Can you make money blogging?
What are the various ways to make money from blogging?
How much can I earn?
Can I talk about my life and make money?
What should I blog about to make money?
These are just some of the most common question bloggers at various level (Beginners, Intermediate) have and in this exclusive guide, I’m helping you to answer all these questions. I will also show you some of the best ways to make money blogging that you can use in 2019 and years to come.
These methods are based on my 10 years of experience and information that I have gathered attending various blogging conferences and having many pro-blogger as my friends. I have also shared screenshots of payments of a few methods to give you a wider perspective. You may find the income to be low or high, depending on the lens from which you are viewing.
If this is your first time here at ShoutMeLoud, I recommend you to start with our about page (Opens in a new tab).
Back to the topic,
A few years back, blogging was just another hobby that some people did in addition to working full-time jobs. Today, blogging still functions in that way, but a lot has changed.
In 2019, blogging has become one of the more profitable online professions. I started as a blogger in 2008, and in the last 11 years, blogging has gifted me a new house, a new car, travel opportunities to destinations like Antarctica, Africa, Bali, Russia which I might not have achieved without blogging.
Gone are the days when we bloggers were only dependent on AdSense to earn money online. Now we have many more ad networks and monetization methods available which we can implement to earn huge amounts of money from our blogs.
If you have been using these traditional methods of making money from your blog, it’s time to revise your blogging business plan. Make some new tweaks, change the design, and optimize the marketing aspects of your blog.
In this post, I’ll be sharing some ways of how to earn money from your blog. Try a few of them out and see which works best for you.
Modern Ways To Make Money from Your Blog:
There are various methods that you can use to monetize your blog. Depending upon your level of blogging and the kind of blog, you could pick the method that matches with your style. Do check the end of this article to get the answers to many important questions asked by bloggers like you.
Ad Networks like AdSense, Media.net
Direct Advertisements
Affiliate marketing
Paid reviews
Sell your eBook
Launch an Online Course
Offer Online consulting
Offer Services based on your skills
Apart from the traditional forms of advertising, you can work on other monetization tricks. Instead of just adding ads, work on adding value for your advertiser.
It’s better to have 1 high paying ad than 4 low paying ads.
There are ad networks which are the simplest and most used method for monetizing a blog.
The two Ad networks which are most popular are:
Google AdSense (Offered by Google)
Media.net
You need to have a blog to get an approval on these ad networks. They show ads automatically based on the context of your article and also based on user interest. Most of the new blogs use these methods to monetize as it gives recurring income. Since the ads shown are of high quality, they don’t affect the user experience.
If your blog is having less than 100 views/day, then there are other ad networks which are listed here that you can use. However, your goal should be getting AdSense or Media.net approval as soon as you could.
Affiliate advertisements are one of the best ways to make money since a single sale will make you a lot more money than a single click on a contextual ad. It’s something most of the bloggers are using these days and one of the most profitable avenues to make money from a blog.
In below screenshot you could see affiliate income from one of the program in one month period:
I have already covered affiliate marketing in depth:
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
How To Start With Affiliate Marketing
How To Select The Right Affiliate Program
And of course, ShoutMeLoud’s affiliate marketing eBook.
Here are some of the popular Affiliate marketing marketplace that you could join:
Amazon Affiliate program
ShareASale
PartnerStack
ImpactRadius
Awin
Commission Junction
Another great thing about Affiliate marketing is, you can use this technique on any blogging platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, Medium, Tumblr or even Facebook. All you need to do is, share your unique affiliate link of the product you are recommending, and when someone makes a purchase, you will end up earning a huge commission of the sale amount.
Affiliate marketing is the way, how a lot of bloggers are making millions of dollars every year from their blog. If you are wondering how much money you can make from affiliate marketing, below is my first 5-year earning report of affiliate earnings:
Sell your own eBooks: (Intermediate)
If you notice, the business model of most top bloggers has to do with selling their own products such as an eBook.
All you need to do is pick a topic, compile an eBook on that topic, and put it on sale on your blog or on Amazon. Once you are used to this process, you can earn a decent amount of money by selling eBooks online. Moreover, having your own product to sell is the best thing that you can do to generate passive income.
You can compile your articles into a well-structured book and sell it on your blog or on other platforms such as kdp.Amazon.com to earn money. This will also give you the credibility of becoming an author.
I have created three such books and have been selling them on various platforms. Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use EDD WordPress plugin to sell books and you can see the listing here.
One of my most popular book “Affiliate marketing Book” is also being sold on Amazon and this is adding recurring income.
You can use freelancing network like Fiverr to get someone to design a book cover.
Here are 3 guides that you can refer to learn more about launching your book:
13 Useful Software’s Help You to Create Your First E-book
An Easy Guide to Naming your E-book For More Sales
The 7 Most Popular Platforms To Self-Publish Your Ebook & Make Money
Launch online course (Membership site): Advanced
Can you convert your textbook into video format?
Can you add the checklist, downloadable templates?
Can you create a 1-2 hour video course?
If your answer is yes, then this method is definitely for you. Thanks to technology, now launching an online course is easy for anyone and if you are giving the unique course, your chances of reaching to $ 1 million goal is really high.
To sell your online course. Here is a screenshot of ShoutUniversity, where you can learn WordPress, Affiliate marketing and AdSense by just watching videos.
You can use platforms like:
Thinkific
New Kajabi
To create and sell your online course.
Direct Advertisements (Intermediate)
There’s no question that AdSense is the best advertisement program for bloggers, but it has some limitations. The biggest limitation is the amount you get paid per click.
If you manage to grab direct advertisements, replace those AdSense units with direct ads instead.
You can try AdClerks or use a plugin like WPAdvancedAds to secure some direct advertisements.
