Running a blog is a time- and energy-consuming endeavor. As such, regardless of your motivation, if you do not invest in blog monetization well, it may become a burden.
Furthermore, since there’s a myriad of easy-to-implement blog monetization techniques, you should at least consider trying out some of them.
In fact, with the proper approach, blogging can provide a full-time income and become a profession, rather than a hobby. All you have to do is choose the right strategy – or, why not, a combination of strategies – and be consistent and persistent.
If you are not sure how to monetize your blog, look no further!
In this article, we highlight 8 blog monetization techniques in 2022, and provide actionable advice on how to make them work.
Of course, you don’t need to try all of them at the same time. Instead, you can start small with one of the easier ones and work your way up toward the more difficult solutions. Alternatively, undertake a few at once to see which one sticks.
Without further ado, let’s explore how to make money from your blog!
1. Publish Ads
Ads are the easiest and most hassle-free way to monetize your blog. They require almost no additional effort on your part and can deliver a steady, albeit not very high, income. It’s a great option if your blog is a hobby and you don’t want to make anything more of it.
However, for the ads to deliver, you need to have consistent traffic to your website. This way, more advertisers will be interested in their offers showing up alongside your content. Consequently, there will be more visitors who are exposed to the ads and click on them. As a result, you will have more income coming from your blog monetization efforts.
Depending on how much work you want to put in, you should consider negotiating with individual businesses. Make sure they are relevant to your niche. You can offer them strategically placed ad spaces on your pages. This is so their offers have a higher chance of making an impression on your visitors.
Furthermore, if your website is popular, advertisers may even reach out to you. This way, you won’t need to seek out blog monetization opportunities yourself.
However, if you don’t feel like dealing with the whole process yourself, automate it with services like Google’s AdSense. They do all the work for you and align the content of the ads to fit your page in order to maximize engagement.
In addition, you can use WordPress plugins to place the ads to be visible but not annoying, and seamlessly integrate with your content.
The downside of ads is that nowadays thousands of people use ad blockers. You can bypass this by issuing a message prompting the user to turn off their ad blocker for the current session. This, of course, may still drive them away, but it’s a risk worth taking.
2. Recommend Affiliate Products
Another easy blog monetization technique is to include affiliate links in your content. Basically, the goal here is to find products relevant to your niche, mention them in your posts, and link to a merchant that offers them.
This way when someone follows your link and buys the product, you receive a percentage of the retail price. The more products you recommend and the better placed they are, the more income you will have.
However, for this blog monetization approach to be successful, your recommendations need to be relevant and made naturally.
For example, let’s imagine that your niche is cooking and you publish your favorite recipes for tasty homemade meals. You can recommend brands for ingredients, utensils, appliances, bakeware, aprons, and whatever else you use in your process. This way, your blog monetization will be seamless and serve as a helpful piece of advice rather than an ad.
Imagine you are using cute cookie cutters. If your readers like them, they may want to buy them. You can contact the seller that provides them, negotiate an affiliate fee, and link to their product page. This way they will make more sales and you will make additional profits. It’s a win-win situation.
You can do this with any relevant product that you like and think your customers may enjoy as well.
If you don’t feel like contacting sellers yourself, you can join Amazon’s affiliate program where you can link to thousands of products and earn from your reader’s purchases.
When using affiliate links, make sure to inform your customers what this means. For example, say that you will receive a percentage of the price, and mention whether there is a discount when using your link to buy the product.
3. Publish Sponsored Content
If your content is popular enough and has many followers, consider publishing sponsored content as an alternative blog monetization income. Businesses with products and services pertinent to your niche can pay you to review them or provide content for you to publish.
Depending on your niche and the type of content you prefer, you can write reviews or opinions, test products, and share your experiences with your audience.
Furthermore, you could find a business in your niche that can feed into your blog monetization efforts as part of their brand awareness initiative. For example, in the past, Red Bull used to sponsor the blogs of athletes and other popular people.
However, similarly to affiliate links, there are some rules that apply to sponsored content:
- Only associate with businesses and products your customers will care about.
- Write about products that you have personally tried and enjoyed.
- Be truthful and don’t skip the unflattering bits, otherwise, your credibility will suffer.
To encourage businesses to contact you, prepare an informative and exhaustive media kit. Use it to explain how the partnership works, its objectives and rules, and, overall, tell the other side what to expect. This will save you time and will make the negotiations hassle-free and easy.
Note: When publishing sponsored content, you should always mark it properly. This way readers will know how to approach the text. Nobody likes it when people are trying to sneak in advertisements disguised as regular content.
4. Provide Subscription Services
When publishing a blog, it’s best to provide all of your best content for free. This way, it will be easier to become popular and attract loyal followers.
However, once you’ve built credibility, you can consider blog monetization by offering your readers additional value in exchange for a monthly subscription.
What content you will place behind the paywall depends entirely on your niche, your preferences, your audience’s specifics, your blog monetization goals, and, of course, on what you are able to deliver.
This can be video courses, behind-the-scenes content, interviews with interesting correspondents, or even a podcast. If you’ve managed to create a solid following, you can also consider launching and moderating a forum of another community where your readers can communicate, and collaborate.
