Did you just start a blog, and you’re looking for how to make money blogging?
If yes, you’ve landed in the right place.
Really, as a newbie blogger, it might be challenging to earn income right away. And that’s why it’s essential to start with the right mindset.
Blogging is hard work, and it’s almost impossible to make money without putting in some time and effort. But if you’re consistent and patient, rest assured that your hard work will pay off with time.
In this post are seven simple ways to help you monetize your blog, even if you’re just starting.
Why Is Blogging A Lucrative Business?
- Work from anywhere – you can work from home and spend time with your kids.
- Set your time – Blogging is flexible, and you can create your working hours. You have equal time for the family and your business.
- Generate passive income – you can make money from blogging in many ways, as shown in this post. In addition, you don’t have to create your product or service,
- Hone your skills – blogging is an excellent way to improve your writing skills and learn more about business skills.
- Pay it forward – Share your story, experience and successes. You also help your audience solve their problems by recommending valuable products.
7 Ways To Make Money Blogging For Beginners
- Affiliate marketing
- Sell Digital Products
- Display Ads
- Online courses
- Coaching and consulting
- Services
- Sponsored content
There are many ways to make money blogging, but the common ones are online courses, workshops, ebooks, and affiliate marketing.
1. Affiliate Marketing
One of the easiest ways to create passive income is affiliate marketing. The reason being that you don’t have to make anything yourself but promote other people’s products and earn a commission when someone buys.
Quite a lot of bloggers earn a more significant percentage of their income from affiliate marketing.
In addition, you don’t have to worry about start-up capital or anything like that as a newbie blogger.
All you need is your affiliate code from the merchant, promote the link, and get paid when someone buys.
Alternatively, you may list out the products you use and feel can benefit your audience. Then create a resource page on your site that highlights those products, giving your audience easy access to them.
Sign up for affiliate programs and promote the products – Share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and email list. Set up a Pinterest business account, create rich pins, and enable them.
What affiliate program can you join?
There are many affiliate programs you can join for free with tons of a wide variety of products.
- Amazon Associates
- ShareAsale
- Commission junction
- Flex offers
- Awin
- ClickBank
Though there are millions of products you can promote, it’s preferable to pick the ones within your niche that you’ve used and sure can benefit your audience.
One of the common mistakes beginners make is to select too many products at once. Instead, focus on few ones that you know will be useful to your readers.
Tips to make affiliate marketing work
- Give freebies of products relevant to your target audience.
- Choose the right affiliate product that you have used can help your audience get their problem solved.
- Create valuable content – write a helpful post that can get you to rank high on Google. For example, reviews, comparison, case studies posts.
- Start an email list – you may offer freebies like eBooks, checklists, Cheatsheet, workbooks, and likes.
- Promote your product – social media platform is an excellent place to use.
2. Selling Digital Products
Creating your own product to sell is one of the best passive income anywhere.
So, If you have the knowledge you want to share with others, digital products may be a good option for you. They are easy to download, and you can make money by creating eBooks, templates, printables and selling them on your blog.
eBooks
You can write and sell ebooks directly from your website to make money. But, first, do some research to ensure it’s a topic and it’s what your audience needs.
You may also turn some of your old blog posts into ebooks in PDF format and design the cover using canva.
You have the option either to self-publish your book and sell on Amazon kindle or through affiliate networks like ClickBank.
Then promote on social media platforms, email list, and your blog.
The benefit of having your own product
- You have control of the price
- You have the whole profit to yourself
- It continues to generate income over time
3. Displayed Advertisement
Placing ads on your blog is one of the easiest ways to make money, and the best way to start is with Google Adsense.
Google Adsense
Almost every blogger started with Google AdSense; it’s free and easy to join. Of course, there are other display ads, but you need tons of traffic to qualify for most of them.
You’ll get a shortcode to install on your site when you sign up, and when there’s enough traffic on your site, the ads are displayed.
But once you get your blog traffic to 50,000 visitors a month, you can apply to Mediavine. You may also join other ad services like Monumetric, AdThrive, Carbon ads, Ezoic, and likes.
4. Sell Online Course
Here’s another effective way to make recurring income. So if you’re an expert in a particular field or possess a unique skill you want to teach others, creating an online course is a good idea.
For example, If you’re a Pro on Pinterest and have a pinning strategy that gets you tons of traffic. You can develop a course that teaches how to be a Pinterest pinning Pro and make money step by step.
Make it into a video, promote on Pinterest, and sell on Teachable, Udemy, Skillshare, and likes.
5. Coaching and Consulting
Organizing online coaching lessons is another passive way to earn income if you have the skill for helping others learn.
Consultancy is the way to go if you have a specialist in your field. You get paid for helping businesses solve their problems.
6. Services
Suppose you have a skill you want to showcase to the world; why not sell it and make money.
If you’re good at writing or you’re tech-savvy, there are abundant opportunities to sell your skills and get paid.
Once you can deliver significant value, you’ll get more clients in no time.
You can create a page on your blog to show all the services you offer and display them at prominent places on your site.
Alternatively, apply for jobs from freelance websites.
