Turn Your Blog into an Income Machine with These Quick Tips

There was a time when a blog was something only super-nerds maintained. Getting online was tough, expensive and had not much real returns for the average Joe. The last decade has changed all of that. We’ve seen the internet go from being a curiosity to a necessity. Communication methods that we never imagined could exist are now integral parts of our lives. Most importantly, the internet has become a place where new ventures can achieve multi-billion dollar statures in a matter of months – something that most definitely was not the case a decade ago.

Here are six strategies for you to pick from and get started on building your own empire.

Run PPC Ads

ppc

Advertising is the easiest and quickest way to monetize a blog. Not every blog will earn thousands of dollars in ad revenue per month, but even a small start is a step in the right direction. You can pick from a variety of ad formats – text link ads, display ads or even paid content ads. Each time a visitor on your site clicks on one of these ad types, you end up earning a small fee. This fee varies among various ad networks and how much you can earn is largely a variable of the size of your blog’s traffic and the genre of content you create on it. Mahesh Mohan offers a very interesting calculation of how a blog needs at least 100,000 page views to make $100,000 a year from Google Ad Sense.

Promote Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing is similar to direct ads on your blog, but not really the same thing. You see, instead of selling ad space on your blog, here you’ll be creating content about the brands that want to promote themselves and post these promotional posts on your blog.

Bloggers with a decent readership and a sizeable number of visitors per day are good bets to venture into affiliate marketing. This is because, unless your audience already trusts you and what you have to say, they’ll never consider the product or service you’re peddling seriously.

When they do consider it, click on to the affiliate merchant’s link and actually make a purchase during that visit, you stand to get a pre-decided commission on every such sale. Commissions can range from 10 to 30% of the sticker price of the product you helped sell. Rakuten and ShareASale are examples of affiliate networks you can pick from to promote brands on your blog.

affiliate

Source: Sugarrae

Sell Stuff

What if you don’t want to turn your blog into a cluttered, ugly (or subtle) ad-addled site? You can still make tons of money without defacing your precious labor of love. Instead of promoting others’ businesses, sell your own stuff on your blog. The variety of things you could offer up for sale is truly limited only by your imagination and abilities. From ebooks to whitepapers to PowerPoint templates to website themes to good old real world products; there’s nothing ecommerce cannot help you sell. All you need is a simple shopping cart plugin like Shopify’s – no matter what CMS or framework your site is built on, whether it’s Weebly, Wix, or something else – and you’re in business in minutes!

blog ecommerce

Offer Consulting Services

A blog typically is a place where you share not just your thoughts, but also some of your expertise with the world at large. So how about making some money from this expertise via your blog, instead of doling everything out for free?

A large number of bloggers have built successful consulting businesses out of their blogging success. Most rockstar bloggers like Ramit Sethi and Marcus Sheridan offer their marketing smarts out on hire and charge their clients a pretty penny for their expert advice. The best part? You can promote your budding consultancy business via your own blog. Make money and save money at the same time!

consultancy

Pursue Paid Speaking Opportunities

Just as consultancy is a great option to bring in some extra cash from your blog, offering your services as a guest speaker is another awesome opportunity. Mind you, this is not for someone who blogs to vent their anger at the system or to keep a log of their daily innermost thoughts. You really need to have something valuable to offer your potential audience to even consider paid speaking as a means of making money.

Sign up for event and conference updates on sites like AllConferences, which will keep you posted on the latest industry specific events in your area. Trade associations in your industry niche, public service organizations, colleges and universities are all fertile grounds for a potential speaking paid gig. Use your blog to first establish your credentials as a thought leader and then approach the right conferences that match your skill sets with the offer of providing them with your services as a speaker.

speaker

Ads in Your Email Newsletters & RSS Feeds

Nearly every serious blog has its own mailing list and RSS feed. Actually, if you don’t have one yet, start building one today.