Furthermore, membership can provide your readers with additional benefits such as access to reports, webinars, discounts, limited events, swag, and whatever else is pertinent to your niche. You can even organize regular Q&A sessions where attendees can ask you questions and tap into your knowledge.
People love communities, and a blog is a great way to attract them to join yours. Just make sure that the membership fee is a reasonable one and corresponds to what the person will receive in return.
5. Write for Other Websites
If you are good at what you do and work on your personal brand, you can dip your toes into blog monetization as a freelance writer creating content for other businesses.
In this case, your blog will serve as a part of your portfolio where you can demonstrate your talent and the quality of your work. Also, you will be able to continue growing your audience and establish your name as an authority in your niche.
For this to work, you will need to be an expert in your field. Hence, be prepared to offer knowledge and skills that can be beneficial to the audiences of other businesses.
You can also provide ghostwriting services and help companies tell their stories in a more compelling way.
Before you become popular and third-parties start to reach out to you to write for their blogs, you can do the reaching out yourself and suggest pieces of content that may be of interest to their audience.
Although this sounds very similar to guest blogging, there are significant differences. The goal of guest blogging is to obtain a backlink to your own blog and make yourself and/or your product is known to the audience of the business you are partnering with.
Whereas when you are freelancing, your goal is to find someone who is willing to pay for your content.
However, guest blogging can still be used as a way to boost your blog’s credibility and personal brand to score more freelance gigs in the future.
6. Create a Course
A great way to utilize your knowledge and provide a next-level service is to launch an eLearning initiative. All the information online courses teach is available for free in multiple places across the web. However, they are widely popular.
That’s because they provide structure and organization.
A class saves people time browsing while looking for content, wondering which part they should do first, how to achieve the best results with less effort, and whether they are missing something important.
In fact, your course can consist entirely of information you have available for free on your blog, and people will still pay for it.
You can even create a whole line of courses on different pertinent topics. There can be one masterclass that unites them all, and a number of shorter classes that individually cover the different subtopics and aspects.
This way, people can make their choices based on how familiar they are with the topic, and how advanced their knowledge.
And if the content on your blog is organized into pillar posts and content clusters (as it should be) half your work is done. Now, all you need to do is to figure out how to best present the information in an easy-to-digest way.
However, for customers to buy your course, you need to show you are an expert in your field and have an established name and brand. This way you will attract more attention and more leads.
Furthermore, you can sell your course on Udemy and other similar platforms.
7. Provide Personal Coaching
If you want to go even further and launch a truly bespoke product, you can provide personal coaching. Similar to organization and structure, personalization is yet another clever blog monetization technique. It’s simply because custom-made, tailored solutions are the next thing people willingly pay for, even when the information is available for free.
When your customers read a blog or watch a tutorial, the information is more or less general and, while it may apply to their particular case, it’s not exactly what they need. It just doesn’t take into account the specifics of their particular case.
When you communicate with them in person and partake in individual coaching sessions, you can save them from the trial and error. This way, you spare them all the possible consequences of not figuring out the right path the first time.
In addition, personal coaching is all the rage right now and people love to follow such trends. So why not take advantage of it, all the while helping them learn and improve.
8. Create and Sell eBooks
eBooks are another popular way to utilize your content and profit from it.
Similar to courses, you can expand pillar posts with pieces from the content clusters, and adjust the content to provide a consistent experience.
Try to determine how exhaustive the information you already have on your website is. You can always provide additional details, graphics, notes, etc. for further blog monetization gains.
While writing a book sounds intimidating, eBooks are actually not that complex, or at least they don’t have to be. In fact, an eBook can be as short as 50-60 pages.
Also, consider hiring an editor to review the content, so that there are no typos and other mistakes.
Next, you should create a suitable cover. You can use a tool such as Canva and do it yourself, or hire a designer instead.
As eBooks are usually not very expensive, you could consider creating a few, so you can expect a higher income.
You can distribute these on your website, but also consider using Kindle Direct Publishing or selling the ebooks on Amazon. This way, you may reach a wider audience and make more sales.
Bottom Line
Monetizing your blog is not that difficult, and, keeping in mind the effort you put into creating and maintaining it, you definitely deserve some remuneration.
Whether you go big or choose to test a few techniques first depends entirely on you. You may focus on one of the more prominent approaches to quickly build up revenue but require more work. Alternatively, you may choose to combine a few that continuously drip small sums.
The only wrong decision is to keep doing nothing. However, don’t miss out on an opportunity to secure an additional income that can grow into a full-time business endeavor.
Team DevriX
This article is crafted by DevriX's seasoned marketing team, boasting over four decades of collective expertise in crafting sophisticated marketing funnels, devising comprehensive content frameworks and pillars, implementing engaging email campaigns, and creating impactful social media content designed for scalability.
Our marketing experts specialize in the complete spectrum of inbound marketing strategies. As an accredited HubSpot Agency Partner and a Semrush Partner, we engage in meticulous research, blending our extensive experience with the unique insights of our highly skilled team.
We set benchmarks in content creation by incorporating cutting-edge marketing trends, leveraging in-depth industry research, and utilizing state-of-the-art AI tools for data segmentation and captivating content hooks. Our proficiency extends across a diverse range of sectors, including working with SMEs, Fortune 1000 companies, global B2B brands, major publishing entities, WooCommerce platforms, business directories, and affiliate networks.
