Starting a blog can be a powerful decision. Whether you did it to achieve a better lifestyle, start your own business, share your thoughts with the world, etc., blogging has many benefits.
But, if you want to devote more time to your blog instead of a job, you still have to pay the bills like everyone else.
With hosting, domains, rent, mortgages, food, gas, electric bills, and more, you have to make a pretty decent amount of money to live.
Thanks to the worldwide impact of the internet, there are many ways you can now make that money from your own blog, working in the comfort of your home.
If you're reading this, you probably have a few ideas of how to do that and have maybe made a little money blogging already, but it's time to take it to the next level.
Here are 30 ways to make more money blogging online:
1. Write to your customers
You shouldn't just write to get traffic or subscribers, you should write to people that are more likely to buy your products or services. If you sell something on your blog, who is your target customer base?
For example, if you have a basketball blog selling a product that teaches people how to shoot, an article about how to shoot like Stephen Curry would probably be more likely to get sales than an article about your top 10 favorite basketball players of all time.
Although both articles are about basketball, the first one is more related to your product than the second. Think about who will read your post before writing it.
Would they be more or less likely to be interested in what you're selling?
2. Make your blog faster
Not only does improving your blog's speed help your SEO, it also improves your bounce rate and the user-experience.
How long do you wait for sites to load when you are on the internet?
Probably not more than a couple of seconds. So, why should anyone else wait longer for your site?
Test your site performance with one of these free services:
Follow the tips they give you for making your site faster and you will see many benefits.
Here are a few articles that will help you with site speed:
- Increase Blog Speed Using These 10 Tips
- How To Parallelize Downloads Across Hostnames Tutorial
- 6 Best Free Tools For Testing Website Performance
3. Try Adsense
If you don't have a product or service to offer yet or don't plan on having one, you might make some decent money from Google Adsense.
With Adsense, you allow Google to display ads on your site relevant to what your visitors might be interested in. Some sites rely on ads like these and some of them just use them for extra income.
If you get good at ranking for keywords that advertisers pay more money for, you have potential to make a lot from ads.
To find these keywords, use the Google Keyword Planner to find phrases that have higher advertiser competition that are related to the theme of your blog.
4. Sell ebooks
Everyone seems to read books on Kindle devices, smartphones and tablets these days. If you know a lot about your industry, make some quality, in-depth books on related subjects your readers would be interested in.
You can sell them on your blog and also self publish them on Amazon to get a boost in sales.
You could have a fleet of books that make a few sales a month each or maybe you will get that one bestseller that can pay your bills for years.
Who knows?
5. Photography
Are you a photographer on the side or even professionally? If you enjoy doing that, you could use your blog to sell rights to your photos. You could even sell them on other sites like iStockphoto and Shutterstock.
If you add a few new photos a week, you could eventually build a huge amount of small royalties from people buying the rights to use them.
6. Promote your blog posts on social sharing communities
If you don't have a huge social media following yet or you just want an extra boost in traffic to your blog, you can use social sharing communities to promote your articles.
On these sites, you basically trade shares with people. You share stuff you find interesting, get so many points per share and then use those points to reward others who share your stuff.
It's kind of a “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” concept. With a points system, everyone benefits and gets more shares.
Here are 3 great social sharing communities to use:
7. Use lead magnets
One of the best ways to get sales for your blog is to collect emails and promote to your list.
Hardly anyone will buy something the first time they see it and a lot of people might forget to return to your site if you don't collect any information from them.
To collect more leads from your blog, use lead magnets to give visitors something of value in exchange for their email.
Gone are the days where you could just ask people to subscribe to your newsletter and actually get a decent amount of people to do it. People want something in exchange now.
They want something valuable and free for their email address. It's just like any other transaction. You can't get something for nothing.
Make a free ebook, course, report, etc. that your visitors would love in exchange for their email and you will see a nice rise in subscriptions from the same amount of traffic.
8. Use more specific offers for blog categories
One problem a lot of bloggers have when it comes to making money is conversions. Typically, the average blogger gets only 1 or 2% of visitors to become leads and another 1 or 2% to buy their offer.
Therefore, you could have 10,000 visitors a month coming to your blog and still not make much money because of these small conversion rates. But, there is something you can do about it.
The best marketers know that the more specific you get with offers, the better your conversions will be. So, instead of having one product for your entire blog, you have multiple.
But, you don't just make a bunch of products to offer to the same subscribers, you have categorized ones.
For example, let's say you have a marketing blog with 3 categories:
- SEO
- Paid Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
Instead of trying to pitch a free ebook about internet marketing in general in exchange for your visitor's email, have a separate lead magnet for each category.
Maybe your visitor is only interested in one kind of marketing. What you do know is if they are reading an article on your site about SEO, they are interested in doing better SEO.
So, you have a free On-Page SEO checklist or something to offer as a lead magnet to get leads, but the only people that see it are the ones reading articles in the SEO category. Make sense?
You have 3 lead magnets: one related to each specific blog category. That is the only lead magnet offered on those posts. Then you do the same with your products.
