How Do Bloggers Make Money?

Ever wondered how do bloggers make money online? In this post I share 5 ways you can make money blogging even as a total beginner!

For the video version, click on the video below to watch:

Now, one of the questions I get asked most often is how the heck do bloggers make money? And how can you get started?

Even if you don’t know anything about making money in the blogging world. So today I wanna share with you five ways in which you can get started to make money in blogging.

METHOD 1: ADS

Now ads simply mean advertising, and you must have seen this.

If you have ever used the internet, you go to a big magazine or to a news website, and you’re always plastered with all of these ads, unless you buy a subscription to remove those ads.

The same thing happens when you are on YouTube, for example, on this channel as well, you have the option to create a paid subscription, and then you don’t see ads.

Otherwise you usually see ads.

Now, advertising essentially is a way for companies and brands to connect with bloggers who have a relevant audience for them, and then showcase their ads on their website.

What this does is that it allows the blogger to get paid for the content that they’re creating, which means that they have more motivation now to create free content, because they actually have advertisers which are willing to put ads on their website and for the companies.

It is also a win-win because their products and services get directly in front of audiences that are most interested in buying them. So let’s say you have a blog in the mommy space, and you have a tie up with a company which advertises specifically to mommy bloggers.

So basically products for kids and babies. Now this is gonna be a win-win collaboration because not only is the mommy blogger now able to monetize their content with advertising.

Also, it’s a win for the company that is using this platform to advertise on this blog. Now, usually when we, as bloggers start out to work with advertising companies, you have to start with a platform that is going to do all the negotiation for you.

So there are two types of ads that you can have on your side.

DIRECT VS INDIRECT ADS

One is the direct ad system where a company directly approaches you and says, Hey, I want to buy this space on your site.

So maybe it’s a sidebar or a top bar or a widget or somewhere in the footer where they want to include something special about their company. And they pay you a monthly or an annual fees for it.

Now this form of advertising used to be very common in the early days of blogging, but is not so common anymore.

Specifically, if you are a small blogger, the second method, which is more common in today’s day and age is when you have indirect ads.

This means that a company or a platform is going to approach you, which is going to do all the negotiation when it comes to advertisers for you.

So they’re kind of going to be the middlemen or the broker in this context. So companies such as Google accents or media wine, or ad thrive, which all work to serve bloggers and specifically show ads on blogger sites are the ones then act as these middlemen.

And in order to do this job, they take a certain commission. So for example, if you are making $10 a month from ads, then you are probably going to pay three or $4 out of that as commission to the company for being the middleman for you.

And then you get to keep the rest of it. This is pretty true when you are advertising, for example, on absence as well. And you’re monetizing your channel with ads. YouTube

Keeps a part of the revenues and gives you the rest. So this brings us to our next way to monetize your blog.

METHOD 2: AFFILIATES

Now, affiliate marketing is again, something that has been around for a really long time and is an excellent way for you to actually monetize your blog with in a passive manner, without having to actively go out and promote stuff.

Now, the way affiliates work on an ad is that essentially you sign up to be an affiliate for a product or a service that you really like, and you promote their links on your blog. Now you could be promoting their links on your blog post.

You could be promoting them on social media. You could be even giving them a shout out in a video or a podcast episode that you create, irrespective of how you go about promoting them.

They usually pay you a commission. Each time a sale is generated for that particular product or service. This means that if you make a sale for a hundred dollars product and they have a $40 commission, you make $40 each time someone buys that particular product from you.

Now, one of the most popular affiliate marketing platforms that possibly everyone is aware of is Amazon. And it’s also one of the most competitive and lowest paying commission platforms ever.

So if you are a beginner blogger who doesn’t really have a large audience, you probably wanna create an audience first, so that you’re able to actually monetize effectively with affiliate marketing.

Because usually what happens with affiliate marketing is that you need a large number of an engaged audience to come to your blog and to then click on your links and then go to the site and then check out the products and make the complete payment there.

In order for you to get a commission a few months later, now, both ads and affiliates, although excellent ways to make passive income with your blog do tend to be something that is profitable.

Once you have established some sort of audience. So if you have anything less than, let’s say 5,000 page views a month, which means less than 5,000 people are coming to your blog, it is going to be that much harder for you to make a full-time living just with these two methods of monetization, because they rely on a large audience that can be monetized in order for them to actually make sense, especially because you are actually splitting your commission or the value that you create each time you make money through one of these methods.

All right, this third method that I wanna share with you, which is one of the most popular methods that people know of when they think about bloggers or influencers, and that is to make money through sponsorships.

METHOD 3: SPONSORSHIPS

Now, sponsorships is when either a brand approaches you to create a certain piece of content on your blog for them, or when you approach a brand in your industry and you say, Hey, I have this audience.

And I think this would be a great match for us. So how about working together? And when I talk about sponsorships, I’m not talking about product placements, where a company sends you a free product and you write a thousand word article for them and you get no payment in exchange.