Here are some of the freelance services you can offer
- Web Design
- Proofreading
- Socila media management
- Email management
- Content creation
- SEO services
7. Sponsored Content
You may write articles about a company’s product or services and get paid.
The key is to build trust with your audience, so only get involved if you’re sure it will be of utmost benefit to your readers.
How do famous bloggers make money from blogging?
Content is still the king, and the best way to make money is by writing valuable ones.
Many successful bloggers earn a significant percentage of their income through online courses, workshops, and affiliate marketing.
Jon Morrow, CEO of Smart Blogger, makes over $1 million every year from online courses and workshops.
Adam Enfroy crossed $200,000 in June 2021 from online courses and affiliate marketing.
Pat Flynn, the founder of Smart Passive Income, is one of the most successful affiliate marketers. He made over $2 million, mainly from online courses, affiliate marketing, workshops, and ebooks.
In March 2021, Ryan Robinson made over $35,000 mainly from affiliate earnings and his online course, Built to Blog.
Anil Agarwal, a professional blogger, generated more than $10,000, mostly from eBooks in 2020.
It’s true that blogging is hard work and takes time, but if you’re consistent and patient, the sky is the limit.
You can do it, get started now,
How To Make Money Blogging in 2021
The first thing is to set up a self-hosted blog.
Pick a niche – select a profitable niche with a large audience.
Then, position your content to suit their needs, solve their pain points, and develop strategies on the best way to monetize your blog.
Fine, you may have started blogging on a free system like Wix, square space, blogger, and likes. But with time, you want to have your own domain.
If you’re looking at blogging as a serious business, a self-host system like WordPress is the way to go.
Moreover, WordPress.org is the largest publishing platform and powers 30% of websites worldwide.
Helpful resources
How to start a blog step by step guide
How to build a WordPress website
After deciding on your niche, go to Google trends to check if there’s a high demand for your chosen topic.
- Then, pick a domain name and web hosting.
- Write quality content – Content is still the king. So aim to create high-quality, keyword-rich articles so your readers keep coming back for more. Pay attention to keyword research and SEO to get a high rank on Google.
- Monetize your blog – affiliate marketing, sell Digital Products, display Ads, online courses, coaching and consulting, service, sponsored content
Conclusion
Though blogging requires hard work and consistency, you can make money if you put in some time and effort.
It’s essential to have an online forum to connect with others and discuss ways to move your blogging business to a greater height.
There are tons of them around; Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, community, email list, and likes.
If you have a passion for writing, why not turn it into a business and make money.
That’s what blogging is about; you get to do what you like, help people solve their problems, and get paid to do so.
Ready to take action and make money blogging?
Then get your blog set up and running and come back here to brag about it.
About The Author
Muslimah is an entrepreneur and a blogger. She helps passionate entrepreneurs start and grow their own online businesses so they can enjoy the flexibility of working from home. She mostly writes about blogging, affiliate marketing, and online income ideas.
Hi Muslimah, great work here I think you made some very good points here. I don’t there is really much you have missed to be fair. A lot of these ideas I’ve actually thought about. I wrote an Ebook on Google Docs and did the image with Canva. Think I should look at getting that converted as a PDF. As for putting a course together, I think that should be something to look at over the next few months. It would be great for collecting leads and as for consultancy, I hope I can do this in future too. You are right so much potential it is just realising it.
Sure, you can, Alex.
Try it and give us feedback.
Thanks for reading.
Hi Muslimah,
Starting a blog to run an online business seems like a good option to make extra money. It has many ways to make money blogging, but it takes hard work, time, and effort. I’ve seen super affiliate marketers create their own online training courses after they succeed in affiliate marketing, so it’s also my path forward once I do get some success in my online business. Maybe creating a Pinterest training course…It sounds interesting. 🙂
Thanks for sharing.
Matt
Go for it Matt and let me know if you need any help.
Thanks for stopping by.
Cheers
Hi Muslimah,
Let me start by congratulating you on the very good and professionally looking website, well done.
Your article is very structured yet detailed enough to explain your thoughts and each point you make.
It is posts like your that give me hope and inspiration that one day I will be among this people who make their living online. It is definitely not going to pay overnight and a lot of hard work goes into blogging but it is all counterweighted by the benefits that you have enumerated in the beginning.
Good luck and all the best,
Tatiana
Thank you for your kind word Tartiana.
Truly blogging is hard work, but you can do it.
Let me know if you need any help.
Good luck!
Very good and thorough. I’ve kicked myself because of how much I have overlooked my blogging potential, because I didn’t know how financially profitable it could be.
One caveat.
I know you mentioned email lists, but I’m telling you. That is highly CRUCIAL for longevity. It can’t be understated how important to have an audience already collected, vs constantly having to find a new one for your content.
I agree that email marketing is vital to success in any business.
I enjoyed reading your article very much. It was interesting and informative. I am currently working on my blogging on my website, but you gave me several ideas on how to expand my site. I find this article very helpful for anyone looking to make a passive income. Great job!
Good to know you find the content helpful.
If you need any help with blogging, don’t hesitate to ask.