This is the age old question and you are in the right place for real, honest answers. Many other bloggers lead you astray so they can add more profit to their income reports. They don’t care if they actually help you. We don’t do that nonsense here.
Skip the Blue Box if you already 100% know blogging is for you.
Should You Start A Blog? Before we get to how to make money blogging, you need to know if you should be blogging to make money. There are only two groups that should be blogging for money. Group 1: People who LOVE writing. Group 2: People who LIKE writing and are OBSESSED with a particular niche. These are the only people who will achieve financial success in today’s blogging landscape. If you don’t fall into one of those two groups and you have a blogger guru still telling you to be a blogger, they are trying to scam you. Simple as that. While blogging can make a lot of money, there are much better options for online money-making for people who aren’t into writing.
Ways To Make Money Blogging
Obviously, there are many ways to make money blogging, and underneath each way to make money there are about 100 sub-categories of ways to make money. This article is high-level with a couple dives here and there into strategies I find interesting and relevant to the current blogging landscape.
1. Affiliate Links: The Best And Will Always Be The Best
Affiliate Links are the #1 way to make money blogging and it’s not even close. For example, here is an amazon affiliate link for an expensive Rolex watch. At the time of this writing the watch is listed for $21,995 and I would get a 4% commission if bought through my link, which would come to $879.80. (Anybody need a watch?)
4% isn’t very good, but Amazon has everything and has high trust among customers, and it’s easy to get approved for their affiliate program. Every blogger should go and get approved. It’s the fallback position. Also, if you’re gonna recommend books like me, Amazon is the way to go!
Amazon links aren’t gonna make you rich though.
Credit card links will make you rich. Financial product links will make you rich. Shilling gambling app links will make you very rich, at the moment.
However, not all of us are running make money blogs and only the most depraved shill gambling links. Don’t shill gambling links. They are destructive, destroying men and tearing families apart. I wouldn’t shill a gambling link for a billion dollars. But thoughts of destroying families isn’t stopping Peyton Manning from shilling gambling! He’s making bank! Go Peyton! #LiveYourTruth!
What to do though if you have a conscience? Well, you’ve heard it a million times: blog in a niche, and then offer relevant links to your target audience. My target audience is smart people who read books, so all my links are for that audience, and the real magic happens when you actually want to help your target audience succeed by what you write and recommend, rather than shilling whatever high-paying links you can get your hands on, which, of course, many bloggers do (e.g. Buy This SEO Course It’s The Best I Promise And OMG Has Nothing To Do With It Having The Highest Commision Rate I Promise!)
So, build a niche, find a handful of relevant affiliate links that will help your audience succede, and promote those links.
2. Sell Your Own Product: Also The Best Sometimes
Here are a few examples that have made many bloggers filthy rich.
- Online Courses: Personally, I don’t want to deal with the headache of managing a course; however, many bloggers have made a lot of money with this. The course doesn’t have to be about blogging though. A woman once made good money with her sourdough bread making course. Anything goes.
- eBooks: This is one of my favorites because I love writing words. I once wrote a guidebook and put it on Amazon and was pleasantly surprised to have an extra $50 or so a month without doing any promotion. I should have done promotion but I was shy at the time. Again, your eBook can be about anything and it doesn’t have to be a 500 page beast, often 100 pages is enough.
- Mastermind Group: “I’m really smart and if you join my group I’ll tell you some smart stuff.” As you may have guessed, I’ve never been a fan of mastermind groups. Feels scammy. But, yes–they make money.
- Physical Product: This is surging and I’m liking it, building a blogging niche around a physical product brand you created; right now think along the lines of organic products like toothpaste, olive oil, coffee, honey.
3. Join An Ad Network Like Mediavine
Ad networks, like Mediavine, have much higher payouts than Google Ads. Once traffic is cooking, it’s time to apply to a higher-level ad network. Sure, ads on a blog are annoying, but they don’t seem drive away traffic if used within reason and they can generate a lot of well-earned income for bloggers who worked their behinds off writing articles and building a blog.
Don’t turn up your nose at display ads for your blog! Bloggers deserve to get paid for their work!
This requires big traffic to work. Think food blogs and such.
4. Sponsored Posts
I’ve written zero sponsored posts, but I hear this is a thing. I think, for me anyway, it would be difficult to find somebody that wants a sponsored post from me and that I believe the sponsored post would be good for one of my blogs. But yeah, bloggers do this.
5. Provide A Service
The most common service bloggers have is some type of copywriting service. It doesn’t have to be that though. Maybe you are a therapist and you start a blog around that, your “provide a service” will, obviously, be providing mental health services to clients.
It could also be taxes, holistic living, or doing artwork on physical books (not books covers, but creating custom artwork on the edges of the pages when the book is closed, really neat!)
There you go, those are the basic categories for money-getting via blogging!