4 Surefire Ways to Monetize Your Blog to Start Making Money!

Blogging has become a dream for many people nowadays. Gone are the days of being content to fight the daily commute to and from the office, working in a cubicle for a pittance and returning the next day to do it all over again.

Creating your own blog is a great way to become location independent and make money from anywhere in the world, doing something you love! All you need to do is find your niche, set up your website and start writing. Sounds easy right? Unfortunately, sometimes it takes years to learn through trial and error what it takes to make a successful blog. You’re writing about a topic in which you’re passionate, and you’ve got some followers, which inspires you to keep going. But one day you want to pack in the 9-5 job and blog full-time. So.

You’ve got your blog up and running. How do you now get the money rolling in?

Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Offer Online Courses

Many successful bloggers have simply found something they’re good at, that they believe can help educate others and have created their own course on that subject. Are you a makeup and fashion wiz?

Do your friends and family constantly ask for your help and advice? Are you a photographer? A diet and nutrition junkie? Find what you’re good at doing and create your own courses. Try sites like Udemy. It is an online, on-demand course website, offering more than 10,000 courses, created by people who know their stuff.  30 million people from all around the world have taken a course through Udemy.

Why don’t you create your own online courses and earn money by teaching people all over the world, on your subject?

2. Advertising

There are many, many ways to use advertising on your site to generate a passive income. First, it’s a good idea to create your own media kit. This is a document that outlines the key facts and statistics about your blog and shows your expertise. A media kit is a great idea to send to possible advertisers or brands with whom you’d like to collaborate.

Let’s look at some different ways in which you can use advertising to make money on your blog.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Sign up to an ad network related to your niche. They then give you ad code to place on your site. You will then receive advertisements, in either the form of image ads or text ads. You can get paid for every click a visitor makes on these ads. Google AdSense is the most widely used provider of pay-per-click advertising, but there are other display networks too like Chitika, RevContent, and PopAds.

Text Link Ads

This type of advertising allows you to place text based ads within the text of your articles. Let’s say your post is a ketogenic diet recipe, you can place text link ads within the post that refer to a particular ingredient you’re using, thus leading your followers to purchase the product by following that link.

Advertising Widgets

More people are now using widgets on their websites to generate passive income. A widget is a small, stand-alone application that you can embed on your website or blog to perform a specific function. There are many different types of widgets; there can be widgets for categories, search, navigation menus, display panels, and more. They can easily be placed onto a website without difficulty, and display a mix of PPC, text link ads and affiliate programs.

Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to earn passive income is through affiliate marketing. This means you recommend other brands’ products and services on your site, in exchange for a commission.

To keep your content cohesive, try to find affiliates who are in the same niche as you. For example, if your blog is offering financial advice, it wouldn’t make sense to display links to diet and nutrition. Keep your brand and content consistent; this will build a sense of trust among your followers. The Savvy Couple, for example, is a blog about earning money online. All of their blog posts is themed around ways to save money and make money.

3. Become an Influencer

These days, people no longer look to celebrities for advice on what to do, wear or buy. Instead, most of us look to our peers for advice - people who are knowledgeable in their field. Here’s where the Influencer comes in. Influencers are just people like you, and me, who have earned a considerably large and loyal following because of their transparency and know-how in their niche.

Successful influencers, with blogs, vlogs, or large social followings, achieve such popularity because of the valuable information they share with their followers. A quick search in Google will show you links to successful Influencer’s sites. Most companies, including InboxDollars, have lucrative Influencer programs.

4. Become a Brand Ambassador

A Brand Ambassador is a person who is paid to endorse or promote a particular company's products or services. How to become one?

Put out content on your Instagram page and hope that someone will like you and contact you to promote their stuff. This is the slowest method and perhaps the steepest mountain to climb.

Go out and search for brands and products you like and message them directly. Ask them to be their brand ambassador. It helps to have more than several hundred followers or more, however. This method is much faster than the first.

Visit your friends' pages and look at any promoted products. Click on links of those promoted products and ask to become a brand ambassador! Easy, right?

You won’t necessarily make a lot of money this way, but you can draw more followers, and the best part about being a brand ambassador? Many score 20% – 50% off items, or better yet, freebies!

A quick search with Google, yields numerous ways to make money from your blog. Some of them take time and are more laborious than they are lucrative. Why not search for other successful bloggers in your niche.  Study their sites, see what they’re doing, sign up to their newsletters, free e-books, or courses.

Most of all, learn from people who have made mistakes with their own blogs and have finally mastered the art. If it worked for them, it can work for you too, right? What are you waiting for? Get out there and get that blog of yours making some money!

Mark

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