Blogging is more than just a hobby for a lot of people. With just a bit more work and some analysis, you can turn your blog into a source of income that can supplement your other work. This is the best way how to monetize a blog in 2024!
1. Ads
Advertising is probably the first thing you think of when you think of monetizing a blog, and that’s because it is a fantastic first step towards making money off of your writing. There are a lot of different kinds of ads you can run on your website, but at first, you’ll probably use a service like Google’s Adsense or MediaVine.
These services require very little work on your end to set up, as they’ll usually provide you with all the plugins you need to put on your website to make them work once you’ve registered with them.
The disadvantage to ads is that they only make money if you have a lot of traffic. Specifically, you get paid more depending on how many people view your page and how long they spend there. To make this work for you, write a large number of articles that will attract many different viewers within the niche your blog covers, and make your blog posts about one to two thousand words each.
One to two thousand words is kind of a sweet spot where it’s long enough that people will spend time reading but short enough that they might actually read the whole article, increasing retention. Of course, this won’t really help you much if your writing isn’t excellent, so put quality writing in front of optimization if you’re serious about turning this into a business.
Remember, you don’t have to be brilliant as a writer, you just have to be good enough to convey your ideas in a way that keeps people reading.
And even if you don’t think you’re in a position to fully take advantage of advertising, there’s very little opportunity cost to putting ads on your blog. Making a few dollars a month is better than making no dollars a month!
You may eventually have the opportunity to curate the ads on your blog. If this happens, you have an opportunity to increase the efficacy of the ads displayed on your website by tailoring them to your audience. This is worth doing if you get the chance since it isn’t especially difficult and can give you an increase in revenue.
2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a kind of sales where you link to a sales page in your article (for instance, during a product recommendation), and in return for your publicity, the retailer gives you a small kickback if the person who clicked your link buys the product. There are several different ways to get into affiliate marketing, but the easiest way is definitely to use Amazon’s affiliate link program. It is widely used and recognized as a great side hustle!
Once you’ve registered for the program, anyone who clicks the link that you created to an Amazon page while logged into your affiliated Amazon account will be recorded by Amazon as having been sent to the website by you.
That’s literally all you need to do, and once you’ve started you won’t be forced to keep adding more affiliate links to your articles if you aren’t a product-focused blog. It’s important to pay attention to which products you use affiliate links for. These are best for articles about products that you feel good about recommending.
Lists of top ten versions of a product relevant to your field work well for affiliate links, as the reader is more likely to be exposed to a product that they’ll buy the more different products they get to see. If there’s a particular product that you recommend frequently but aren’t already sponsored by, this might also be a good fit for that. Just make sure not to come across as pushy.
On the other hand, if you’re frequently recommending sub-standard or low-quality products, you can erode the trust of your readers, which will decrease revenue in the long term even if you get a short-term gain (which isn’t even guaranteed.) Because of this, you should always be careful about the products you recommend. Your reputation is at stake!
3. Broaden Your Net
Ads and affiliate links are great, but if you want them to make money for you you need to have a big audience. How do you find an audience? Some people can just get lucky, or use their natural charisma to get people onto their blog.
Others are skilled at getting their blog posts to the front page of Google to increase traffic. For people who can’t do either of those things consistently, there is still hope!
You can still grow your audience by increasing the number of kinds of media that you create. Starting a YouTube channel, Tik Tok, podcast, or social media page can all funnel people into your blog, and some of these projects are monetizable in and of themselves!
Youtube is probably the best of these alternate media forms since you can easily embed any youtube videos you create into your blog. It’s also considered a blog killer for many.
This comes with a ton of value since people watching the video from your page will both be increasing your ad revenue from the blog by increasing the time spent on the page and earning you ad revenue from Youtube, essentially making anyone who chooses to watch that video count twice for monetization purposes.
Every platform that you use increases the number of people who will be exposed to your work. If you’re monetizing a travel blog, for instance, starting an Instagram account where you take pictures of the places you visit can increase your credibility and maybe even convert people who are just interested in pictures to people who read articles!
If you’re monetizing a political blog, however, a podcast where you talk about contemporary issues might be able to help you build an audience of people who are interested to hear (or read) your opinions making people more likely to come back to your blog day after day for more takes.
It doesn’t hurt that most platforms have monetization programs of their own, even if for some of them monetization might be significantly more difficult than others.
The big disadvantage that this method has is that it basically doubles the amount of work that you have to do since you have to make twice as much content. However, the benefits of growing your audience are worth putting in the effort, since the only way to grow in this field is to increase the number of people seeing your work.
You also might not see results from branching out into a new field right away. If this is the case, you may have to persist for a while before this starts to be worth the effort.
