One of the best parts about running your own blog is that you have the option to monetize it. Some bloggers use ads and other revenue sources to earn a little spending money monthly, while others dedicate extra time to make their blog a source of part or even full time income. There are several key ways you can make use of that. Bloggers are already earning weekly and monthly payouts through the posts they make on their business and personal blogs. Hosting advertisements is perhaps the easiest and most popular way to earn money with your blog, but there are several other unique approaches you can take to turn your writing into cash including direct sales, affiliate programs, and sponsored posts.
Making Money with Ads on Your Blog
Most people are familiar with the concepts behind Internet advertising and the common small-block graphical ads shown on the sides and footers of social profiles, timelines, blogs, and websites. While these ads don’t capture a high percentage of your traffic, they pay out quite well for the visitors you do end up directing forward to the advertiser. These ads are usually the result of a blogger or website owner signing up for an advertisement service like Google AdSense or AdRoll.
Advertising services match advertisers to platforms like blogs to serve visitors relevant ads with products and information they are likely to be interested in. Personalization of the ads based on what content visitors have expressed interest in help to convert more of your traffic and earn you more money, and is done algorithmically by the ad-serving software. All you need to do is sign up for these services, get your content approved, and paste your ad code into your HTML. Algorithms take care of the rest.
Placing Discreet Ads on Your Blog
While it’s a certainty you’ve stumbled upon a monetized blog while surfing the web, you may not have even realized it at the time. That’s because some types of ads can be quite discreet, which is generally good for keeping readers interested in your content and not giving the impression you’re posting strictly to create ad revenue. Discreet ads including in-line hyperlinks, which link a particular word to a paid advertisement, sub-menu horizontal ads containing single-word links which appear as menus to many users, and pop-under ads which don’t appear until a user leaves your blog. Some bloggers prefer discreet ads as to not distract from their content, while others find more traditional ad blocks to be appropriate for their traffic.
How Much You Can Earn With Ads on a Blog
The two prominent types of advertising systems are Pay-Per-Click (PPC,) or pay-by-impression, where the number of impressions you deliver. You most often have the choice as to how you want to be paid. Choosing a PPC ad method may result in hundreds of people visiting your blog and seeing ads between each payable ad display, but will pay around $0.25 to $1.00 per successful ad click. Getting paid by impression means each person who visits your blog and sees an ad is contributing to your payout, but these ads are often measured in the tens of thousands of visitors. It’s not uncommon to earn $10 for every 10,000 visitors. Exact payout information is unique to each blog and virtually impossible to predict given the thousands of factors involved, but ads will generally create revenue along these estimates.
Make Money Blogging with Direct and Indirect Sales
If advertising networks aren’t your thing, then you can tap into the great earnings potential of direct and indirect sales. Perhaps the most popular form of sales for bloggers is through the indirect sales method of using an Amazon Associates account. When you are approved for ads through Amazon, visitors to your blog will see ads for products they are likely going to purchase soon. A cookie is placed in the visitor’s web browser and you are compensated a variable amount of commission for any purchases they make on Amazon before the cookie expires. This indirect sales method is a great way to sell products on your blog simply by discussing them and without having to deal with shipping or payment information.
Another popular form of indirect sales is drop shipping. This term refers to the sale of merchandise that you don’t physically inventory. Drop shipping companies like Shopify will allow you to display products on your site, while offering to ship and collect payment from your visitors. Most drop shippers payout weekly, or monthly in some cases, for any orders placed as a result of your blog.
Direct sales are another great way to earn money with your blog. Direct sales involve you shipping an item to your customers directly. This can be any home-made and crafty items like those found on Etsy, or wholesale items you purchase at reduced cost in bulk to resale. The benefit in making direct sales is that you keep more of the profit per sale, while maintaining control over the entire order process. This is a less common method of earning revenue among blogs, but works perfect for many artists, manufactures, musicians, and other creators of tangible or digital goods.
Other Ways to Make Money with Your Blog
Since you’re likely paying for web hosting if you’re looking to monetize your blog, one good method to check out is upgrading your web hosting plan to a reseller hosting account. This will enable you to sell hosting plans to other blogs while running your own blog at a reduced cost. Reseller hosting is easy and cost-effective, considering you’re already paying for hosting to run your own site or blog.
There are several other creative ways to make money with your blog, especially if your content is particularly valuable or interesting. Creating premium content that sits behind a pay wall is a great way to earn continuous residual income from subscribers of your blog. Pay walls are easy to install for WordPress blog owners through the use of Pay wall plugins like Leaky.
Selling your blog posts to other websites and blogs who like to republish content is another great way to earn extra cash. Look for high-traffic blogs and sites that publish content within your blog’s particular niche and reach out to the owners to see if they’d like to purchase the rights to some of your existing posts.
Of the many ways to create revenue and make money off your new blog, the first thing to consider is creating valuable content. In order to garner the large amount of traffic your content will need to bring readers back to your blog time and time again. Produce useful blog posts and interact with the visitors of your blog’s community and you’ll see results from any of these methods of earning cash by blogging.