Earning Income From Your Blog

Getting Started with Earning Income From Your Blog

So you’ve put in the work and created yourself a blog, but what are you supposed to do next besides posting fresh content regularly? Wouldn’t it be great if you could make some cash along the way like the professional bloggers do? Some of them are easily making a six or even a seven-figure income simply from blogging. Let’s take the hard work out of earning income from your blog, shall we?

What does the term “professional blogger mean exactly? To put it simply it just means people that are making a full-time living from blogging, or do it for their full-time job. That’s why they are called professional bloggers.

Chances are, if you’re reading this then you probably already tried blogging. If not you definitely should. You don’t even need an internet connection to create the content for your blog. You can create a post in your bedroom, on your way to a cafe, or even while sipping on a cup of coffee. Then, as soon as you have Internet access, you just post it to your blog and click publish, and watch the money start coming in.

At this point you may be wondering how the money is going to start pouring in? We’ve got you covered as this report details several easy methods of achieving this. So let’s not waste anymore time and get started!

Google Adsense

Of course the first method we’re going to talk about is Google Adsense. If you have been on the internet for more than a couple of days you must have noticed those ads marked with “Ads by Google” on many websites. Those sites are earning through what is without a doubt the number one income stream for a blog: Google Adsense.

So what makes Google Adsense better than any of the other income streams? We can easily come up with a couple of the main reasons:
1. Google owns it, obviously. That’s great because you can be sure you’re dealing with a legitimate entity that’s going to be here for the long haul, global crisis or not. Most people always trust the big guy. This is clear by the huge number of advertisers using AdWords. So it’s guaranteed you’ll find (actually they do that for you) the right ad for your blog’s content.
2. Google ads are context-based. They actively scan the content of your blog before displaying any ads. As a result, the ads displayed are only those that are relevant to your content. That way, the probability of your reader being interested in the ads is very high and makes them more likely to click on them. When they do you earn from that simple action.

Let’s talk about that process of earning. You earn from the ads displayed on your blog each time a visitor actually clicks on the ad. No click, no earnings. That’s why Google’s context-based ads can have a huge benefit to you.

Affiliate Programs

First of all, this method can be a little bit more complicated than the last. However the rewards can, and often are, far greater that what you would get from pay-per-click (PPC) ads like we talked about in the last section.

With affiliate programs, a sale usually needs to take place before you can earn, but there are some out there that par per visitor, or per lead. But we’ll focus on the most popular par per sale. When you join an affiliate program, the vendor promises to give you a commission for every purchase made on their product that originates from you.

As an example, we’ll use the most popular affiliate program on the internet for this purpose – Amazon Associates. There are so many successful bloggers out there that have earned a lot from this single affiliate program. Once registered, you can choose from a wide selection of links, banners, and widgets to display their products. You can write individual posts reviewing products, and you can even set up your own store where you can feature Amazon products just to give you a couple ideas.

As Amazon has a seemingly endless listing of products on their site, you can surely find several products to feature on your blog. It’s difficult to go wrong when you have the backing of America’s largest online retailer.

Of course, Amazon is not the only game in town. There’s a ton of other very popular affiliate programs out there too like Clickbank, Commission Junction, and ShareASale just to name a few. You can find a ton of others simply by searching “affiliate programs” in Google search, but be sure to do your research on the less popular ones. I’d love for you to become my affiliate, as I pay out huge amounts every month to my affiliates.

Earning Income from Your Blog with Sponsored Posts and Reviews

If you have you ever tried shopping for something online then chances are, you spent time reading reviews on the product you’re interested in. While you can write about particular products simply because of how much you enjoyed using them, you can also do it for other reasons. They can be for a product you’re promoting as an affiliate like in the last section. However many companies will pay you to write a review.

That’s the power of blogs these days and the business community recognizes this. They know that not only do some blogs get a ton of high quality traffic, but some bloggers have a loyal following who have high regard on the bloggers’ take on things.

While paid reviews can certainly be very lucrative for you, many people frown on them, including many pro-bloggers and consumers. After all, can you really trust what’s written in the review if it was paid for?