But again, it’s all worth it for the growth. Just make sure that whatever you choose to do you can do consistently, as social media sites and podcast audiences tend to reward consistency more than anything else.
4. Sponsored Posts and Native Advertising
Sponsored posts are any posts that you do that are paid for by a company that commissions the post from you. We’ll talk about native advertising in a bit.
You don’t really have much control over this type of advertising, as most of the time companies will reach out to you for sponsorship opportunities once you have a large enough audience.
There is a school of thought that says that you should take any sponsorship deal that you can get since the money that you get from doing sponsorships is the only kind of money you’ll be able to get from your blog that you can count on.
However, if your website focuses on expertise in a specific niche and you sponsor a product in the field that is known to be ineffective or attached to a scummy company, you can quickly lose the trust of your readers and thus your audience.
Because of this, you always need to be careful about what sponsors you choose to take on. Aside from the obvious, which is that the more relevant the product is to your audience the more likely they are to appreciate the recommendation, avoid sponsorships from companies with predatory business practices (certain mobile games come to mind), or sell products that you have never used.
If a company that produces a product you don’t know about approaches you, if there are no other red flags, give them the benefit of the doubt and try to get some hands-on experience with that product before making your decision.
If possible, you should probably buy the product with your own money so that you aren’t creating an obligation to give it a good review as you might if you let the company send you a free sample. Once you’ve determined whether the product is worth supporting, give them your answer, and don’t be afraid to say no!
You don’t have to be unkind, since you don’t want to get a reputation among potential sponsors as someone who is mean or uncooperative, but your audience is more important than potential sponsors so don’t shy away from being selective.
When you do write a sponsorship, you should write about your own experiences with the product and the ways that it’s helped you with your work. If you’re sincere, people will be able to tell and they’ll appreciate the effort.
A lot of the same goes for native advertising. Native advertising is like a sponsorship or an ad, except it’s disguised as a blog post that’s on your website. These might come in the form of full commissioned articles, or they might come in the form of links to external blogs that have similar topics to your blog.
Pretty much all the same rules apply to native advertising as apply to sponsorships. Keep quality up to keep audience trust, that should be your priority.
5. Ask For Donations
What if you want to monetize your blog without putting up ads? Maybe you think they would worsen the user experience, or you worry about supporting companies like Google or Amazon. These last three options will be focused on monetization options that you can implement without needing to do advertising.
Using sites like Ko-Fi and Patreon, you can easily set up opportunities for your audience to donate to you to continue your work. Your pitch can be as simple and unobtrusive as inviting people to buy you a coffee, and most audiences appreciate the chance to support a creator they love.
Even for people who don’t donate, it’s unlikely that they’ll find the invitation to be offensive, making this another low-cost way to get some extra money out of your work. Like everything else, this works better the bigger your audience is.
6. Sell An eBook
eBooks are a big-time investment, but if you think that your audience will buy a book from you it can be a great way to make some extra money on top of your other monetization plans.
Your eBook can basically be an expansion on the topics that you cover in your blog. Be sure that you’re adding new content and insights so that people who invest don’t feel ripped off, but balance that with enough familiar information that people feel like it fits in with the rest of your content.
You might also cover tangential topics. If you’re monetizing a lifestyle blog, for instance, you could sell a cookbook full of your favorite recipes.
Some of the most appealing eBooks we’ve seen have been monologue books sold by blogs for actors who are just starting out. These are great because they offer new information while being on-topic and not being terribly difficult to produce.
7. Shift To A Membership Plan
If you have a devoted following, you might be able to get away with adding a kind of subscription plan on top of your free content. Subscribers might have access to up-to-date news, extra information, or early content depending on what kind of a business model you’re going for.
The value of a membership plan is that it’s guaranteed income for each member who signs up. The disadvantage is that it works against your continued growth, as new audience members who don’t want to pay the membership fee feel gatekept and leave.
You may also have to stop running ads on your website, as members will probably expect to be able to view the content they pay for ad-free.
If you have a stable number of readers who don’t really change and who are likely to continue going for your content no matter what, adding a membership plan to your business model might be a viable choice especially if your reader count isn’t growing. However, for most people, this will not be a very good option.
Summary
Establishing a high traffic blog is still a high value and high income skill. As you can see, there are plenty of good ways to monetise a good blog. I’d almost say sky is the limit. That is also why I decided to start my financial independence blog many years ago. I keep hustling and utilizing the methods that I know so well so that I never have to work for anybody ever again. Will you do the same?
I’m a preacher of the fact that saving money is pointless unless you get some realy good % on that cash. So making money is what I am good at and what I know that I can teach YOU!
