Anyone that wants to make money with blogging has several options. In fact, most bloggers remain blissfully unaware that they have seven smart ways to make money with blogging. All of these seven ways to make money with blogging are legit.
If you’re a blogger or wish to become one, surely, you’d love to step up your income or start monetizing your blog. Therefore, stay with me as I will be discussing in this article, the seven smart ways to make money with blogging. And there’re several good reasons why you should use these seven ways too.
Reasons to Start a Blog & Use These Seven Ways
Nowadays it’s very important to have a second source of income. That’s because nobody can predict what 2021 and beyond holds for us. We hear about the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and the havoc it’s wreaking on businesses small and large. As a result, there are no guarantees that the stable job you hold today, would be there for you tomorrow.
At the same time, we’re all witnessing an increase in the overall cost of living, due to inflation. Furthermore, our wants in some cases, have actually become our needs, due to evolution in technology. Therefore, to afford such wants, most of us would require a second stream of money other than a regular job.
In such situations, a good blog could help you make money even while you’re asleep. The ways to monetize your blog that I will discuss could help you in such efforts.
Seven Smart Ways to Make Money with Blogging
Before I begin discussing the seven smart ways to make money with blogging, here’s something you should fully comprehend. By any yardstick, blogging isn’t a ‘get-rich-quick plan, scheme, or game. Instead, it takes several months or even years of dedicated hard work and excellent digital marketing processes for any blog to become successful and start making money for you.
According to Pritam Nagrale founder of SureJob, the purpose of blogging isn’t merely to make money. Instead, it is to provide people some information that they can identify and engage while using it for their lives.
Having said that, I’ll add that there’re about 800 million blogs on the Internet from almost every corner of the world. Not all of them are successful and in fact, some are already inactive. Therefore, making money as a blogger isn’t the proverbial cakewalk. But if you can create a blog and post content that people would love to read, share and engage with you, here’re the top seven smart ways to make money with blogging.
| S. No. | Ways to Make Money with Blogging |
| 1 | Google AdSense |
| 2 | Affiliate Marketing |
| 3 | Sponsored Posts |
| 4 | Accept Paid Advertisements |
| 5 | Offer Premium, Paid Content |
| 6 | Use Your Email List |
| 7 | Sell a Course |
1. Google AdSense
Most bloggers in the world prefer Google AdSense to make money from blogging. After all, Google is the single largest search engine in the world. Hence, it also provides ads for companies and other businesses.
When you subscribe to Google AdSense, you’re giving permission to Google to display ads on your blog site. These ads will be customized by Google, depending upon the searches made by the reader of your blog. For example, if the reader or follower of your blog was searching for airline tickets, Google will display ads of airlines and travel companies on your blog to that individual. And if another was looking for food, Google AdSense will display ads related to restaurants and supermarkets.
If any of your readers or followers click on these ads, Google will pay you some money. The amount of money you make depends upon the location of the reader or follower and the business whose ad was shown. If your reader is in India and the ad was from an Indian company, you would get paid in Rupees. But if your reader or follower was in Germany and clicked on an ad there, you would get some money in Euro, but converted as Indian Rupees.
There’re certain criteria you have to fulfill before you can subscribe to Google AdSense. You could check these on the official website of Google AdSense to ensure you qualify.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically selling products to your readers and followers for someone else. In fact, the world’s largest online store, Amazon, runs a wonderful affiliate marketing program under the brand name Amazon Associates.
If you become a member of Amazon Associates, you’ll get a dashboard where you can create affiliate links, ads, and lots of other stuff to promote certain products. And whenever someone clicks on your affiliate link to buy, Amazon pays you between two percent and 18 percent of the actual cost of the product, minus taxes and shipping charges, where applicable. Statistics from Amazon reveal, about 42 percent of their sales come from affiliate marketers who’re actually bloggers.
However, Amazon isn’t the only organization or business in the world that pays you to sell their products. There’re several more. eBay, Flipkart, and many more online sellers offer attractive affiliate marketing programs that you could join to make money with blogging.
In fact, affiliate marketing is becoming very popular worldwide. At the end of 2020, the entire global affiliate marketing industry stood at a whopping $12.2 billion with projections it would cross the $17 billion mark by the year 2025.