To do this successfully you have to find a middle ground. Perhaps you could keep your reviews genuine and instead do paid sponsored posts like many YouTuber’s are doing nowadays. Just make sure that you’re clear to your readers which posts are sponsored.

Text Link Ads

This is probably the easiest and least invasive way to integrate ad programs in your blog. They’re so subtle, that it would be difficult to spot them. Yet, despite this, they were once considered the most popular ad program ever, favored by both bloggers and advertisers. Earning income from your blog has never been as simple and straightforward as this method.

Besides search engine results, the best way to increase the visibility of your blog is by having links around the Web that lead to it. It’s really easy to do simply by leaving comments in other people’s posts, using social networking/bookmarking programs, submitting to e-zines and article directories, participating in forums, and getting involved in link-exchanges. The more links you have pointing to your site, the better chance you have of driving more traffic and getting more revenue from these strategies.

Some advertisers employ many of these same techniques in order to increase their site’s traffic. To help them speed up the process they turn to sites that facilitate the pairing of bloggers and advertisers.

For you as the blogger, the process can be as simple as signing-up, submitting your site, inserting ad code, waiting for ad suggestions based on your blog’s content, approving or denying the suggestions, and finally making money!

Since these ads take the form of links throughout your content they’re barely noticed. Unlike widgets and banners, which take up a lot of space, text ad links virtually don’t take any at all since they blend in with ordinary links found within the blog’s content. The result is a fairly clean blog, cool to the eyes, and devoid of any resemblance of ads.

You have to be careful when you allow these text ad links on your blog as Google can be pretty finicky about them. The best advice I can give is to make sure they are relevant to your content. You can also employ tags in your links that notifies Google and other search engines to ignore it so it does not effect your rankings if you mainly rely on SEO for traffic.

Earning Income From Your Blog Without Ads

By now we’ve established that putting ads on your blogs is a great way to earn, especially if they are of the contextual type. There are however certain readers who cringe at the sight of ads. And I mean any type of ad. Once they see an ad on a blog, they promptly move on. Does that mean that you should forget about monetizing your blog altogether? The answer is no.

It might surprise you to learn that you can still earn from your blog without ads.

Have you ever thought that you can use your blog to showcase your writing talents? Using your blog, you can find people who will be interested in your skills and your blog is your perfect portfolio. The great news is there are tons of writing gigs out there that pay pretty well.

Some blog owners don’t like writing or they’re not really good at their blog’s niche or main topic. What would be their best strategy? Simple; hire someone who can do it for them. That’s where you, the expert, come in. Obviously, to get the job you should be able to show you have the right skills to write on the topic of the blog.

Guest posting is another great way to start earning income from your blog without any ads if you’d rather not make any long term commitments. Other blog owners still like to hire guest bloggers every now and then to add variety to their content.

Some may be too busy monetization to keep up with their readers demands, so they hire guest writers to fill in for them. Others do it knowing that if they hire a popular blogger, they’ll bring in a loyal fan base that could end up as regular readers of their blogs as well.

With either of these examples, you can charge a fee that is appropriate to your level of expertise. The better you master the subject, the more you can charge for your services.

If you’re really good, some might end up inviting you for a printed publication project like a magazine or a book or even invite you to speaking engagements. These type of gigs really pay big if that’s your thing.

Blog Networks

Are the type that would rather just post on your own blog and not be bothered by any monetization strategy but still get paid for your work? Then maybe a blog network is the way for you to go.
The best part about this strategy is that you don’t have to do any marketing whatsoever. All you need to do is what you do best, and that’s write great content.

Blog networks started a long time ago when bloggers realized that they had a lot to gain if they worked together. As an example, they realized that they had a lot more leverage when negotiating with ad companies as a network.

Regardless of the type of network you ultimately decide to join, there is one benefit that you can find in all of them. And that is a sense of belonging; a community that you can turn to for assistance when it comes to blogging. Blogging can be lonely sometimes especially if you go solo, but many of us prefer that too.

When you’re solo you pick your own ads, design your site, and you are responsible for drawing in traffic. If any problems arise you have to deal with them yourself.