A captive audience like a newsletter or RSS subscriber base is an extremely valuable asset that can be monetized through judiciously placed ads in your weekly or monthly newsletters. These can be negotiated along with the banner or text ads on your blog home page and can advertise brands that operate in the same industry area as your blog content. This will make sure that the ads don’t stick out like sore thumbs in your content and that your subscribers find value in the ads you publish. A targeted ad network service like LaunchBit is a good option to kick start the monetization of your blog’s newsletter database.

email ad

Epilogue

To be fair, not every new startup enters the stratospheric heights that an Uber or an AirBnB have managed. However, the fact remains that it has never been easier to make money from nearly zero investments as it is today. Why even a humble personal blog has the potential to earn you millions of dollars in revenue with the right strategy. Our very own Ammar isn’t doing too bad for himself either! :)

Which of these strategies are working for you? Which ones are you raring to try out?

6 thoughts on “Turn Your Blog into an Income Machine with These Quick Tips”

  1. Hi Rohan Ayyur
    Thanks for such a nice valuable content. I got a question for you. Can I earn money by selling products through a free blogger? I’m running a free blog (not custom domain), so could you please guide me if I can do affiliate marketing etc things. I’m waiting for your response and thanks in advance.

  2. As far as I am concerned, Affiliate is the best way of generating revenue out of your blog. Adsense is highly sensitive. Although I have worked with both but I am bit more satisfied with the affiliate programs. Amazing post BTW

  3. I’m very much in the “create and sell your own products” camp. Whilst I know a lot of bloggers who make enough money through affiliate sells and PPC, there’s always the risk that it’ll go belly up and you’ll be out of an income stream.

    I’ve started created e-courses and books based on what my readers are searching for and asking – this is a great way to determine how to make money. Listen to your audience and use them for inspiration. To make money you need to solve a problem, so tap into those problems and create solutions that people need in their lives!

  4. Hi Rohan,

    I like each tip.

    I have dove into selling eBooks these days after creating over 120 of them recently. OK, over the past 11 months, I have written and published that many on Amazon Kindle. I am just starting to promote them now so I figure that the word will spread. I’ve already generated over 100 audio book sales without touching those suckers; crazy how they sell on their own because again, other than a quick blog post, I have barely done any promoting on that front.

    As for the income streams listed above I’d say that selling stuff really rocks. I vibe with this stream. I also feel making money through the other streams is possible. I am a freelance writer and I also offer blog coaching services but I’m moving away from each model to focus more on the good old eBook and audio book side of things.

    One note: focus your attention and energy on creating helpful, insightful, in-depth content. Be all over that because content drives sales, or, blogging income. Here’s how: people find your blog. People read your posts. If people really, really like your posts, and if you have solved their problems or if you have helped them live their dreams for free, you will find that folks buy into what you’re doing….literally.

    Let’s say someone scrolls through my blog. They may dig my last few blog posts. Awesome. If I helped to solve their problems they will grow to trust me. If they trust me they will likely promote my content, spreading my word, which helps boost my blogging income.

    These trusting folks will also buy my 99 cent eBooks (wink wink) and will leave positive reviews for me, along with 5 star ratings. Further boosting my income. More than a few folks will hire me, boosting my online income. Pretty neat. All because I created helpful, thorough, valuable content for a targeted audience.

    In addition to the value thing, double down on targeting too. I strayed a bit from my core topic over the past few months; guilty as charged. But that’s OK. I was busy creating eBooks. Now I’m all blogging tips, all the time, and by tomorrow I’ll be spreading the word from a tropical paradise again. Pretty dang neat. The thing is, when you stay on topic all of the time you’ll grow your list of targeted readers who’ll buy what you’re offering, product-wise, and many will hire you on the service side of things.

    It’s really wonderful, how it all works. Just be sure to set up those helpful income streams that you’ve carefully set up for us above. Each one works, and works darn well, when you create helpful, targeted content to draw in your buying audience.

    This was a clean read Rohan. Loved it. I am cutting back on income streams right now as I laser target my focus but I will slowly add them back as I establish my eBook promotional campaign. I’ll spread the word gradually, then maybe I’ll dwell on adding advertising streams or a few of the ideas discussed above.

    Thanks for the super share and have a fun week.

    Ryan

  5. Here is another tip to attract more income…

    Google this phrase:

    273 most expensive Google keywords

    The most expensive search is for car insurance quotes – more than $70.00 a click!

    This list is a great way to find expensive words that get over 100,000 searches a month.

    Plus, these same PPC advertisers might wanna sponsor your blog post.

    1. Thank you for the tip. I need to understand something from your tip. I have a blog called todaybase.com and it is not a car insurance blog, so how do I attract car insurance ads to my site?

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