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You might feel that making money from blogging is a far fetched impossibility. That’s because you either haven’t tried it or failed miserably on previous attempts. In truth, you can learn how to earn money blogging. You just need to know the right strategies and have the right attitude.
Today, we’re going to explore some of the widely recognized strategies for making money with blogging. We’ll cover what seems to work, how to go about it. We’ll also examine some tips from some industry leaders, and some examples of blogging done right.
With any luck, you’ll be able to adapt the lessons learned today to your own blog. Do it right, and you’ll be able to count yourself among the growing ranks of those who make money blogging.
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Table of Contents
Before we learn how to make money blogging online
Before we talk about making money blogging, if you don’t know what blogging is exactly you can watch this video to get a quick overview:
Simply put, a blog (usually built on WordPress if making money online is the way you want to go) is a frequently updated online weblog. You can create many different kinds of content, but it is usually a mixture of articles, photos, and short videos with a bit of podcasting thrown in if that’s your bag.
All of the above are going to support you in your goals of bringing in traffic and definitely (in time) making money online (just don’t expect too much at the start, if we could all make a million right off the bat. Blogging would be swamped and nobody would have a chance if you didn’t need a bit of staying power!)
There’s no real barrier to entry to those who want to make money blogging. Just about anyone can do it if they have the drive, willingness to learn, and they don’t mind shelling out a small amount for a domain and hosting. People maintain blogs for many reasons, but our focus today will be how to turn the blog into a source of profit.
With any blog, no matter what the topic or monetization strategy, the site has to be quality and it needs a readership. Let me explain. If your blog is garbage, then no one will read it. If no one reads the blog, you have no audience with which to implement your monetization strategy.
Therefore, before you concentrate on which money-making scheme to use, you have to focus on making sure your blog is worthwhile. You have to start a blog that has real promise. Let’s begin.
If you want to make money blogging online, start right
Popular belief may dictate that good ideas just fall from the sky. If only it were that easy. Coming up with a good blog takes some dedicated brainstorming.
You’ll have to choose a blog topic that you will enjoy writing about, and readers will enjoy reading. Unfortunately, some blog topics simply do not resonate with the majority of people. No matter how hard you try, there won’t be enough support to make them popular enough to generate income.
How, then, to focus on something that people will enjoy and support?
There are a few approaches. Let’s take a look at two popular paths that may help you find what to do.
One, choosing a blogging niche, comes from Blogging Basics 101. They emphasize choosing something that you will enjoy writing about to reduce the chances that you’ll quit halfway through. Sound advice, but how to narrow down what to write about out of the many things you love. They’ve got that covered as well. They recommend asking yourself some simple questions:
- What are your hobbies?
- How do you spend your free time?
- What is the one topic you could go on about for hours if your friends or family let you?
- What types of classes did you enjoy in high school or college?
- What do you enjoy reading and learning about?
- If you could do one thing for the rest of your life regardless of salary, what would you do?
Once you have your focus, you have to study and start competing with the other blogs that occupy that niche. To succeed, you’ll have to put a unique spin on the subject. This will come from injecting your personality into your article each time you write one.
That is, after all, what a blog is. A collection of your thoughts and feelings on a topic. Without the personal element in each article, the chances of success diminish drastically.
Now, the second approach for finding your focus. The experts at ProBlogger suggest a 3-pronged approach: finding a niche, finding a demographic, and finding a fight.
We’ve already discussed narrowing down a niche. You’ve got to search your mind to find the topics that interest you. What about the demographic and the fight, though?
These are interesting concepts. In the demographic approach, ProBlogger recommends thinking about who the blog is for rather than the topic it should be about.
Forget about affiliate marketing and trying to sell some of the time, and choose a type of reader to concentrate on, then build each article around things that will be relevant to them. The example ProBlogger gave was Gala Darling (she’s awesome, by the way, you should check her out).
Other examples include Black Girls Run and Fit Bottomed Girls. The titles are so descriptive you know the target audience without me even having to tell you!
Thinking about who you’ll resonate with is a great way to stay audience focused during the blog creation process. This will go a long way in helping you build up that readership as you’ll be able to concentrate on the people you connect with the most.