A blog network takes all that hard work out of your hands and lets you focus on writing great content. When you’re part of a blog network, all you need to worry about is what your next post should be. You don’t have to worry about the intricacies associated with monetization strategies, they take care of it for you.

Sure, you still need to do your part when it comes to getting traffic. But the good thing about this arrangement is that you won’t be going at it alone. This can be very beneficial if you’re just starting out, bringing in your first hundred visitors in a day won’t seem impossible anymore.

The only catch is that many of these blog networks implement a profit sharing type of payment strategy. But since both you and the network are responsible for generating the income, it is logical that you share the rewards.

This is not as popular of a method that it once was 10 years ago, but it’s still a great option if you don’t want to worry about all the technicalities and other mumbo jumbo. However, keep in mind that going at it alone tends to be the much more profitable option.

Selling Your Own Products As a Model for Earning Income from Your Blog

In almost all the blog monetization methods discussed earlier, other vendors own the products and services you promote on your blog. As a result, the actual transactions were made between the interested buyer (your readers) and the advertising company even if you earned from those transactions.

However, in this section I’d like to talk about how you can begin earning income from your blog by selling something you own. While the section entitled “Make Money Without Ads” tackled the sale of your services, here we’ll focus on selling your own products.

• While there are many products that you can sell through your blog, the more common ones are:
• Information products such as eBooks, short reports, audio and video files, etc.
• Graphic designs
• Printables, Workbooks, and Planners
• Software and Plugins
• Merchandise like t-shirts, mugs and more
• Allow your imagination to lead the way!

The biggest advantage with selling your own products is that you control everything and get to keep 100% of the sale for yourself. As you can imagine this method makes it a lot more profitable for you, but it does involve a bit more work.

What if you don’t have the expertise or are too busy to handle everything yourself? That’s perfectly alright because you can always outsource the work to someone else. You can either pay them a one-time fee or a share of the profits. Your choice. I recommend the one-time fee model myself.

There’s a ton of plugins you can add to your blog that make selling your own products a breeze. These days you can get setup in very little time and effort on your part. One of the most popular options today is WooCommerce, and you have other store options like Shopify to choose from too. Do your due diligence to find the best one to fit your needs.

Get Paid From Reader Satisfaction?

This last method I’m going to talk about is often overlooked, and that’s probably because it’s not really going to earn big. However it’s one of the best ways to measure your reader’s satisfaction, that way you’ll know if you’re moving in the right direction.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m talking about donations. This might seem like a weird way to end this report, but it’s worth talking about because of all the added benefits it brings. After all, so many content creators in nearly every niche imaginable take some form of donations these days. Remember the “buy me a coffee” trend many years ago?

Like I mentioned, you can’t expect to earn big bucks from this. In fact, if your readers are not happy with your work, you probably won’t even earn a cent. But what if they are? They might consider sending you a couple bucks just to show you their gratitude.

Sure, the amount of traffic you get can serve as a decent way of determining whether your blog is doing good or not. But it’s harder to try and measure the level of satisfaction each of your readers have from the traffic alone. You can definitely measure that by setting up some sort of donations on your blog though.

Setting up a donation box is extremely easy to do with the plethora of tools available today. PayPal is probably the fastest way to set it up and the most convenient for your readers to send you their donations. Or, consider setting up your own Patreon site and using it as a membership site for your blog.

An important not is to try not to sound like begging, you can be subtle with your approach. Heck, even the old “buy me a beer” or “buy me a coffee” are commonly used to this day, and not at all intrusive to your readers.

Your Turn to Start Earning Income From Your Blog…

You now know what you need to do to take the hard work out of generating revenue from your blogging efforts. The only thing left now is for you to take action. I can give you advice on what to do, but I can’t make you do it. That is entirely up to you! See you at the top.

I’m bestselling Wall Street Journal and USA Today author of more than twenty books, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you to help you to achieve your goals. If you are interested in learning how to optimize the syndication of your content, please take a look at my popular Syndication Optimization training course and consider coming aboard to increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability.