You have started a blog and got a healthy volume of regular readers so far; how do you start earning money from your blog?
You will learn some of the proven ways to monetize your blog in this article.
If you have not yet started a blog, refer to this article and take the first steps towards earning a sustainable income from blogging.
The first thing you have to learn is the fundamentals that you must adhere to if you want to gain a high volume of readers before you start monetizing your blog.
Many people start blogs and quickly abandoned them because they did not pay attention to these basic tenets that drive success in the blogosphere.
How to Monetize Your Blog Without Destroying Your User Experience
The 5 laws of blogging
There are 5 laws that you must follow before you can realize the potential to monetize your blog.
You cannot monetize your blog until you have enough readers to turn into customers.
The only way to get enough readers is to abide by these rules.
That’s just the way it is.
Law 1: Be Focused on Your Niche
Your blog should focus on one niche alone and not try to do everything at once.
When you digress and start writing about things that are not associated with your core niche, you lose the focus of the readers and they will simply move away to a blog that addresses their needs fully.
The reason why people keep coming back to a blog is that it fills in a gap that needs to be addressed fully and not in disjointed bits and pieces.
The only way to meet their need is to be focused and structured in the way you address their issues.
Law 2: Write Quality Content
One big folly that newbie bloggers fall into is simply churning out large volumes of content without thinking of the quality they are providing.
The blog posts must be of good grammar, sensible and well-structured. You should cite sources and link to other sites that could shed more light on the issues you are discussing.
Linking to credible sites will also improve your ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) which will improve your findability and bring in more readers.
If you want to earn money from your blog, ensure that you create quality content.
Law 3: Provide Value to Your Readers
What exactly are you teaching people about?
What needs are you answering to?
For people to keep revisiting your blog, you must provide value that engages them fully.
When people are trying to figure out things, they want in-depth tutorials with written and visual content that makes them understand how to meet their needs.
If you want to teach people how to make money blogging, like we are, try to go through all the steps, and explain why each step is necessary.
Just like you are learning about the 5 laws of blogging and why they are necessary, right?
Value is an incredible catalyst to monetizing your blog.
Law 4: Engage your readers
Ask yourself why people should keep on reading your content.
How engaging can you be when trying to connect with your readers and keep them coming back?
The more people find your content engaging the more they will keep coming back to your blog.
Think about your favorite movie or book, which you kept repeating over and over again; that is the same kind of engagement you should have with your readers if you want to monetize your blog.
Law 5: Be Authoritative
This law does not mean that you become strict with your readers like a military commander; not at all.
Being authoritative is creating content that shows that you know what you are talking about.
Being authoritative can bring in a lot of traffic.
For example, a social media influencer can find it very easy to create a blog and monetize it because the followers believe that he or she is an authority on the issues they follow on the social media profile or page of the influencer.
If you are an expert in your niche, then use that to your advantage and prove that you are credible; this credibility will translate into earnings when you monetize your blog.
Now that you have an idea about how you can create a blog that people will love to visit, it is time to get into ways of monetizing your blog.
Excellent Ways to Monetize Your Blog
There are innumerable ways that you can monetize your blog, but the ones listed below have been tried and tested and rank quite high as the fastest ways to start earning money on your blog.
#1: Run Advertisements on Your Blog
The type of advertisements that you add to your website matter when it comes to earning money from them
Most newbie bloggers opt for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advisements which do not augur well for a young blog.
With PPC adverts, you need a very high volume of readers to even start making good money from them.
For marginal income using PPC ads, you need at least 10,000 visitors a day.
To make a reasonable income from PPC ads, you need about 100,000 visitors a day. That is quite steep.
In order to make money from adverts properly, you should use display ads on your blog.
These are ads spaces that you can hire out to businesses operating within the same niche as what you are blogging about.
For example, if you blog about repairing vehicle engines, then manufacturers of spare parts would be willing to pay premium rates to place display ads on your blog.
#2: Sell Affiliate Products on Your Blog
This is one of the most popular ways of earning money from blogging.
If you don’t have products r services to sell, then this is a great way to earn money from your blog. This is excellent for beginner bloggers.
Look for affiliate products that have an association with what you are blogging about and convince your readers to buy them.
Using our previous example of an engine repair company, you could write about spare parts that you find to be excellent and convince your readers to buy them; every time a reader buys a product that you write about you get a commission.
You already have a blog that people read because they find your engine repair tips to be useful, so why not leverage your XXXinfluence to sell spare parts as well?
Affiliate marketing is automated, so you keep earning money even when you are sleeping or taking a vacation.
#3: Sell Through Email
This is referred to as Email Marketing.
In email marketing, you sell your products and services, or other affiliate products by sending emails directly to people who subscribe to your blog.
You must build an email list, which you will use to send emails regularly, telling people about your products and services.
Email marketing can be used to promote blog updates thereby bringing people back to your blog whenever you create a new post; this increases your traffic and ranking on SERPs.
There are free and premium tools that you can use for email marketing; try out Infusionsoft, Aweber, or ConvertKit. They will guide you on how to create emails that people will open.
Email marketing helps you keep readers engaged and forms a great bond between you and them. A great target would be to earn an average of $1 to $2 per subscriber each month.
#4: Sell Digital Products
Digital products come in many forms and can be a lucrative way of earning money from blogging if you have created a strong bond with your readers.
These can be videos, downloadable resources and guides, software tools that you develop, SaaS, and a lot more.
Basically, you will create a product or service that people can download, and then sell it through a subscription or one-time payment.
When developing a digital product to sell, you must consider the value that it will have for your readers. Make sure that it is worth the price that you are asking for.
#5: Sell eBooks
One could argue that eBooks are a digital product and should fall in the previous category, but this is not always true.
eBooks are simple books that you create and sell on your blog, and do not necessarily have Videos or offer SaaS as digital products do.
eBooks can be a condensed form of some of the most popular topics that you have ever blogged about. You give it as a one-time premium product and the reader can refer to it at any time.
Use an eBook to teach a skill that many people struggle with.
Promote your eBook by using landing pages on your blog that deal specifically with the eBook alone and not the blog posts you regularly post.
Use the sale-funnel to gently guide your readers to buy the eBook; this will be happening on autopilot, which means making money without your direct input.
#6: Sell Courses on Your Blog
Selling courses is another way that bloggers make a considerable amount of money.
You should develop a course that is intuitive and helpful to your readers. The value of the course has to be quite high for people to want to buy it.
Using the example in this article, you could sell a course that could Gide your user to become a full-time mechanic. This will provide value to the reader and he or she would be willing to par with a considerable amount of money for this course.
Of course, this would require you to have in-depth knowledge about becoming a mechanic, so this is why the course should be designed carefully.
Other skills that people are willing to pay for when it comes to courses are Graphic Design, 3D Modeling and Animation, Web Development, Mobile App Development, Personal Finance, Investing, and Accounting.
F course there are many more courses that you can develop as long as you fill an urgent void for your readers.
#7: Become a Coach in Your Niche
Coaching is not like creating a course, in that caching is a process that you will cover over a long time.
People are becoming coaches in various aspects of life; whether it is about how to live a great life, or how to develop a business, all the way to how to be a religious person.
Opportunities for becoming a coach in your discipline are vast and you simply have to find one that is not competitive.
When you become an authoritative coach, you can earn a considerable amount of money from a few subscribers.
All you have to do is use your blog content to convince them that you have valuable insights that they can benefit from if they subscribe to your coaching service.
#8: Wrote Sponsored Blog Posts
Getting sponsors for your blog posts is another great way of monetizing your blog.
However, if you want businesses to sponsor your blogs, then you have to prove that you have a high volume of readers who will read the sponsored post.
Sponsored posts have to be labeled as “Sponsored” otherwise the FTC will flag your post and you will be in violation of the rules governing sponsored posts.
Google also looks out for sponsored posts that are not transparent about their intent; this could lead to your blog being penalized and the sponsor will be penalized too.
This sold lead to a flood of legal actions that could bog down your blog just when you are starting to earn money from sponsored posts.
#9: Start a Podcast
You might find that your niche is currently bursting at the seams thanks to the high number of bloggers who are in it, but do they have podcasts?
People are turning to podcasts since they can simply listen to what advice you have for them, rather than read it on a blog post.
People connect easier to podcasts than written blog posts since they feel like you are talking directly to them.
This engagement will work in your favor and bring you a steady stream of income.
John Lee Dumas went from earning about $68,000 from his blog in 2012 to over $ 1.5 million in 2018. Now that is a figure that should convince you why you should have a podcast piggybacking on your blog posts.
All you need is to find a podcast host, such as Buzzsprout, Libsyn, BluBrry, or Transistor, and connect your readers to your audio files.
There are other plugins on WordPress that you can use to host a podcast.
With podcasting, you can create a high volume of avid followers within a very short period, which will be great when you want to monetize your blog quickly.
#10: Host a Virtual Summit
If you have never attended a virtual summit, then you have missed out on one of the trending ways to engage your readers and earn their respect and trust; It will also earn you lots of money.
A virtual summit is an online conference where people come in to listen to the advice that you have to offer them.
They will in turn be able to ask you questions directly and you can answer them during the function.
This kind of engagement will show even the most skeptical reader that you are an authority in your field.
After the virtual summit, you should include a Call-To-Action for your readers to buy your products or services.
Another way to make money from a virtual summit is to sell an all-access pass to interested persons. The virtual summit will be free, but in order to access the material used in the summit at any time, your attendees will have to buy an all-access pass.
If you are quite good at what you do, then you could make upwards of $10,000 simply selling all-access passes to people who attend the virtual summit.
Takeaway
There are many ways in which you can monetize your blog, but we shall cover these 10 since they are the most popular ways.
With these, you will be able to find an angle that you can leverage and start earning a comfortable living as a blogger.
Podcasting and hosing virtual summits are not as competitive as written blogs; this is an ideal opportunity for creating a huge number of followers quickly and also make a killing when it comes to earning money from your blog.
Leverage these final two tips and get a competitive edge over other bloggers who started earlier and have a firm foothold in your niche.
Remember to follow the 5 laws of blogging outlined at the beginning of this article if you want to build a healthy volume of reader traffic that will enable you to monetize your blog.
Create valuable and high-quality content in each of these methods and you will be able to breakthrough in the world of blogging.
Happy blogging and happy earnings to you!