For me, this kind of ad is the best, most stable, and highest paying. You should also have a detailed advertisement page for your blog.
Here are a few articles to check out:
5 Best Tips To Find Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
What Advertisers Look For In A Blog
Paid Reviews (All level)
Paid reviews are a great way to boost your monthly income. You can quickly make $10 or more from a small review post. I personally make a minimum of $1200 from every review at ShoutMeLoud.
When doing paid reviews, there are a few things which you need to take care of:
Paid Review: Good, Bad or Ugly
Should You Do A Paid Review Or A Free Review?
Here are a few websites to find paid reviews/sponsored review opportunities:
Famebit (For YouTube channels)
Izea Pay per post
Tomoson
Revcontent
Run campaign for brands: (Intermediate and advanced)
This one is perfect for any type of blog with an established audience base. You could help brands reach the target audience by running the campaign for them. For this, you will be doing brand collaboration, running webinars, even paid Ads or making videos. You will see an increased number of blogs doing it with various brands. Keep an eye on this type as its already becoming one of the hottest way to monetize a blog.
Services
Based on your skills, you can offer various services. Depending on what are you good at, you can offer content writing, logo creation, SEO, and so on.
In the past, I used to offer WordPress, SEO and hosting related services. Offering services not only help you to make money but also gives you more use cases which help you hone your skills. I have had time when I was earning more than $2000/month only by offering services.
In fact, launching your own services is pretty easy. All you need to do is create a page on your blog and list the services that you are offering. Make sure to place the link of that page in your blog navbar and prominent space for the maximum visibility.
Make it easier for your audience to contact you and inquire more about your services. As you deal with your first 2-3 clients, you will have ample ideas to improve the sales process of your services. In fact, you will be able to automate some of the things like payment and follow-up.
FAQ’s about How to Make Money Blogging
Can you actually make money blogging?
I’m living proof of someone who can make a handsome living with blogging. A lot depends on how consistent and persistent you are. In my case, I was working almost 14 hours every day for 4 years to reach this stage where I’m earning more than $40K/month from blogging.
As the online space has matured, now there are more opportunities to make money via blogging. The only thing is, you need to be consistent for almost a year before you start making decent money to quit your job or to plan your life on blogging income.
How much money can you make money blogging?
There are bloggers who are earning more than $1 million/year with blogging and then there are bloggers who are making only $500-1000/year from their blog as they are working without the strategy.
By working on your content strategy and driving targeted traffic, you will be closer to A-lister bloggers who are minting millions of dollars. The numbers of such A-list bloggers are increasing as a lot of bloggers have started treating their blog as a serious business. You can check the ShoutMeLoud income reports here.
Can I blog about my life and make money?
This is another growing form of blogging where a lot of people talk about their day to day life and create a community around it. You may have seen a lot of them on YouTube as Video blogger and you can do the same on the blog or even on YouTube.
Some of the popular topic for this kind of blogging is:
Lifestyle
Fashion
Travel
Motivation
Entertainment
The key here is to keep it entertaining, add value and create a community around your brand. Depending upon your style and consistency, you could mint a lot of money with this strategy.
A lot of beginners also ask is, should I focus on blogging or vBlogging?
Well, it’s a good idea to have a mix of both. Producing video content (Recording, editing, and publishing) is time and money intensive, whereas creating text content takes lesser time. Having a good blend of both the technique will help you to grow faster and start significant earning sooner.
What should I blog about to make money?
In case if you don’t want to blog about your life and wondering about the best topic from the blog monetization perspective, here are 4 factors that you should consider.
Passion: Things that you are already passionate about or have an interest in. This thing doesn’t have to be something you are learning at an academy or at your job, but it could be as simple as something that your friends, family, and others call you to take your opinion. For example, Cars, Food, Finance, Travel. Take a pen paper, and label it as “Passion list”. Now, list down every topic that you think you have an interest and you could blog about.
Traffic and trend: You would want to ensure that there are decent traffic and interest in the topic that you have discovered by creating your passion list. Trends will give you an idea if this topic is growing or dying. Trends.google.com is a free tool that let you gauge the traffic trend of any topic.
Monetization: The 3rd factor that will help you to find profitable blogging idea is an option for monetization. You need to see how you planning to monetize your blog. Is it going to be Ad network such as AdSense or is it going to be Affiliate marketing?. To give you a perspective, “Whatsapp” as a topic is growing really fast and you may be passionate about it, but the monetization sucks. Even with high traffic, making money is negligible.
Competition: This is the last but not the least factor. If you are getting into a competitive niche, you will find it hard to stand out and also outrank existing big players. I don’t mean to demotivate you but if you have a choice between 2-3 topics, pick the one with medium or low competition. If you end up picking a broader niche, for example, fashion, in a competitive niche, it would just take few extra months to ace it. So, you need to keep this in mind when looking at the competition.
I suggest you browse more articles of ShoutMeLoud to get a clear understanding of picking up a niche.
How will I receive Blogging payment?
Your advertisers could be sitting at a different part of the world and there are 5 popular ways by which you can receive payment from all over the world. These are also popular ways by which these companies pay.
PayPal
Payoneer
Transferwise
Wire transfer (Your bank)
CoinBase (Crypto payment)
Once you start making money, it’s a good idea to have an account on all the above website which let you receive payments. They are all free to join and easy to use. You can also use these above services to pay freelancers or virtual assistant in the future.
There are a lot of services you can offer, but I would recommend not overwhelming yourself and instead implementing them one by one.
All the above ideas work great, and you should find out what works best for your specific blogging niche.
Here are a few more articles which will help you to make money from your blog:
How To Make Money Without Google AdSense
What strategy do you use to earn money from your blog? Let me know in the comments below.
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