Creating amazing blogs or website is great fun, but unfortunately running them is not cheap. There’s hosting you need to think about, yearly domain costs, plugins, updates, people to pay if you have outsourced your content writing, and all kinds of payments. Thankfully there are several different ways to monetize a blog and make some of that money back.

What is required to monetize your blog?

Before we jump into how to monetize your blog I want to talk a bit about what is required from a blog that you might want to monetize and that is because most of the ways we are going to use to monetize your blog require these.

1. Content

To monetize your blog the first thing you are obviously going to need is content and preferably great content. This is simply for the reason that if your content is terrible whos going to want to consume it? No worries, if you are not that into writing here are our 10 Tips For Great Content Writing which you can steal from us to get started.

2. Value

Even if your content is good or great if it doesn’t offer any value to the person reading or consuming it some other way there is no way for you to engage them which comes in our next part. To keep this simple you can remind yourself with this short reminder ACV meaning “Always Create Value“.

3. Engage

In today’s world even if you have the best content in the world that creates immense value to the users they still might forget you or brush you to the side and that’s simply because people have the need to engage. When you engage with your users in your blog comments, on social media, or in a social group you’ve created (click here to join the Blog Inbox community) it creates a connection between you and the users. This will keep them engaged with you and your content.

4. Authority

Google has been moving from simple “word match” to much bigger and more complex search algorithms a long long time ago already, but what does this mean to you and me? It means that they are now focusing more and more on brands and in more detail authority. The more authority you can create for yourself the high chances you have of ranking high on search engines like Google, thus reaching more people and being able to gain more visitors, which again leads to more interest in advertisers to be seen on your blog, which in return means you will be able to monetize your blog better.

10 ways to monetize your blog

Now that we know what is required from us to monetize our blog, let’s find out how to monetize it and what different kinds of methods we have available.

1. Advertisements

One of the easiest and most profitable forms of monetizing your blog is of course to add ads to your site. For this, you can use Google Adsense or get started with platforms like Ezoic. Platforms like Ezoic help you run ads automatically on your site and sell the ad spots on your site for you so you don’t have to spend your important time finding advertisers and making a pitch for them to advertise on your site. And the best part is that Ezoic actively optimizes the ad placements and performance of your site to give the best experience to your users while maximizing your revenue, so it’s a WIN-WIN-WIN.

2. Affiliate marketing

If you blog about a certain topic you could always turn to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing offers bigger payouts than advertisements because you are only paid per sale. This means you could be making anything from 1 – 30 % per sale on the products or services life. Some affiliate programs even offer lifetime payouts meaning as long as the person or company pays for the product or service you will also gain money from those payments. Great services to try out regarding affiliate marketing are the Amazon Affiliate Program and PartnerStack.

3. Sell ebooks

Got content you could easily turn into books? Then ebooks are the way to go. Ebooks are a great way to monetize your blog because it’s easy to promote your own ebook to the audience that is already interested in your topic or if you don’t have your own you can always drive those sales to another ebook you might know and love as well.

4. Email marketing

Monetizing your blog usually requires a huge amount of traffic, but if you manage to gather even a small but engaged email list with your blog you can easily use that to market these interested parties to almost any kind of product or service. And if you thought email marketing is dead, you are dead wrong, because it’s been proven to still be one of the best ways to engage and reach your target audiences. Click here to learn How To Build An Email List In WordPress With MailPoet.

5. Sell courses

If you are able to blog about a certain topic you probably can teach about it. Only courses are a growing business and what better way to monetize your blog than by teaching others about the topic. Creating an online course around the topic of your blog is a great way to monetize your blog. A good example of this is different blogs about mindfulness, yoga, food, finances, and even tech blogs that teach around the topics of their blog or directly teach people how to do things from basic yoga moves and cooking to how to solder or trade stocks even.

6. Sell digital products

If your blog focuses heavily on the digital world one way to monetize your blog is to offer digital products. For example, you could sell an SEO tool you have built or a plugin for WordPress. Or maybe you have built an online calculator to count the calories of food which people can pay a small subscription fee to use. All of these are great ways to turn your blog into a money-making machine.

7. Offer paid memberships

If you have a dedicated following that’s ready to pay then offering paid memberships is a great way to monetize your blog because this way you can stay focused on generating the best content you can while still keeping the site ad-free if you wish to do so and serving those who are most dedicated to your blog.

8. Sell sponsored posts

Many companies and sellers have noticed the power of sponsored posts and actively buying spots for their content on blogs. This is a great way to gain money while gaining high-quality content at the same time for your blog.

9. Sell physical products

One of the best ways to actually sell something is to talk about it and if you can sell digital products, why not sell physical products. Might it be a rake, a fidget spinner, makeup, or something completely different, blogging about products is also a great way to become their seller because people who follow your blog might also be interested to buy the physical products you talk about.

10. Ask for donations

Not everyone feels comfortable asking for donations, but let’s face it. You have worked hard on your content so asking for donations is not a bad thing. Donations should be considered more of a tip or a thank you from the donators who you have brought value to by sharing information about certain topics or even showing them how certain things work. This is also the business model many content creators use to pay for their living by accepting donations through services like Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.

Final thoughts

There are several ways to monetize your blog and you might be tempted to try them all out to maximize your revenue. Unfortunately, not everything works for everyone so it’s important to try to find the ways to monetize your blog that work for you and most importantly that work for your audience. For example, some might find great success in email marketing while others might be able to sell their courses, but not wise versa.

Comment below and tell us what has worked for you or which of the methods shown in this guide have you tried already?