When ProBlogger mentioned finding a fight to zero in on, what do you think they were referencing? The answer is a struggle that readers can identify with and rally around.
In the case of ProBlogger, Darren Rowse founded the site to talk frankly about his passion for blogging. Think about what your cause is, and how you can frame it in a way that will be interesting for people to read.
Once you have your blog topic, you’ll have to go through all the rigamarole of designing a site, getting it hosted, etc. You’ll then have to concentrate on making great content as well. All these steps present challenges of their own, but they are surmountable if you put in the effort.
You can get a quick breakdown on the technical steps you’ll have to take to create a blog here:
How to start making money blogging
The number of strategies is almost as vast as the different topics you can choose. There’s no need to beat our heads against the wall trying to figure out what works. The experts have been there and done that. Let’s analyze what methods the pros recommend to make money blogging.
Blogging Basics 101
Blogging Basics 101 comes right out the gate with one of the most straightforward money-making models: selling ads. What they cover first are CPC and CPM ads. Let’s break down what that means.
CPC stands for “cost-per-click.” You have the ads on your site, then every time someone clicks the ad, you get a small amount of money from the advertiser.
CPM ads are “cost for 1,000 impressions.” You get a set amount of money every time 1,000 people view the ad. Now you see why building up that audience was so crucial?
Blogging Basics recommends going with Google AdSense for these kinds of ads. It’s not a bad suggestion either. Google AdSense takes much of the hassle out of finding the right ads and arranging them on your site.
They track down the relevant ads; then you get a cut based off of how many readers you can bring in. There are similar services that have the same basic setup that Blogging Basics also recommends: Chitika, Infolinks, and Media.net to be specific.
The problem with services like these is that they take some control away from you, the blogger. They also take a cut of the profits, which, if you’re looking to maximize your money, is not ideal.
To circumvent that, they also recommend selling ads directly. It’s more difficult and takes a greater investment of time. You get to keep more money for yourself, though so it might be worth it for you.
The ads don’t have to take the form of the traditional banner on top or side of the page ads either. Blogging Basics notes that you can use more subtle methods. Sponsored posts, “brought to you by” content, and the good-old affiliate link is all fair game.
Affiliate marketing is especially popular as it gives you a commission whenever someone buys a product or service you’re plugging. There are plenty of affiliate programs out there, with Amazon being one of the top dogs.
If you don’t feel right hawking someone else’s wares on your site, you can always use your blog to sell your own stuff to your audience. If you have a product, like a book or software, you can promote that directly.
You could also decide to plug your own business and use the blog to talk about what your business is about and how your services can benefit your audience.
Smart Blogger
The Smart Blogger approach also promotes building an audience and using that to generate income. Their specific income strategies are different than Blogging Basics and The Huffington Post, though.
First off, they eschew selling ads for cash. The reason that the amounts brought in from advertisers pale in comparison to the amounts that you can make from selling your own stuff. To put it bluntly:
“If you have an engaged audience that trusts you, selling ads is never a smart move. You’re better off either selling your own products or getting a commission from endorsing another company’s products, assuming you truly believe in them, of course.”
Next, they recommend a multi-part plan for building that sweet income stream. They recommend starting with affiliate marketing. We’ve covered the basics of affiliate programs already, no need to rehash that.
What Smart Blogger adds, though, are some reasons that affiliate marketing is a good move. In their opinion, it’s fast, it’s passive, and you can learn about what works with a little bit of study and using your common sense.
They make an interesting caveat, however. Services providers, graphic artists and the like should come out the gate promoting themselves. A smart move. I, for one, agree with their assessment.
The next part of the Smart Blogger plan comes in the form of a sales funnel. If you’re not certain what that is, you can find a pretty good explanation here thanks to Ron Segall:
The basic concept is that you hook buyers with ever more intriguing offers. The result is cash flow from people buying your most vaunted products and services.
Where Smart Blogger flips the game on its head is by suggesting that you do the sales funnel tactic in reverse:
“You’re much better off creating and selling the expensive product first, and then gradually building cheaper and cheaper products.”
They fully admit that this may result in a reduced number of people buying your product. They counter that it’s not a big deal:
“Often, you can make more money selling to the 2% than you can to the entire 98% combined.”
