When I first started blogging over ten years ago, money-making wasn’t on my agenda, it was purely a method of recording my new life experiences as a Mum. Fast forward to today, and my blog is why I can be a work-at-home Mum. If you’re just starting out, you may be wondering how you, too, can monetise your blog to allow you to have the freedom to work from home and support your family.
Making Money from Blogging
The thing to remember with blogging is that your earnings won’t come from one stream alone but from many different places:
- Affiliate Marketing
- Sidebar Advertising
- Sell Your Own Products
- Social Media Promotion
Let’s take a look at these in more detail:
Affiliate Marketing
This is the process of earning a commission when someone makes a purchase after following a link from your website promoting products or services. Some companies pay per click, some pay a percentage of the purchase price, and some pay a fixed fee. It is worth taking the time to learn this process very carefully as this is how a lot of bloggers make big money. You can be an affiliate marketer directly for a company like Amazon, or you can do affiliate marketing via sites like AWIN or CJ Affiliate.
Collaborative Posts
A brand will pay a blogger to write a blog post on their behalf, this could be in the form of an advertorial, a review style post or similar. Some brands will approach the blogger directly via their PR team or through an outsourced PR firm. Bloggers can also actively seek paid opportunities by signing up to blogging networks such as Get Blogged, Ace Media or BloggerOutreach.
Get Blogged has a useful feature called Marketplace, where you can connect with brands directly for paid blogging opportunities. This is a much better way of ensuring you are only advertising the brands that truly fit with your website’s theme and providing the readers with the brands that meet their needs.
Sidebar Advertising
Some advertisers will pay to place an advertisement in the sidebar of your site; in these instances, they will usually provide you with a logo or piece of text and will pay for the link to remain on your site for 6 to 12 months at a time.
Sell Your Own Products
If your blog provides a service such as teaching blogging, fitness or photography, you could create ebooks, recipe books, video downloads or e-courses which you can sell on your site. Perhaps you could create sponsored merchandise such as sweatshirts, t-shirts, pens and water bottles with your brand logo, which would also act as advertising to reach a wider audience.
Social Media Promotion
This is a similar concept to collaborative posts, where brands will pay bloggers to create promotional posts on their social media either in addition to a blog post or in place of a blog post. Depending upon the size of your audience, this can be a very profitable means of making money.
These are just a few ways to monetise your blog to supplement your income or, if you do it well enough, to make it your main source of income and put you in the driving seat.
Perhaps you are already making money from your blog via a different means; feel free to leave any additional advice in the comments. The one thing I love about blogging is the sense of community and how we all work hard to help each other make the most of blogs and earn potentially. Speaking of which, pop over to Parent Blogging Secrets to read up on 10 things to do you on your blog to explode your traffic. It offers some great advice.
