As a freelance writer and/or author, your blog should be the hub of your business.
At first, your blog should be about sharing your ideas, and when you start gathering a good audience then you can start finding ways to monetize your blog.
Once you have a number of blog posts, some say at least 100, then it’s time to start monetizing your blog.
Know this: If you have an audience, you can make money from your blog.
So where are you in this process?
Have you started your blog?
Do you have at least 100 quality posts up yet?
Have you made a plan for how you will monetize the site?
Don’t wait to do all this.
Get started now.
5 Ways to Monetize Your Blog
Once you’ve developed your blog’s audience, here are 5 popular ways to monetize your blog:
1. Your Own Products or Services
One of the fastest ways to make money from your blog is to sell your own products or services.
You don’t need a lot of readers to make it possible to earn money.
You can create information products, how-to products, etc. quite easily with a word processing program and a good idea.
Create a professional looking cover (or have someone on<a href=”http://www.fiverr.com” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”> fiverr</a> make one for you), set up a PayPal payment link, and you’re in business.
If you’re a traditionally published author, you’ll also want to use your blog to attract more readers and therefore sell more books.
And, if you write any kind of materials for business clients, you’ll use your blog as a tool to attract more of these clients.
2. Affiliate Products
If you don’t want to create your own products you can find products that your audience would like to know about and promote them as an affiliate.
An affiliate is someone who earns a percentage of sales off each product that someone buys through their special affiliate link.
You can become an affiliate of many types of products at Clickbank.com, or you can simply look up products you’ve bought and used yourself to find out if they have an affiliate program.
If they don’t, ask them if they plan to create one.
3. Advertising
Once you have more than 10,000 unique visitors per month you can join an advertising network.
The easiest to join is Google AdSense (and you don’t even need 10,000 unique visitors to get approved).
There is also Yahoo! Advertising Network as well as some other more niche oriented ways to get ads on your site.
If you have a site devoted to women for instance you could join something like The Woman’s Forum.
4. Paid Blog Posts
Once you are popular some people may approach you to write paid blog posts for their website, or even for your own on their behalf.
It’s kind of like an advertisement in the form of a blog post.
There is a lot of controversy about doing that, but many people do it successfully and earn some extra money doing it.
5. Product Reviews
You can do both paid product reviews as well as unpaid reviews that link to the product as an affiliate to earn extra money from your blog.
It’s important if you are going to go this route that you put into your blog’s disclaimer that some of your reviews are paid for, and some aren’t.
But, it’s also important to be very honest in all reviews, paid or not.
Obviously from looking at the different ideas, you’ll want to focus on your own products, affiliate products and advertising to make the most money from your blog.
Try it!
Suzanne Lieurance
writebythesea.com
Note: This post may contain some affiliate links for your convenience (which means if you make a purchase after clicking a link I will earn a small commission but it won’t cost you a penny more)! Read my full disclosure and privacy policies...