An interesting strategy, and one well worth exploring further. They note that there are two mistakes to avoid with this approach:
Charging high prices but making small promises (result: the product doesn’t sell well, and you waste a ton of time).
Charging low prices but making big promises (result: lots of customers, but you make no profit).
They also stress that you have to gain the trust of your audience, price your product correctly, and think carefully about what it is that you will offer your customer base.
Once you’ve got the funnel, they recommend adding some advanced techniques to your repertoire. Webinars, the automated sales funnel, and email lists are all big money makers. It takes time to get the grasp of, but implemented properly they can net your blog the profit you desire.
ProBlogger
Then there’s the ProBlogger approach. ProBlogger is a great resource with a ton of high-quality information about monetization. They stress that there are more than just the few advertising and affiliate sales methods for generating income. In fact, they provide a detailed infographic with many branches:
- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Events
- Recurring Revenue
- Offline Business
- Services
- Products
- Other Income Streams
These are further divided into specific strategies that you can implement to start making money through your blog audience. They cover each broad category briefly and note that combining multiple income streams is often part of the path to success.
They offer some high-value tips on maximizing your advertising potential. This comes in three parts. Improving your traffic, positioning your ads, and designing your ads.
By implementing all three concepts, you should be able to optimize how your ads are doing and thus get more money than you may have thought possible for running them.
ProBlogger makes a distinction between direct and indirect income streams. Direct methods, they explain, are the ones that allow you to make money from your blog. Indirect methods, they contend, earn you money because you have a blog.
Examples of the direct approach include advertising, sponsorship, affiliate programs, selling/flipping blogs, donations, merchandise, subscriptions, and blog networks.
We’ve already gone over advertising, having sponsors, selling merch, and using affiliates. What about these other strategies, though?
Flipping blogs sounds a lot like flipping real estate. That’s because it is. You build up a blog with a mighty audience; then you sell that to some entrepreneur looking to use that audience to further their goals.
They might have their own product they’re looking to market. Maybe they just really want to manage their own niche motorcycle blog. Either way, they’re willing to pay you for the hard work you put into building the site first.
You could even become a serial flipper. Create, sell, repeat to your heart’s content. If you have the knack and the design skill, it’s not a bad way to go about it.
Donations and subscriptions are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you can provide your content for free, then gently advise users to support you by leaving money. The so-called “value for value” model. You could solicit donations directly on your site, or use third-party facilitators like Patreon to have your audience fund you.
Alternatively, you can build that audience, then lock some of your premium content behind a paywall. If they want to read that special article, watch that cool video, or have whatever secrets you hold revealed, your readers have to come up off the cash first.
As for the blog networks, ProBlogger says one way to go here is to start a network, contract bloggers to write for you, then reap the rewards. You could also try joining one of these networks as a writer, in which case you would earn money from whoever runs the network for your contributions.
They provide examples, like Gawker (RIP), along with legitimate reasons for joining a network or declining to join a network.
Become network-affiliated, they note, can get you more partnerships, more traffic, and allow you to leverage the skills of people who may have more experience than you do.
Instead of beating your head against the wall trying to manage the technical and administrative back-end of running a blog, all you have to do is write and collect your money.
There’s the added benefit of building off of an existing network’s prestige as well that can bring you greater legitimacy.
You’ll have to weigh those reasons against the fact that you’ll lose a large amount of freedom. The network calls the shots. They also have ownership of the content you produce. To top it off, they take a cut of the revenue as well.
A network could be a good springboard for you to build an audience. It might also trap you into an arrangement where you don’t have much control. Choose wisely.
The indirect methods for developing that income stream that ProBlogger lists are largely self-explanatory: consulting, employment opportunities, business blogging, book deals, offline writing gigs, selling e-resources, business partnerships and speaking opportunities.
As you can see, the methodology here is that you build the blog, you get noticed, then ancillary opportunities come your way because of that. You’ll have to keep a keen eye out for establishing connections and recognizing when an opportunity is knocking. Any one of these methods could become lucrative, though.
Consulting/Speaking Opportunities: You establish yourself as an expert in a particular field and then charge for your expertise.