I’m talking about sponsorships where you have a clear payment structure involved, and the company is actually paying you either a one time fee for creating that particular blog post, or they’re paying you a recurring fee for creating the blog post plus an affiliate commission for any future sales.

Now, the second option is a very lucrative option specifically if you’re just starting out, because that means each time the company makes money from your article.

You also get a certain amount from that particular sale as well, but you also get paid for the upfront work that went into creating the block post and images and all the production that goes into creating content.

Now, sponsorships, although an excellent way to work with brands and companies in your industry and establish your credibility.

They do tend to be a little bit more on the active side, which means that you will usually have to create new pieces of content over and over again for the specific brand or company that you work with.

This means that it is not exactly a passive income method such as the first two that I mentioned. So even though it can be a lucrative method specifically, if you have a large audience, it does tend to be pretty time consuming.

So if you’re someone who doesn’t have a lot of time to create new content responses every single month, then maybe you want to look at some of the more passive ways of creating an income stream on your blog.

All right, this brings us to the fourth income stream, which is one of my favorite income streams.

METHOD 4: PRODUCTS

And that is when you create your own product. Now you can create two types of products to sell as a blogger. You can either create digital products, which can be, for example, eBooks PDFs, Excel, sheets, templates, swipe files, courses, workshops, really the sky is the limit.

When it comes to creating digital products, or you can be creating physical products, which are products that you can actually touch and feel, and that you have to ship to your customer’s location.

Now, needless to say, digital products have a higher profit margin because you don’t have shipping and inventory costs.

And it’s also a lot more passive because once you have created the product, you don’t have to consistently work on shipping it or manufacturing and selling it over and over again, once it’s created, it’s created and you can sell it over and over again by leveraging automation.

However, when it comes to physical products, you do have a little bit more of an overhead, which means that your profit margins are gonna be lower, but they can also be very lucrative ways to monetize blog.

If you aren’t an industry that allows it, for example, many bloggers in the personal development and productivity niche have their own planners or workbooks that they ship to their clients.

And that has become a huge source of income for them because their clients really find a lot of value in this particular physical product, as well as the blogger who then has to ship and update this product regularly.

So it provides value to their clients as well. So when it comes to creating your own products, the biggest argument here for creating them is that no one can take it away from you. No one can tell you that they are not going to allow you to do something because you don’t meet an arbitrary number of page views or an arbitrary number of sessions or an arbitrary number of followers.

Now, usually when we talk about working with the first three methods that I mentioned, which is ads, affiliates, and sponsorships, they do require you to have some kind of entry barrier in place.

Which means that if you’re a really tiny blogger who doesn’t have a large audience in terms of the page views that you get from people around the world, then your chances of being able to monetize with one of these methods is much less compared to when you take the control in your own hand, and you decide that you are gonna be offering your own products, irrespective of which niche you’re in and irrespective of which country you’re in as well.

Now, another thing to keep in mind is that most of the ad networks, as well as the affiliate marketing networks, usually only accept

People who either have a large audience based in the us UK or in developed countries, or are actively based in these countries.

So this means that if you don’t fall inside one of these countries or one of the threshold criteria for these monetization methods, you can’t actually monetize your blog, which totally blows because you are someone who wants to offer value in your particular niche to the world.

And you wanna make sure that you’re actually also able to pay your bills. And you’re not just doing this for a hobby or as an expensive hobby for your whole life. So when it comes to creating products, that is something that I discuss a lot more in my course CEO Blogger Academy.

So that brings me to the final method that you can use to monetize your blog.

And that is monetizing your blog with services.

METHOD 5: SERVICES

Now services essentially means that you offer either a one-on-one or a one to mini service in your particular industry, as either as a freelancer or a consultant or a coach, and you monetize your blog with the same.

Now, when it comes to monetizing with services, it is obviously an active one-on-one time consuming activity. So it is also not a very passive stream of income, such as products or ads or affiliates can be.

But if you’re someone who really loves working with clients and you love having that transformation available to your particular clients or customers, that it is an excellent way for you to monetize your blog as well.

If you don’t have a large audience, you can get started on sites like Fiver or Upwork, or even just networking on Instagram or LinkedIn and offer your services to creators entrepreneurs or any other people out there who can benefit from what you have to say.

For example, some of the people that I work with today as contractors and on different projects are people who just pitch their services to me via social media. And that’s how we got to working with them as well.

So as this industry grows more and more people are going to be looking for freelancers as well as experts in their niche, who can help businesses scale in certain formats in certain areas.

So for example, if you’re a web designer or a photographer, and you don’t want to wait until your ads and affiliates are making enough money, you can start pitching your services to your clients or to your readers ASAP and start making money until you get to the point where you can decide whether you want to continue offering services, or just focusing on passive income streams of revenue.

Needless to say, all these five methods are excellent ways for you to generate an extra source of income in your blogging business.

And if you don’t have a blog yet, this is an excellent incentive for you to start because there’s so many possibilities in the blogging world to get started and to start making passive income, as well as active income for your hobbies, for your skills and for things that you love to share anyway, with the world.

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