This article is a chapter from my book Blog Ideas: 131 Ideas to Kill Writer's Block, Supercharge Your Blog and Stand Out. The entire book will eventually be available on this website for free in web format, but if you prefer to read it in ebook or physical formats, you can find Blog Ideas on Amazon.com (affiliate link).
One of the most exciting moments in running a business is making the first dollar. My first check from Google Adsense came around Christmas time. It was a check for $103.10. It was just enough to pay for my hosting costs, but it gave me such a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
The vast majority of blogs do not earn a significant income. To become a successful blogger takes hard work, time, and dedication. Most people are unwilling to devote much time and effort to their blogs.
A 2012 survey of 1,000 bloggers by Blogging.org found that only 9% of bloggers made a full-time income. Upwards of 81% never even made $100 from blogging. What this means is that you should not quit your day job to pursue blogging. A better tactic would be to start your blog on your free time, blog about your passion, and keep working at it. It takes time and dedication to build a significant following. You can only earn income if you have readers.
Diversification is essential. If you are serious about blogging for profit, don’t let ad networks be your only source of revenue. This article has dozens of ideas for making money from your blog. Take advantage of as many sources of income as you can find. That is the only way you can build a solid blogging business.
The first part of this article has several ideas for finding advertising for your blog. Advertising is the most common way bloggers earn money. It is also easy to set up an advertising network on your blog.
The second part of the article introduces affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a way you can earn commission from online sales. If you promote a product on your blog, you can get a part of the sales through affiliate marketing.
You can also sell products or services through your blog. The third section of the article provides ideas for different things you can sell on your blog. They range from physical products to digital products to services you can provide.
Advertising
Blogs are replacing print media like newspapers and magazines. Traditional print media made money by advertising within their pages. The easiest way to monetize a blog follows the same model. Companies pay you some money to put up advertisements on your blog.
A few factors go into how much you can make from advertisements. The most important factor is traffic. How many eyeballs see your blog each month? Measuring traffic can be tricky because not all traffic is equal. A blogger can use some slimy marketing tactics to drive traffic to a site, but the traffic will be low quality. On the other hand, a respected influencer may have a small group of loyal followers that buy everything she recommends on her blog. A skillful advertiser would take a few loyal followers over thousands of uninterested ones any day.
There are other important factors for advertising. The type of advertisements allowed matters. Some sites allow only text advertisements, while others may allow animations, sounds, and popups. Advertisement duration is also important. While some sites show an advertisement for only a moment, others keep it on the screen. Placement and size also play an important role. A full-page ad will cost much more than a line of text at the corner of a page.
Ad networks
There are several services that make it easy to add advertisements to your blog. Some of the more popular ones include Google AdSense (adsense.google.com), Media.net (www.media.net), Chitika (www.chitika.com), Clicksor (www.clicksor.com), and Sovrn (www.sovrn.com).
Optimize your ads
When placing advertisements on your site, put the ads where people’s eyeballs go. You might have to do some testing for different ad locations throughout your blog. In his book, How to Make Money Blogging, Bob Lotich attests that the most profitable spot to put AdSense ads is directly below the article title of a blog post. In How to Blog for Profit Without Selling Your Soul, Ruth Soukup confirms this, and adds that the next best advertisement positions are above, to the left, and at the bottom of your content. You should use this information as a starting point and run your own tests. The optimal settings may vary between different blogs. The only way to know for sure is to test it.
Note that if you have fewer than 50,000 page views per month, it’s probably not worth your time to tweak your advertisements. Instead, concentrate on increasing your traffic before spending time tweaking advertisements.
Direct ad sales
Once your blog gains a presence in your niche, companies may begin reaching out to you to advertise. In this case, you can sell ad space directly to the company. The company would want to know exactly how much traffic you get so you can agree on a fair price.
While you can passively wait for companies to proposition you, you can also aggressively pursue direct advertisements. If this is the path you want to pursue, you need first to put together an advertising kit. It is a brochure that includes a description of your blog, traffic statistics, and specific advertising opportunities you offer. You may also want to go further and include testimonials, your bio, and your photo. You can find companies to work with by attending conferences and networking directly with company representatives.
Sponsorships
Sometimes, a company is willing to pay you to promote their brand. They can do this by sponsoring your blog for a certain amount of time or sponsoring individual blog posts. A company might also give you an exclusive coupon code that you can give your audience. If you have a podcast or newsletter, companies can also pay for you to promote their brands through those mediums.
Other times, a company might send you free products. They do this in hopes that you will show off the products to your audience or provide a positive review on your blog. They might even send you products to give away to your readers for free.
If you get a company sponsorship, it is important to disclose the relationship to your audience. In the United States, not providing disclosure is against the law. Be careful who you accept money from, because it will have an impact on your reputation. If your readers enjoy the products you recommend, you will gain loyalty; however, associating yourself with one bad brand can tarnish your reputation for a long time.
Real-world advertising
GoDaddy.com spent $2.4 million to air their first SuperBowl commercials in 2005. They gained more than 500,000 extra visitors to their website immediately following the advertisements. While you may not have the money for television commercials, it does show how effective offline ads can be.
Look into traditional advertising methods like print, radio, and television. If your message is compelling enough, people will remember your web address and look you up online. Something as simple as tacking your web address onto a bulletin board at your local grocery store may be a cost-effective way to drive new traffic to your site. Just make sure you are targeting the right audience. For example, a grocery store audience may be more interested in food- and home-oriented content.
Try a publicity stunt
Do something newsworthy or offbeat to get people’s attention. There is a subtle art to publicity stunts, so you have to be careful. Stay too conservative, and nobody will notice. Go too controversial, and it may blow up in your face. But if you get it just right, your blog can go viral.