Employment Opportunities/Business Blogging/Offline Writing Gigs: You build a following from your blog, then someone comes along and wants you to write for them since they saw your work.
Book Deals: The blog nets you such an audience that publishers come-a-knocking to offer you money.
Selling E-Resources: You can market your own e-books, webinars, and classes to your audience.
ProBlogger is even kind enough to lay out some criteria for judging how much money your blog should be generating. They claim that there are six factors that directly influence a blog’s earning potential:
- Traffic
- Source Of Traffic
- Income Stream
- Topic
- Age Of The Blog
- Time Invested
They note that balancing these is a tricky process. They also state that the best way to find out what works is trial-and-error. Jump right in, then experiment with what gets you the most money. They do call attention to some generalities that are important:
- Blogs with good content do well
- Blogs with a large amount of good content do better
- Blogs with an established reputation have more followers
- It takes time to build a reputation (and good SEO rankings)
- There is a learning curve
- Your topic choices will affect how well you do with advertising
- You have to build your audience with loyal readers
Make money blogging conclusion
Now you should be set on how to create a blog and make money. No matter what you decide to do, you’ll have to make sure that you are offering quality content and grow a substantial audience.
Once you have those bases covered, you can make use of any number of strategies that will help you make money blogging.
Now you have discovered the basics of how to make money blogging your next question concerns how bloggers make money via affiliate marketing, and it is important to answer.
After a lot of work creating high quality content that puts you high in the rankings, it is time for all that work to pay off. You’re ready to monetize this blog.
There are a lot of great sites that can help you in making money from your blog once you have established yourself a little bit. Let’s take a look at a few of the most popular and useful among them.
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How bloggers make money with affiliate marketing
There is one prime money maker that anyone can use, and most do and if you want to learn how to make money blogging then it is vital you know that one of the most popular ways to do so is through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing in essence is a partnership between you and an online retailer where you agree to market their products in exchange for a commission of every sale they make through your promotion.
When it comes to writing a blog and getting paid for it, affiliate programs have grown in popularity as more and more bloggers find ways to market niche products through their blogs.
I’m going to review my five favorite affiliate marketing programs for you here, then offer some guidelines for affiliate marketing to help you get started.
List of top affiliate income networks
| Network | Commissions | Cost to join | Established | Join link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Varies |
Free |
2009 |
||
|
Varies |
Free |
2000 |
||
|
Up to 10% |
Free |
1996 |
||
|
Varies |
Free |
2000 |
||
|
Up to 75% |
Free |
2002 |
||
|
Varies |
Free |
1996 |
||
|
Varies |
Free |
1998 |
1. Amazon
Amazon is one of the largest e-commerce sites on the Internet, so naturally it also has one of the largest affiliate programs.
I want to spend a decent amount of time with this review, because it’s not just a place to grab hold of the best blogging books, it’s also one of the most popular and simple ways how bloggers make money.
Pros
- Amazon is an extremely reputable site.
- They have a massive inventory of items for sale to any niche market you choose.
- Their tracking chip lasts for 24 hours and is valid for any Amazon purchase. This means that if someone clicks through to their site from yours and decides not to buy your advertised item, but they make a few purchases while on the site, you still make commission.
- There aren’t any traffic requirements to meet in order to stay a member in good standing, and they help you promote.
- Their tracking system is excellent, so you can easily see which of your content links are driving revenue and which ones are not. This lets you target future articles towards success.
Cons
- They pay significantly lower commissions than other affiliate programs, but that’s because you are more likely to sell through a trusted site like Amazon.
- Their operating agreement is lengthy and not very clear. Some of their guidelines can trap unsuspecting marketers who haven’t done their research.
- Their cookie only lasts a day, so if someone waits more than a day to purchase the product, you won’t get your commission. However, if they add the product to their cart, you will get commission as long as they purchase within 90 days.
- You can’t use email marketing to directly send your Amazon affiliate link to your users. You can circumvent this by linking users to content on your website, and leading them from that content to your Amazon affiliate link.
- Their minimum payment of $100 can be pretty steep if your website is still young and needs growth. It will take time to make money with them.
