Originally Posted on Copyblogger by Megan Mahoney
Finding customers is one of the biggest challenges brands face when selling products or services.
As a blogger, you’ve already done the hard work of building an audience, so there are endless ways you can make money.
Below are nine ways to make money blogging and the pros and cons of each strategy.
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Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you sell another brand’s product or service to your audience and earn a commission (usually between 10% and 20%) on each sale.
For example, The Blonde Abroad is a lifestyle and travel blog, and many of its blog posts contain affiliate links.
This blog post about plant based milk is an excellent example, as you can see that her audience earns a discount when using her discount code. The brand uses that discount code to track orders from Kiersten’s audience and then Kiersten receives a commission on any of those orders.
The benefit of affiliate marketing is that it requires very little effort on your part as you don’t have to create the product or handle customer support.
However, this also means you have little control over product quality and customer support. Unfortunately, if your audience has one bad experience with a brand you recommend, they might not trust your future recommendations. As a result, it will be more difficult for you to earn sales for products you promote in the future.
Additionally, you only make money when you actually sell products. Therefore, it’s not the most steady source of income. However, it is an excellent way to earn passive income with very little effort.
To get started with affiliate marketing, contact some of your favorite brands, which you already use and like, and see if they’d offer you an affiliate link.
You can also make money blogging by charging brands to write a blog post about their product or service.
For example, here’s an example of a sponsored post from a tea company:
You’ll see at the bottom of the post that she states it’s a sponsored post:
Some brands also provide free products or services in exchange for a review. For example, this blog post is a review of a surf camp in Sri Lanka:
Many brands reach out organically to partner with bloggers on sponsored post opportunities, but you can also reach out to your favorite brands directly and ask if they’d be interested in sponsoring a post on your blog or providing free products/services in exchange for promotion.
The benefit of sponsored posts is that you can charge a set price rather than relying on commission-based pay, which is often volatile.
The average price for a sponsored post is usually around $300, though influencers with over 100,000 followers may charge from $800 to $1,000 per post.
However, your sponsored posts and reviews must still be honest to avoid losing the trust of your audience.
If your audience feels that the review isn’t authentic, they’ll likely quit following you or stop buying products and services you recommend.
Additionally, it’s important to balance the ratio of organic content to sponsored content. If readers see that all of your content is sponsored, they’ll likely become disinterested and quit following you.
If most of your content is sponsored or contains affiliate links, your followers will likely become disinterested and quit following you.
So, another way to earn money through sponsorships while still creating organic content is by offering sponsored listings.
For example, you’ll see advertisements for different builders and designers on this log home blog in the sidebar:
You can also create a directory and charge for those listings. For example, the same blog offers a directory of log home builders, maintenance, and service professionals.
Another option is to create a job board with your blog and charge for job ads. For example, if you have a blog about design, you could create a job board for design jobs.
Or, if you have a mom blog, you could create a job board for companies looking for virtual assistants or other jobs that a mom working from home might be interested in.
Memberships and Communities
It can be difficult to find people with your exact same interests or hobbies in your hometown, so memberships and communities are excellent resources to connect with specific people with shared interests.
For example, Michelle Dempsey-Multack is a divorce coach and offers a paid VIP community called Moms Moving On:
This community is a great way for moms to connect with others experiencing similarly challenging situations.
Communities and paid memberships are excellent because they allow you to earn recurring revenue. Most basic online communities charge around $10 to $30 per month, though you can also evolve it into a more exclusive community or even a mastermind and charge thousands of dollars.
Communities and memberships also give you a unique opportunity to better understand your readers and their challenges. This customer research makes it easier to generate content ideas and even identify profitable products and services.
The downside of communities and paid memberships is that they require more active management to ensure members are courteous and actively engaged.
Engagement is particularly critical because people join communities to connect with and learn from like minded individuals. Therefore, the value other members provide dictates the value of your community.
To increase engagement, you can use a platform like Skool that unlocks rewards for engagement. For example, you might give them access to a course after they’ve commented on a certain number of posts.
To increase the value of your community, use a tiered pricing model that gives more individualized attention and access to higher paying (VIP) members. VIP members also tend to appreciate this as it allows them to cut through the noise and connect with other top performers.
Selling Digital Products
People read blogs to learn skills and advice, so offering more tactical, step-by-step guidance through a digital product like a course is another great method to monetize your blog.
For example, this woodworking blog offers an online course about woodworking:
Courses can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars.
The benefit of courses is that you create them once and sell them infinitely.
The downside of courses is that most industries are already highly competitive, and there’s more content available for free than ever before. Additionally, there are plenty of comprehensive, low cost courses available on platforms like Udemy, so competing on price isn’t a great option:
To succeed, your course must offer unique value that your audience can’t access online.
Here are a few ideas to add more value to your online course and justify a premium price point:
- Include coaching calls or live group calls
- Create a community
- Offer accountability meetings
- Include digital resources like checklists and templates
You can also build a team around your course to provide more personalized support and accountability without scaling your personal involvement in the business.
