About to give up blogging?

Or….

Are you going to continue but you’re not sure how to get a great return for the time you put in?

You can make money with a blog…

Do you want to know some ways on how to make money blogging?

… read on!

Why Do You Need to Have a Blog?

The right content attracts attention.

Attention -from your ideal audience, in this noisy world – helps you generate more sales.

But….

Only if you know how to convert (see later).

A blog is a vehicle for creating content around your topic and it attracts in your audience.

It also attracts search engines like Google, which are always on the lookout for content.

Without a blog, you can attract people based on the products and services you have to offer, but it’s much easier to attract a larger audience with content.

Have a look at the sales funnel here:

A blog is a great way of enticing people into your funnel.   They hear about your blog through Google, other websites, word of mouth, email, social media or other means.

When you entice them in through your blog, you want them to engage.

Initial engagement could involve downloading a report (in exchange for their email address), buying a low-cost product, applying for a free consultation etc.

Then, you focus on building the relationship and offering them your core products and services.

It doesn’t stop there, because your current customers will become your future customers and some will also become your raving fans and support what you do!

There are many profitable blogs…

… so we’re going to break it down into seven key ways to start profiting from your blog!

7 Ways to make money from your blog

1. Affiliate Revenue

An affiliate relationship is where you promote other people’s products and services.

You include a unique tracking link so that, when someone clicks on the link on your site and goes and buys the product, you get an ‘affiliate commission’.  Typically you’d use a tool such as Get Ambassador to manage relationships with influencer bloggers.

This affiliate commission could be a couple of dollars or thousands, depending on the product and what is negotiated.

The affiliate route is a great way of testing what type of products you can make money from before you build them!

Tools/Sites

You can use SEMRush to find out which keywords you are ranking for that companies are also using in their advertising.  If a brand is basing its advertising on these keywords and you are driving traffic based on these, then you could agree an affiliate deal with them!

Clickbank or Affiliate Junction are sites where you can find affiliate deals.  You could also approach providers directly.

Thirsty Affiliates is a tool for managing your affiliates in WordPress.  You set up automatic linking so that you don’t have to worry about inserting all the tracking links.

2. Webinars

If someone is prepared to attend your webinar and listen to you for 45 minutes or so, about a topic relevant to your product or service, I think that means they might be interested in it!!

Yes, webinars are good for selling your products and services.

Consider adding an opportunity, on your blog, for people to join your webinar.  Take a look at this one, made with LeadPages, below.

The webinar could be pre-recorded or live.  When you are on a webinar, it’s hard to tell the difference.  But live is certainly more fun!

Tools/Sites

Use GoToWebinar or similar tools for running a webinar.  An alternative is Webinar Jam, which allows you to run recorded/evergreen webinars.

Read this article about building a list of registrations for your webinar.

3. Run ads on your site

I don’t have ads on my site because, if you use ads from Google or similar (e.g. Adsense), you don’t make a lot of money unless you have a huge amount of traffic.

Anyway, I think there’s better ways of making money.

…But….

You can have a banner ad across the top of your blog, ads for products in your blog’s sidebar, or even ads within your blog posts!

Here is a site called List25, which has ads within its content.  This works because they get a massive amount of traffic. Their audience is not all serious business professionals so having an ad in their content is acceptable!

The reason the ad is related to marketing automation is because I was on the Marketo site beforehand… Marketo is using a retargeting advertisement network to retarget ads to me on other sites as a I browse.

My preferred method of ads for lower-traffic sites is to advertise your affiliate promotions – choose the ones where you get the highest commissions!

Or, you could get a ‘sponsor’.  A site sponsor can get an ad displayed but there may be additional benefits such as placement within your emails, mentions on podcasts you are on, etc.

Tools/sites:

AdRoll – For setting up retargeting ads.

Google Ad Network – If you want Google ads on your site.

4. Promoting Other Content

At the end of a blog post, you often see ‘related posts’.

Increasingly these related posts are not actually posts from your own website…

… they are links to pieces of content on other sites and the blogs get paid per click.

Every time someone clicks on the link and goes to the site, they get paid.

Here is an example on the Daily Telegraph site; you can see the promoted stories at the end…

Tools/sites

Check out Outbrain and Taboola to sign up for a content-recommendation engine.

5. Selling Your Own Products

Of course, you could also advertise your own products for sale.  For example by placing an ad in the sidebar.

But…

You need to consider that, if someone sees a tweet about your blog post and clicks on a link, that might be the first time they have heard of you.

If it’s the first time, then what are the chances of them handing over a couple of hundred dollars…?

…. Very slim!

But, they may sign up for a free consultation where you can sell your services, or they might buy a low-cost product and then you can upsell them.

So… selling doesn’t have to mean an immediate sale!

Tools/Sites

You may need to use tools such as Canva to create the promotion images, or vCita if you want to capture appointments.

6. Product Reviews

It’s not difficult to get people to pay you to review products and create a blog post about it.

Your audience may not like this because they know you’ve got paid, so they may not trust your opinion. But it’s still possible!

Tools/sites

No tools are required but, if you are doing lots of reviews, you may want your developer to add extra code to your site (schema markup), which gives Google more information about the reviews you are writing.

This means it will display things like star ratings within search results.  Here’s an example:

7. The Catch all – Email Subscribers

If you have a blog, you need to be building email subscribers.

With email subscribers, you have an ongoing relationship with an audience.

This is your community.

As you build the relationship with your community, you have the opportunity to sell your products and services.

Tools:

All you need is a good email-marketing tool to get started!

Read our post about building email subscribers using OptinMonster.

Summary

There are hundreds of ways to make money with a blog…

We have included some of the most popular ones.

How do you make money for your blog and/or will you implement some of the above?

What are you going to do to profit from your blog?

I’d love to hear from you.