Pricing
Product reviews are one of the main ways that people are making money from a blog. If you stay transparent and endorse a product that you believe in, you can make great money. When users see your review and notice your enthusiasm for the product, they will be likely to click through and buy one for themselves.
Best sellers are a great way to leverage product reviews. These are already popular and trendy, and linking to them will give you commission for a sale people are interested in already. You can also use the reviews to your advantage. While it’s prohibited to use their reviews as your own, you can leverage the feedback to build trust in the product.
Social media is another great way to promote your content. When you post, stay transparent. Let people know that you are posting an affiliate link. Amazon takes transparency very seriously. Make sure these are mixed into an actual article, because no one wants to see nothing but advertisements.
Making a start
You can sign up on Amazon by filling in all their forms. Read the rules first so you understand everything. As I mentioned, they have a lot of them.
You can search the Amazon site for different products to promote. When you enter a keyword, Amazon will generate a list of related products. Once you find a product you want to promote, you simply click the Get Link button to create your specific Amazon affiliate link.
Choose your products carefully. They should fit your brand and match your topic well. Seamless integration of affiliate marketing posts is the goal. If you promote something you wouldn’t buy yourself, you will start losing trust, and your reputation will take a nosedive. This will cause you to lose followers which obviously also results in less sales.
Again, remember that it is mandatory to disclose your affiliation. Not only will you keep your trust and reputation, but you won’t get banned from your affiliate programs or put in jail for breaking the FTC guidelines.
2. ShareASale
ShareASale is one of the largest affiliate market programs around right now. It can compete against other affiliate programs in an evolving market.
They have been in business for nearly 20 years and have consistently worked to improve their program for both affiliates and merchants.
They have a reputation for being a fair company that deals in honesty. They provide some of the best customer service out of any affiliate program and accurately report with easy-to-understand tracking tools.
They were acquired by Awin, another large affiliate program, so they have a network that is nearly as vast as Amazon itself. New affiliates will be presented with welcome kits to help them learn some of the basics of affiliate marketing and strategize ways to make money faster.
Pros
- Like Amazon, they have a great reputation. People trust this company to do good business.
- Their sign up process is very easy. It takes less than 15 minutes to sign up for their program, which makes it a great beginner market for new affiliates and bloggers.
- Since they are so large, they also have a lot of different merchants. No matter what niche market you use, they have products for your viewers.
- They have some great built-in search engines to make it easy to find products to endorse. They also have a Power Rank, which lets you browse the strongest merchants currently on the site to see what sells.
- Unlike nearly all the other affiliate giants, their customer service is fantastic. You can even reach them by phone from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Central time.
- You can customize your affiliate links. Instead of having a giant, long link with tons of random numbers, you can create short URLs that are more visually appealing to users.
Cons
- They don’t use PayPal. Your earnings are deposited directly into your bank account.
- They aren’t great for new affiliates or smaller traffic sites. They have a pretty high payout threshold, and if you don’t meet it, they will deduct fees from your account and potentially delete it entirely.
- Merchants are also deleted from the network, and their affiliates won’t be notified. This means that your affiliate links become useless and you don’t even know it. Make sure you stay on top of your tracking reports to figure out when links stop working.
3. ClickBank
Another marketing affiliate giant is ClickBank. Entrepreneurs developed this site, so their network enables you to make money blogging. As with other sites, this one allows bloggers to search their marketplace for products to endorse and make a commission for sales.
One thing that distinguishes ClickBank from other programs is that the vendors are the ones who set the commission for their sales affiliates. This can work against affiliate marketers, but most often it actually works in their favor. This site shows commission payouts as high as 75%, and when affiliates can choose which products to endorse, it encourages vendors to set a competitive commission rate.
Is ClickBank legit?
Because they are such a large community, but not associated with well established programs, people are always asking whether or not ClickBank is legit. Expert niche marketers have made insanely high revenue from this site, and they rave about it a lot. This also contributes to a sense of “too good to be true”.
The good news is that ClickBank is legit. You can make money with their affiliate program. The bad news is that hype is usually just that.
The average user won’t make those high sales numbers until they’ve spent a lot of time increasing their reader base and gaining the trust of their subscribers. You need a high traffic rate to make lots of money with affiliate marketing. After all, if people can’t find your link they can’t use it.