Public relations blogger Frank Strong recounts sending books with handwritten notes to people who gave his brand shout-outs on social media. While doing this never made his blog go viral, he did see a steady increase in his loyal fan base.
ConAgra Foods once staged a publicity stunt that backfired. In 2011, they invited bloggers to a free dinner at a fine restaurant. They didn’t tell the guests that the food was not prepared by the chef, but was from ConAgra’s line of frozen foods. They secretly recorded the guests’ reactions to the food. The response from the bloggers was not what they expected. Many of the bloggers wrote negative reactions on their blogs because of ConAgra’s perceived dishonesty.
Affiliate marketing
In affiliate marketing, you promote products and receive money for each sale you make. You are a salesperson making a commission.
There are many ways you can promote affiliate products. You can write a how-to post and link to the supplies needed. You can make YouTube videos to promote products. Or write comparisons between products. You can also write a shopping guide that shows people what to look for when buying a type of product like televisions or cameras.
Keep in mind that the same disclosure rules apply to affiliate marketing. When you include affiliate links in a blog post, you need to tell your readers that you will make some money if they buy through the links.
Become an Amazon affiliate
One of the biggest affiliate marketing programs is the Amazon Associates program (associates.amazon.com). You can earn a percentage of almost anything Amazon.com sells by including affiliate links on your blog. That means if your blog discusses a new video game, you can include an affiliate link to the game on Amazon. If a reader clicks your link to the game on Amazon and buys it, you will get a small percentage (usually around 4-6%) of the sale price.
Find affiliates outside of Amazon
Amazon is so big that they don’t need your help for selling things. That’s why they offer such low commission rates. If you want to earn more on commissions, you should seek out individual products to promote. Commission Junction (www.cj.com) is one of the largest affiliate networks out there. If you can find the right products to promote, you can make upwards of 50% commission. The downside is that you need to devote more time and effort to selling the product.
Another thing you can do is go to the websites of your favorite products and see if they have an affiliate program. If they do, they usually put the link at the bottom of the page. If they don’t have an affiliate program, sometimes you can contact the company directly and ask if you can help sell their product for a percentage commission.
Selling products or services
You can sell products from your blog. They can be digital, physical, or service products.
The main benefit of digital products is that they can be delivered instantly. They don’t take up space in your home. You can even automate the whole process so buyers can purchase the product and receive it without you having to do anything.
Many people still prefer physical products over digital. Having a physical product feels more real and valuable to them. They are products that people can put on their desks, touch, and give to others. Not everyone is comfortable with the digital versions of things. Most people will prefer to read physical books over e-books. Some things like food and equipment just can’t be digitized. You can still sell these items from your blog.
You can also sell services from your blog. Services are not digital or physical. They are provided on the medium of time. They are conferences, live classes, special events, or consulting sessions.
You can accept payment from your blog using a payment service like PayPal (www.paypal.com) or Gumroad (www.gumroad.com).
Sell digital products
With the rising popularity of YouTube videos and podcasts, there is an increasing demand for music and voiceovers. People with video or audio shows need music and voiceovers for intros and outros. Audio Jungle (www.audiojungle.net) and iStockPhoto (www.istockphoto.com) both sell audio clips. If you’re an audio whiz, you can sell your audio files from those sites or your blog.
If you’re a photographer, you can make money selling your photographs. Sites like iStockPhoto and Foap (www.foap.com) will sell your pictures for you. Or you can sell them directly from your blog.
If you can write your own themes and plugins, you can sell them on a site like Creative Market (www.creativemarket.com). You can also offer your code for free, but accept donations.
You can also sell domain names on Sedo (www.sedo.com). Sell blogs and websites on Flippa (www.flippa.com).
Sell information
Another type of digital product you can sell is an information product. Instead of selling finished media like photos, videos, or plugins, you sell information. The information can take many different forms. You could create an online course. You can run a live webinar or online workshop. You can also format the content as an e-book and sell it on your blog or Amazon’s Kindle platform.
If you have been blogging for a while, you can curate your articles and edit them into e-book format. Add some additional writing to tie everything together. Upload it to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Or convert it into a PDF file to sell on e-junkie (www.e-junkie.com) or your blog.
Repurpose your blog posts to sell
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you already have a lot of content. You can repurpose and repackage that content to sell. Even if the content is already free on your blog, some people will prefer to consume it in another format. Compile your best blog content into an e-book. Start a podcast based on your blog content. Put your most popular how-to posts together into an online course. Then you can sell the repurposed content on your blog.
Create a membership site
If you want to offer exclusive content from your blog, you can create a paid membership section using a WordPress plugin. The most popular WordPress membership plugin is Wishlist (www.wishlistproducts.com). A less capable, but free alternative is S2Member (www.s2member.com).
Sell custom-printed items
Many websites will print custom images onto products. You can upload your logo or other graphics to create branded clothing, bags, mugs, calendars, or almost anything. Two of the larger sites that do this are CafePress (www.cafepress.com) and Zazzle (www.zazzle.com). You can sell these customized products from your blog and have them made on demand.
Create your own games
The Game Crafter (www.thegamecrafter.com) lets you design your own board games or card games, then have them printed on demand. You can design game boards, rules booklets, and pick out pieces (like dice or pawns) to be included. Then, whenever someone orders the game, they will print it, package it, and mail it for you.
If all you need is custom playing cards, a company called MPC (www.makeplayingcards.com) can print high-quality playing cards that you can sell.
Host a live webinar
If your blog teaches something, you can offer more in-depth information through live webinars. You will need software like Crowdcast (www.crowdcast.io) or WebEx (www.webex.com). These operate much like remote classrooms. Students can pay for and register for your webinar in advance. Then, when the scheduled time comes, you log in and teach the webinar.
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