“How do you make money blogging?” That’s one of the most common questions I’ve gotten over the last 4 years, ever since my wife and I tried blogging full-time. We blogged full-time for a year before starting our marketing company. During that time we learned how to make money blogging (mostly through trial and error). Here are the 3 ways anyone can make money through blogging.
1. Advertising
The first way to make money from blogging is through advertising. When you have a blog, you are like a mini magazine. You create content (hopefully good content). If you can build a big enough audience, then you can attract businesses to pay you to advertise on your blog.
There are two main types of advertising for blogs: banner ads and sponsored posts. A banner ad is like a regular ad in a magazine. It’s usually a clickable image with text that is shown somewhere on your blog post. You can charge advertisers per month, by impressions (how many people see the ad), or by clicks.
As a blog, you don’t always have to directly attract advertisers. There are ad platforms that help you sell your ad space. The most popular one that is used by bloggers is Google AdSense. When you sign up for this program, Google will decide what ads to show on your blog. Each of your blog readers will see customized advertisements. Google will look at who your reader is and determine which advertisement would be the most relevant for them. You do have the ability to block certain types of ads from showing on your website. When we used Google AdSense, we found that we would get paid $1 for every 1,000 pageviews.
The second type of advertising is a sponsored post. A sponsored post is content created for your blog by an advertiser. Usually it is content that will promote their product or service, or content that the advertiser thinks that your audience would be interested in but contains links back to the advertiser’s website (to boost their SEO). Recently I had an advertising company offer me US$80 to publish a sponsored post on our blog.
2. Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, your blog earns a commission by promoting another company’s products or services. Every time one of your readers purchases a product through your blog, you earn a share of the profit.
One of the most popular affiliate marketing programs is the Amazon.com Associate Program. We have been a part of this program for the past 4 years. We actually received a cheque from Amazon yesterday for $145.93.
This is how it works: When you register for the Amazon Associate program, you get the ability to create customized links to any product sold on Amazon. Whenever we blog, we often refer to books that we’ve read or products that we’ve used. We will include our custom links to those books or products on Amazon. If one of our readers is interested in finding out more about that book, they can click on that link and preview the book, read the description, read reviews, and see the price. If they decide to buy the book, then we make between 4-6% of the price (the percentage rises with more products sold).
An attractive feature of this program is if someone clicks on one of your links to go to Amazon and buys something else, you also make a commission. Two months ago someone clicked on one of our links to go to Amazon and ended up purchasing a digital camera for $320. We made a commission of $20 from that purchase.
Generally speaking, about 2-3% of people that read a blog post (with an Amazon link) will click on it. Once they get to the Amazon page, 5-8% of people will make some sort of purchase (in December, that number increases to 10%).
3. Sell Your Own Products
The third way to make money from blogging is to sell your own products. The first products we tried to sell on our blog were our books. We sell the Kindle version of our books for $5 and the hard copy for $10 and $12 on Amazon. For the Kindle version, Amazon pays us a 65% royalty. For the hard copy, it costs $4 to print the book, Amazon takes $3, and we get paid $3.
The new trend is for bloggers to develop online courses, which they sell for anywhere between $100 to $5000. You can sell directly to your blog readers, or you can create your own affiliate marketing program and pay other bloggers a commission to sell your online course (which happens often).
Many traditional businesses decide to blog because it is a great way to generate more sales. Last week I wrote about how the Coracle Marketing blog has helped increase our sales leads by 122% and revenue by 42%.
So there you have it. The three main ways to make money from blogging are through advertising, affiliate marketing, or selling your own products. If you have any questions about how you can use a blog to make money, feel free to comment on this blog post, on social media, or contact me – I’d love to help.