3. Sponsored Posts
You can make a lot of money by accepting sponsored posts from other bloggers, companies, political parties, stores, and many others. However, this would be possible only when your blog becomes popular and you’ve several followers. Other bloggers and organizations will pay you to publish a post because they’re interested in your audiences. Hence, they pick bloggers that are very popular and have a wide following.
However, there’s one glitch about accepting sponsored posts. The first is that the sponsored post could be out of sync with the original theme of the blog. For example, if you’re blogging about education, someone might ask you to post a blog about making money. These instances are rare but they do occur.
The other is that sometimes, a sponsored post might contain incorrect information that could misguide your followers. If that occurs, you risk losing some of your fan following. And trust me, it can prove very difficult to regain that trust and develop that high fan following later.
4. Accept Paid Advertisements
If your blog site has a rather large following, you could accept paid advertisements to make money. This would also depend upon the design of your blog site because you would need some space to place these ads. There’s certain software that you could program to show these ads to your readers and followers. However, in such cases, an Indian ad might be seen in China, which means the display goes waste.
Should your blog be very popular and have a large fan following, approach organizations that offer products or services that are in sync with the main theme of the blog. For example, if your blog is all about making money, you could approach Mutual Fund houses, stock trading platforms, banks, and other financial institutions to place ads on your blog site.
How much would organizations pay you? There’re no definite figures. However, you can check how much money do newspapers charge for advertising on their websites and arrive at a rate depending upon the popularity of your blog. In such cases, the advertiser may ask you some questions about the demographics of your followers because they wish to get value for the money they’ll pay for you to display ads on your blog post.
5. Offer Premium, Paid Content
As a blogger, you could also open a membership site. This means, you’ll provide exclusive and premium content to subscribers, that’s not available on your regular blogsite. Again, this is only possible when you’re very famous and have made a brand for yourself as a superb blogger.
Generally, people will pay to read premium content only if they’ve got something to gain. Therefore, if you’re planning on offering paid content on membership, create a blog on something that people would really love reading and want to know more about. Some common themes for such blogs include information about stocks and stock market movements, making money, and hobbies at which you’re adept.
Offering premium content isn’t really everyone’s cup of tea (or coffee, if you wish). But it’s possible and comes with extensive practice. Normally, only veteran bloggers with very large followings offer premium paid content through membership websites.
6. Use Your Email List
As a blogger, you’ll certainly wish to give updates to your followers about any new blog posts. And most bloggers have a contact form where people can contact them. Additionally, they also have a comments section. Usually, anyone that wishes to receive updates, contact you or leave comments to have to give their names and email IDs. This helps you build an email list.
If you’re blogging about some niche product or service such as cars, finance, or hobbies, manufacturers and service providers would definitely be interested in your email list. Therefore, you could offer them your email list. That’s because these organizations will use them as leads for email marketing.
However, there’s one risk in doing this. The first risk is that you’ll have no control over your email list and one buyer could sell it to another. This would cause your follower to receive a lot of spam mail. Secondly, all blog and website owners nowadays have to publish and comply with a privacy policy that assures followers about what data you’ll gather from visitors to your blog site.
Moreover, for your blog to be legit in Europe, you’ll have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy and publish the same on your website. GDPR violations could land you with legal problems.
7. Sell a Course
Once you establish your own brand as a blogger, you can promote and sell your own course on blogging, digital marketing, and content writing to your followers and others. This is a very common way for famous bloggers to make money. At the same time, you’ll require sufficient years of experience in the entire blogging process, including content writing, Search Engine Optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing to offer such courses.
You can sell the course from your own website or promote and sell through e-learning platforms such as Udemy.com. Or you could market it through both these channels. Generally, this is done by advertising a live seminar or teleconference through your blog. At the seminar or workshop, give details about the course and start accepting enrolments through the blogsite. You can also sign-up with a bank to accept payments on your behalf by incorporating a compatible online payments system on the website.
In Conclusion
There’re several other ways to monetize your blogging. One of them is blogging for others as a content writer or providing digital marketing services and consultancy. In this article, I’ve spoken about the seven smart ways to make money with blogging that only veteran bloggers know but often don’t speak about. You could try any of these and make money.
Ends.
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[MBA in Finance]
Nazim Khan is an expert in Microsoft Excel. He teaches people how to use it better. He has been doing this for more than ten years. He is running this website (TechGuruPlus.com) and a YouTube channel called "Business Excel" since 2016. He shares useful tips from his own experiences to help others improve their Excel skills and careers.