Offer Premium Content
Offering premium content is another strategy to monetize your blog. However, know that your audience can find plenty of informational content for free, so your premium content must provide valuable insights they can’t find anywhere else.
For example, Cosmetics Business is a branded business blog that offers premium content, like behind-the-scenes interviews with hard-to-reach people.
Other examples of premium content include:
- Original data, research, or statistics
- Q & A sessions with you or a guest
- Exceptionally thorough and actionable blueprints/guides
The downside of premium content is that there’s always an opportunity cost – if you publish the content for free, you can continue growing your audience and deepen your relationship with your existing audience.
Selling Physical Products
Many common blog monetization strategies involve a brand paying you as the blogger to promote their products.
However, brands only agree to promotional engagements if they’re confident that they will make even more money than the price they’re paying you to promote their products/services.
So you can potentially earn significantly more money if you create and sell your own products.
For example, this homestead blogger sells various cooking and homestead products, like aprons and towels.
This blogger also sells merchandise:
Many bloggers also sell merchandise, though your target market will be limited to your readers, as random people who haven’t heard of your blog likely won’t be interested in buying merchandise with your logo.
On the other hand, if you build a physical product that appeals to a broader market, you’ll have much more potential to grow and scale the business.
The downside of selling any physical products is that you must learn how to create, manufacture, and sell them, so it can be a learning curve when you first start.
Therefore, another option is to take equity (partial ownership) in an ecommerce company that already produces quality products.
This type of partnership can be highly profitable because your income scales with the company’s growth, and you aren’t responsible for any logistics involved in selling e-commerce products.
In fact, many YouTubers are using the equity strategy to monetize their audience. For example, Ryan Trahan recently partnered with the sweets company, Joyride, in what was likely an equity deal.
As a blogger, you can do a similar equity deal. Your blog will become the ecommerce company’s marketing engine and can focus on doing what you’re best at – creating quality content.
Additionally, you don’t necessarily need any capital to acquire equity in a thriving ecommerce business if you have a substantial following.
Selling Services
If the prospect of building your own physical products is too intimidating, another option is to sell services like consulting and coaching.
For example, Decor Fix is an interior design and decor blog and the founder offers interior design and decor coaching services:
The benefit of coaching and consulting services is that there is no upfront investment to create a product – it only requires your time.
The downside of coaching and consulting is that it isn’t very scalable because it’s limited to your time.
Another service you can offer is marketing services and consulting for brands in your target demographic. For example, if you have a travel blog, you could reach out to brands that sell travel products and offer to produce content, like social media and blog posts, for their brand.
You’re already an expert on travel marketing, so it’s a no-brainer for brands to work with you rather than a random marketing agency unfamiliar with their audience.
For example, you can see that this mom blogger, The Inquisitive Mom, offers social media marketing services for brands:
You’re already doing all of this work for your own blog, and many brands are willing to pay bloggers to do the exact same work for their brand.
Selling marketing services is also more scalable than coaching or consulting because you can hire a team to help you execute the work.
Sell Your Blog
Many brands don’t want to spend the time and money growing a brand new blog from scratch and would much rather simply buy a blog that already has traffic and a loyal audience.
Assuming it typically costs anywhere from $100 to $500 to produce a high quality blog post, many brands are happy to pay five, six, and even seven figures for an established blog with a loyal audience.
For example, this blogger recently sold their blog (The Modest Man) for a “life changing amount of money:”
If you look on Flippa or Quiet Light, you’ll see that there are still plenty of different blogs that are not only for sale but also under offer for six figures:
If you’re starting a blog specifically to sell it, be very intentional about your niche selection. Specifically, consider these factors:
- The value of the audience: For example, an audience of wealthy entrepreneurs is more valuable than an audience of high school students because the entrepreneurs have more money to spend.
- The value of the niche: A tech blog is much more valuable than a knitting blog because the value of a single sale in tech is much higher than the value of a single sale for knitting equipment.
- The market size: For example, the beauty industry is much larger than, say, the poodle industry.
- The competition: If the industry is too competitive, it will be difficult to sell your blog as you’ll find it difficult to gain traction. For example, the beauty industry is highly competitive and writing about generic beauty topics likely won’t work for a beginner blogger. Therefore, the solution is to niche down, gain traction, and then expand into the broader market.
Get More Help Monetizing Your Blog
Most successful bloggers use a variety of the strategies listed above to monetize their blogs, and you can scale your income by raising your prices for each strategy.
However, starting a blog can be challenging, and the journey can feel lonely and overwhelming. To make it easier for you, we created the Copyblogger Academy, a course and community of like-minded entrepreneurs who earn money through writing.
Many of these people, including Copyblogger CEO and seven-figure entrepreneur Tim Stoddart, are six and seven-figure bloggers.
You’ll also have access to nine different marketing courses on topics like SEO, content marketing, personal branding, email marketing, and all the other skills you need to grow a blog.
You can join the Copyblogger Academy out today risk free, and we’ll give you a full refund in 30 days if you aren’t 100% satisfied.
