongst your target audience?
Earn it!
This means that you need to provide them with topics that hold their attention. Provide enough of that topic and you will be seen as an authority on the subject matter. However, there are certain tenets that most people believe are the fundamentals of successful blogging.
Making money with your blog – tips to get paid
- Provide fresh and interesting perspective on old topics
- Have content that interests your target audience
- Post often and regularly
- Establish lasting relationships with other bloggers in your field
- Build a relationship with your audience to capitalize on it
- Be a decent writer (note: don’t need to be great)
- Narrow down your niche, don’t be a generalist
Companies, businesses and other blogs will come to you once you establish your reputation and have a loyal audience.
Earn a livable income when you monetize your blog right!
This is one of the main reasons why and how Carol Tice makes $5000 or more from blogging, and Elna Cain fully replaced her full time income by being a part-time blogger.
At the same time, also constantly pitch yourself to successful blogs out there. One article in a leading publication can do wonders for your freelance blogging ambitions!
Looking for freelance writing Jobs and Opportunities in your niche?
Create and Sell Online Courses & Books
Online courses are extremely popular currently. People in general like to learn how to do things and do them well. If you have a blog, you can essentially create an online course that is connected to the topic of your popular blogs, or to your hobbies that you’ve mentioned in your blog. The more you establish your reputation as a trustworthy, knowledgeable blogger, the higher rates you can command when it comes to payment. In her role as a Persuasion Strategist, Bushra Azhar now offers her knowledge and strategies bundled as courses.
Online courses will require a payment before a person can have access to the material. Direct blog traffic to your money-making course by parking links, banners, and CTAs (call to action) at relevant spots on your most visited pages as well as creating content and writing blog posts that lead people to the course naturally.
Some examples of courses can be:
How to build a sales funnel
Strategic ways to grow your Pinterest following
Masterclass on monetizing your content
When it comes to online courses, the market is huge, as long as you do it right, and provide quality information. There are many platforms for creating online courses, and the type of course and material you offer will determine which platform you go with.
Check out these 6 Pro Tips on how to convert and monetize your blog into a book.
Write and Self-Publish e-Books and Guides
Technology had advanced so much that you don’t have to get a publisher in order to publish your book or guide anymore. It’s as simple as creating an account with Amazon Kindle Publishing or Apple iBooks, write your text, and publish it yourself. If you have knowledge about certain topics, know how to use a particular software very well, you can even create e-books in Canva and host your digital products on your blog or website.
Moreover, you can publish guides and instructional pieces. Do you know how to write persuasively? Why not talk about it and make a guide out of it. Do you have a good understanding of the legal how-to’s of a business, or know WordPress exceptionally well? Then create an instructional e-book and teach others.
Publishing and selling e-books and guides can be very profitable. Start small but go in-depth on a topic you are clearly the expert and then go wider. However, you need to be committed to this and publish several of them. Otherwise the returns are not substantial. However, if you have 10 ebooks, and even if each one is being sold for $2.99, with proper marketing, you might earn a lot more.
Megan Of Love Family Health shares that she earns a decent profit not just by selling her e-book titled eBook Ninja but also by including affiliates within her ebook.
Your blog or website can act as a marketing platform for your books. Talk about them, provide links, ask for feedback even.
With publishing and selling, like with anything else, really, persistence is key. Don’t give up easily. You will not become rich overnight. If you stay your course, you will see results.
Want tools & freebies to learn and help grow your business?
Check out this awesome library of Digital Tools for Entrepreneurs!
Offer Free and Paid Webinars
Many bloggers out there are utilizing the wonderful tool of a webinar. It is a middle ground between an online course and video. Webinars are great because they can be short segments, or you can make them into series, like once a month or even a week. Webinars can be about any topics:
- Teaching website design skills
- Help with networking
- How to use content to gain traffic, leads and repeat customers
- Best website themes to use, etc.
Initially, you can create webinars and offer a few of them for free. Once you establish an audience who is interested in what you have to say, you can make some of the webinars with paid membership if you’d like.
There are bloggers out there who utilize the power of webinar and they do interviews, case studies with influential people and companies, then put the entire thing together, market it as a virtual summit, and sell the subscription. Doing this will hardly cost you any money, but it can be quite lucrative. Moreover, doing this will most likely put you on a bigger map, and bring a lot of subscribers and traffic to your blog.