One of the other things that hurts their reputation is that they aren’t the best at weeding out bad products. The site has great service, a user-friendly and speedy interface, and a great payment processing system. A lot of people are offering great products. The issue is that, with ClickBank being large and unwilling to perform some basic quality control, you can also run into some real duds.
Pros
- You don’t need to be approved in order to have an account. A lot of other companies will screen your site to make sure you’re well established and professional. This makes ClickBank an ideal site for people just getting started in affiliate marketing who are still working to establish their brand and gain more traffic.
- Giant commissions are possible with this site. Because each vendor sets their own commission rates and affiliates choose their own products, there is a huge incentive for vendors to offer large commission bonuses for their sales.
- They are extremely reliable. You will always be paid on time, and you can trust the site itself, even if some of the vendors need to be screened.
Cons
- Their refund policy is nice, but only if you’re a buyer. All vendors are required to offer a 60-day money-back guarantee for anything they sell. They are also required to offer it with no questions asked. While this isn’t ideal, you can avoid having to refund commissions by carefully screening your products. Only endorse the ones that you would put your reputation behind in terms of quality.
- ClickBank doesn’t offer quality control. This makes it kind of a safe place to land for shady businesses offering subpar knockoff products that they want to pretend are the real deal. Look into small niche marketing, as these tend to have more conscientious sellers. Larger markets make it easy for shady vendors to blend in, with attractive offers that don’t mean anything.
- They have a minimum sales requirement, and you have to make it across multiple payment types. Because they don’t screen affiliates before account approval, they do a back-end check to make sure their affiliates aren’t scamming the system to give themselves discounts. This means that payments must be accepted from more than one source, and you must meet an initial minimum before they will release your first payment. The good news is that once you’ve satisfied this requirement, you’re in the clear!
4. Rakuten marketing affiliate program
One of the other giants in affiliate marketing is Rakuten. This is a global network that connects businesses to new audiences using your site. Rakuten has one of the best reputations in the business, so you can support them without fear.
Rakuten is driven by performance. They are very selective when it comes to accepting affiliates into their program.
They don’t stop there, either. Once marketers make the program, they are still monitored to ensure that their content is high quality, and they are effectively using the program.
Rakuten’s size is an advantage. They have a lot of extremely well-known brands, like Lego, Best Buy, New Balance, Mac Cosmetics, and several major department stores. This means that they work a bit differently, though.
Unlike others, this network is a conglomeration of different affiliate networks. Once your account is approved for Rakuten, you still have to apply for each individual marketing program. Each of these will manually review your website and determine whether your products are in line with their brand and relevant to their market.
Pros
- Their customer service is great. Every affiliate gets their own dedicated manager, so they have a single point of contact that will readily answer questions and assist them in making sales growth.
- They have massive numbers. In 2016, they were home to over 1,000 merchants, and they tracked over 100 million orders. They have only grown since then.
- Their ads have integrated technology. If you are technologically proficient, then this is an amazing way to allow you creativity. Select the type of ad you want, and they will generate the code you need for your site. They also let you keep it simple if you aren’t interested in digging too far.
- They offer a user-friendly interface. A lot of affiliate programs make it difficult to find your affiliate links sometimes, and searching their interface for new links can be difficult. Rakuten’s dashboard displays tracking and linking alongside payment information and link codes. You can even generate quick and advanced reports.
- Training tools are available. This site focuses on growth and high revenue streams. They want you to continue to grow and succeed, so they offer a lot of tools to teach you how to grow your business.
Cons
- This is not the right program for beginners. This program wants to know that you will be a high-profit sales affiliate. They check to make sure your blog is established as an authority and generates traffic that interacts with you. If you are new, don’t have a lot of content, or need to build an engaged readership, then hold off on Rakuten and get some experience.
- Their payment schedule is not regulated. They pay you after merchants pay them. This means that you can sometimes wait a couple months before seeing payment for your sales. They don’t use PayPal, either, so you have to accept direct deposit or wait for a check to arrive in the mail.
5. CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction)
CJ Affiliate has also been around for a long time. They have evolved along with technology, ensuring that they consistently rank among the top affiliate programs.
