Once you have made a blog and been publishing and sharing useful content that people find interesting, your audience should be growing and you would want to turn that attention into something more.
Earning money from blogging has long been an option for serious bloggers who like to write and share their thoughts about particular subject matters. You can do the same as well, especially now in this day and age when blog monetization has become a regular thing.
There are various ways you can earn money from blogging, and being able to do as many of them as you can through your blog is pretty much stacking the deck in your favor. You are encouraged to give these methods a try, and you can stick with those that work best for you and your blogging activities.
Online Advertising
This is usually the first destination for people who are looking to monetize their blogs. Putting ads on the blog is a good way to earn passive income, and having more regular visitors potentially means more earnings. Increase in traffic and growth of your brand also means you’ll find more advertisers who may be willing to pay for exposure to your audience.
Ad networks such as Google AdSense are the go-to advertising for beginners in blogging. You can have ads from those networks strategically placed on your blog and you can earn some money whenever visitors click on them.
Sponsored Content
As mentioned, you may find third parties who may be willing to pay you for exposure as you get bigger. You can then do sponsored content for them in order to advertise them to your audience.
It must be noted that disclosure must be indicated on your post if it’s sponsored. Your audience will appreciate your honesty if there’s a disclaimer that clearly says a company paid you to create this content for them. Not doing so makes you look disingenuous and dishonest since people just don’t like it when they’re being fooled.
Affiliate Marketing
This is the act of having links to products being sold on a website like Amazon which people can click on if they wish to buy said product from there. When someone does buy a product through your affiliate link, you earn a commission for that sale, thus effectively earning from your blog.
Asking your audience to click on the affiliate links if they wish to buy something that the affiliate has should be a part of your call-to-action as it can indeed go a long way. If people are willing enough to click on ads, they should do the same to click on affiliate links if the message you’re presenting does resonate with them.
eBooks and Premium Content
When you have become an influencer and/or authority in your chosen niche, you can sell your expertise in it through various ways. One of them is writing an ebook or creating your own products and/or services to share your knowledge to those who are willing to pay for it.
Writing an ebook is one of the more common ways bloggers employ to take monetization to the next level. While it takes a good bit of work, a well-written ebook packed with tons of useful information can make for a lucrative source of income for your blog.
Merchandise
If your brand is particularly popular in terms of the culture fostered by your audience, then you can create physical merchandise out of that. This is more common for entertainment-oriented brands that regularly create fun content.
Whether it’s a t-shirt with a tagline or illustration that your audience is especially attached too (provided that it’s not violating any copyright) or a poster showing something from your brand that became big in some way, you can sell that and earn extra income after gauging your audience’s interest in it.
Crowdfunding and Voluntary Subscription
While online advertising is still a viable income source, it’s not as big as it used to be as there are now more people than ever before putting ads in their blogs and even more people using adblockers on their browsers. That’s why crowdfunding and voluntary subscription have become prominent options for bloggers whose content is especially good, so much that their audiences are willing to donate money to keep it coming.
Having something like a Patreon page for gathering monthly contributions is great if you have a sizable audience who are loyal to your brand and are enthusiastic about your content. Of course, you have to gauge their interest first to see if they are indeed willing to donate to your endeavors before you pull the trigger.
Events and Workshops
Similar to writing an ebook, this is great for bloggers who have become an influencer and authority in their chosen niche. If you’re willing to make appearances, whether online or in live events, in order to talk extensively about your interests and expertise to an audience, then you may book events and invite your readers to attend them through your blog.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many ways to monetize your blog. As long as you’re regularly putting up great content relevant to your niche that’s both fun and informative and have an audience that’s totally into it, then you should be able to monetize your blog and have an income stream that you can rely on.