So there you go! Now you know the 5 ways to monetize your blog smartly and successfully to earn a livable income.
By monetizing it, you can earn livable income from it, and if you really try, you can earn way more. Blogger Lena of What Mommy Does shares a detailed blog income report to give you an idea of a blogs earning potential.
Blogging offers many opportunities to monetize your expertise and earn livable income. You just need to see the bigger picture and not give up immediately if you don’t succeed initially. Good luck!
Mariam Tsaturyan is an Attorney, Freelance Blogger and Writer at Freelance and Marketing. She chose to take a sabbatical from her law practice to raise her son. Currently, her work focus is to help solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, small business owners, as well as bloggers increase their online presence and brand awareness, to generate more traffic, and to have higher sales with more profit.
I am also having affiliate links on some of my blogs. Gotta try the other ways. Thank you for these lists!
Hey these are some pretty good tips, thanks for sharing – will try and implement them in the next 6 months with some SMART goals!
Thank you. I hope you do! Let me know how it goes 🙂
I must thank you for the efforts you’ve put in writing this blog.
I’m hoping to view the same high-grade content from you in the future as well.
In fact, your creative writing abilities has motivated me to get my very own blog
now 😉
Thank you! I wish you luck with your blog. You will do great!
I’m working on 1 out of 5 now, affiliate marketing. I’m thinking about trying online courses too. I need to work on my consistency though.
Both are great options for monetizing your blog. I love online courses, and for me it’s the best way to earn income. However, affiliate marketing is the ultimate way to earn passive income. There are many great resources, even free ones, that will guide you and teach you about each.
Very informative post. I agree with you in that affiliate marketing is a great way to get income from your blog. Eventually, I hope to get my blog to that level.
Thank you! You should definitely do it, as I believe you can incorporate affiliate marketing in your blog even without a huge reader base.
Really useful post for us since we are new into the blogging business. Thanks for sharing ?
You’re welcome! I am glad you found the post worth your while.
Such a very informative post to read and love those given tips with us, I am sure it will help all bloggers out there most especially the new one.
Thank you Kristine! I am glad you enjoyed it 🙂
When you consider that only a small fraction of blog visitors are going to click on an ad, less than one in 100 visitors, you need hundreds of thousands of visitors to make much money. Making just $0.008 per page view, you would need about 12.5 million page views to make $100,000 from Adsense!
I agree with you. Therefore, it’s not one of the ways I listed. I know people out there who do make good money with Adsense, but it’s really rare. A bloggers stands a better chance to earn money with one of the ways listed above, than old school advertising these days. Do you have a particular method you like to use?
Very informative post. I am a writer but planning on publishing my ebook soon. For me adsense has been my primary means of earning on my blog. http://www.healthphreaks.com
This is an informative post, but i dont really use Affiliate on my blog. I find it so hard. I will have to know more about affiliate marketing!
Affiliate marketing is something that not everyone is comfortable with. There is a stigma, in a way, attached to it. For this reason, if I do use affiliate marketing on my own site, it’s usually products that I truly and wholeheartedly love. I have to be sure that the product is great before I even recommend it to others. For example, I am an affiliate with ConvertKit, and I am completely comfortable with it. However, if someone told me they’ll give me money to advertise or be an affiliate for another email marketing software that I didn’t use and love, I would feel very hesitant.
There are many great resources and blogs on affiliate marketing. You can even base an entire blog on affiliate marketing as a niche.
There is just no doubt that the internet offers almost limitless opportunities to make an income. Blogging has proven to really work for a lot of people and has become so popular. These ideas for anyone blogging are all great ways to diversify your online income and become your own boss. Great info.
Thank you Nicole! I am glad you enjoyed the post.
How do you write an effective article for affiliate marketing? What if you don’t use the product? What if the product you’re using is not part of the affiliate marketing industry?
I personally only endorse products I use and/or love. For me, personally, the best way to write an effective article on a product (if you’re an affiliate) is to do a review, or list the reasons why you love the product by showcasing the features.
I am not sure I understood the second part of your question well. There are times that individuals or companies who created certain products don’t have affiliate programs. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about it. You can try to contact them, and offer to sell or market the product, and see what their reaction will be.
Who knew there were so many opportunities? This is a must read for fellow bloggers!!! Thank you!
Wow. Who knew there were so many opportunities? Thank you for sharing – this is a must read for fellow bloggers!!! Thank you!
You’re welcome Rudy!