They are considered one of the largest affiliate programs in North America and have only seen steady growth over the last decade.
Pros
- They have a pretty in-depth search function. You can even search by category for niche marketing. Searching the keyword shows several different affiliate programs along with their payment terms and network earnings. Clicking the company will take you to more detailed information.
- They have a lot of very well-known brands, so you can assure your subscriber base that they are receiving quality products. Zappos, Walgreens, Vimeo, and Torrid are all merchants that use this program.
- They assist you with the process. Instead of letting you do all the work yourself, CJ Affiliate provides you with widgets and link automation to help you grow quickly. This lets you make attractive links that are more likely to get clicked and let you scale quickly thanks to extra opportunity.
Cons
- Affiliates have to apply to each merchant individually, and each merchant is free to set their own Terms of Service. This can make for a long and difficult approval process that requires keeping track of multiple sets of different rules. Make sure to keep quality content and organize your program guidelines to avoid issue.
- They are frequently deactivating their advertisers. The way their billing works means that you are temporarily deactivated while they settle accounts with their merchants. This means that you do not earn commissions if your users buy during this deactivation period.
- Their tracking system is extremely outdated. While their payment models and merchants have updated with the times, their tracking features have not. They offer very little conversion information. You get a date and TID (tracking identity) tracking. If you want more data, you will have to use an API (application programming interface) and get your reports from a third party.
- They have a reputation for closing inactive accounts. They do not seem very careful with regards to activity, either. Several people have reported losing commissions before payments were made, because their account was deemed inactive and closed without notice.
How to make money blogging aside from affiliate marketing
While we focused on reviewing some of the top affiliate marketing programs, that’s only one way to make money with blogging. There are a lot of different options:
- Advertisements: While they have lost popularity among bloggers, because they require a lot of traffic to be effective, you can still use Google AdSense and other similar tools to earn money from a blog.
- Seminars: If you’re an expert in your field, sell your knowledge. Cultivate online courses that will help people learn the basics, and sell them. Be sure to include some webinars and interaction.
- Social media: Use social media to boost traffic to your blog. When bloggers balance advertisement posts with genuine, unsponsored content followers will be very receptive and you will begin earning more (as well as making your blog content more relevent to your subject matter overall.
And a lot more that you can learn at Wealthy Affiliate which we mentioned earlier!
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How to make money blogging: conclusion
Now, you know how to make money blogging and how bloggers make money using affiliate marketing!
There are a lot of great ways for bloggers to make money online.
You can advertise Skype consultations on your blog where you charge a large hourly fee for one-on-one training is something that can only be easily managed when you have long been established as an authority.
Advertisements are already falling out of fashion with lots of bloggers, so they are unlikely to gain you money unless you have a very high-traffic site where people are clicking everything.
Because of this, I recommend you start by using affiliate marketing to make money. If you’re just getting started and don’t have as much traffic, then you can’t go wrong with joining up at Wealthy Affiliate (free) where you can start to learn the basics of how to make money blogging. Try it, if you’re a beginner you’ll definitely thank me for all the support you get in the pursuit of your dreams of making money online!
FAQs
Can you really make money from blogging?
Of course! We have taught a ton of people how to start a blog and make money with things like Amazon associates and Google AdSense over the years.
These huge companies provide ways that allow you to make money with their ads and services, and they definitely wouldn’t waste their time creating these opportunities if blogging for profit didn’t work for both parties.
How do beginner blogs make money?
Here is how beginner blogs make money in most cases:
- Affiliate marketing
- Selling your own digital products
- Newsletters
- Coaching
- Consulting
- Dropshipping
- Memberships (recurring)
- Selling the actual website
- Sell courses
- Accepting donations
How do bloggers get paid for blogging?
This all depends on how you are monetizing your site, there are many types of blogs that make money, but usually, you will receive payment from most companies via direct deposit to your bank account, via check for linking to products (Amazon for example) or by showing advertisements on your site (like Google AdSense).
From here you can move onto more advanced monetization methods, but the above are my recommended ways on how to get paid for blogging on WordPress for the beginners we help.
Does blogging really pay?
How long does it take to make money as a blogger?
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