If you use what you know about your visitors and tailor specific offers to what they are reading about, you will get much better sales conversions.
9. Sell your arts and crafts
If you are good at painting, sculpting, woodwork or any other kind of craft, you could sell your work on your blog. Etsy is also a great place to do this.
If you use both your blog and Etsy together to promote your crafts, you could get quite a few buyers. The great thing about art is it is very unique.
You can price it based on the time you put into it, how many are available and how there is nothing else like it in the world. Unique sells. You just need to use your blog to get the needed traffic.
10. Flip websites
If content is king and you happen to be very good at ranking content, you could make quite a bit of money flipping websites.
You can bid on domains at Godaddy Auctions, buy some that you think you could work with, build up a quality website with plenty of traffic and sell it for a profit later on.
It's kind of like internet real estate in a way. But with this, you never have to leave your home.
Related: One Weird Trick To Get More Social Share For Your Blog
11. Write killer blog headlines
What do all news and big media companies have in common? They write headlines that are so good, you can't help but click on them. This is why they get so much traffic.
A lot of times their content isn't even that amazing. Have you ever noticed that?
You can go to a lot of smaller blogs and find really in-depth articles or better overall information on just about any subject, but it's the news sites that get more visitors because they have the best headlines.
Better headlines = more clicks in search results = higher rankings in search engines = more traffic for you
It doesn't matter how good your content is, if the headline doesn't grab people's attention, no one will see it. The first step to getting incredible traffic numbers is to write the best headlines.
Go to Yahoo News, celebrity gossip sites and big brands to find ideas for writing great headlines. You'll know they're good if they make you think about clicking them or they have lots of social shares.
Here are a few quick tips for headlines:
- Use “How To”
- Use numbers (numbered list posts do especially well)
- Use “Case Study”
For more on headlines, read this.
12. Build up your social following
After you publish a blog post, what is the next thing you do? You probably share it on social media, right? That's great. The more eyeballs you get on your post the better.
But, if you don't have very many social media followers, sharing your post won't do a lot for it. You have to put some work into building your following.
To do this, don't reinvent the wheel, just find what works and model it. Look for your competition, as well as your own social posts. What posts get the most engagement?
Usually quotes, images and videos do pretty well on social media. Remember, every post should not be just a link to an article on your blog.
I've tried this and you usually don't see that much growth in your following if that is all you do. You need to mix it up.
Unless your social account is geared towards your company as opposed to your personal brand, you shouldn't post links to social media more than 50% of the time.
Like I said, pay attention to what works on each social platform and model it. Popular posts on Instagram might not be popular on Twitter. Test, observe and emulate what works.
Don't continue to do what doesn't.
13. Try affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing has become one of the leading ways for bloggers to make money online. It has helped thousands of people make 6 figures or even millions online with just a laptop and an internet connection.
There are many benefits to affiliate marketing:
- No startup costs
- No responsibilities for customer service
- You don't have to build your own products
- There are unlimited offers to choose from
- Some products pay you huge commissions
If you want to make money blogging with little risk, go to a site like Clickbank and look at some products that fit what your visitors might be interested in. Go to their sales pages and ask yourself if you would consider buying the product being offered.
If so, chances are your readers would too. You can use these to make quite a bit of money from your blog if you have enough traffic and a decent sales funnel for the product.
I definitely recommend at least trying affiliate marketing, especially if you're a beginner trying to make money blogging.
14. Experiment with popups
Popups are ads that appear in the middle of your blog pages, usually when people first visit your site or are about to leave. These are one of the best tools for getting leads through your blog.
Can they be annoying? Yes. Do they get results? Yes, if used correctly. It all comes down to a little testing.
For instance, if you use a popup plugin like Ninja Popups, you can make different popups for different posts and test different scenarios to optimize results.
You might test having the popup appear a few seconds after a visitor arrives on a page vs having it appear right before they leave.
It might help you bounce rate and be less annoying if you have it popup right before they leave, but you need to test and make sure.
You could also test different copy, backgrounds, or lead magnets to see what converts best on your blog. Either way, most marketers will agree that popups account for a large chunk of emails collected on their websites.
15. Offer a service
Offering a service like consulting, web design, coaching, etc., can be one of the best ways to make money from your blog.
It's easy to setup because you don't have to create a product and you can get paid very well if your services are in demand.
You could even use sites like UpWork or Fiverr to promote your services on top of your blog to get you an even bigger customer base.
If you do this, make sure you create contracts that your clients can digitally sign to protect your business. Also, you need to figure out if you want to be paid by the hour or by the project.
Have all your prices clearly defined before doing this, so you make it easier to bill clients and determine which jobs to take or decline.
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16. Write lengthy content
One of the biggest challenges in blogging is getting enough traffic. The main way you get traffic to blog posts, besides sharing on social media, is to rank articles in search results.
Although search engine algorithms are always adapting, one common ranking signal is the length of the article.
Google, Yahoo and Bing tend to give more ranking juice to an article that goes more in-depth in the topic being searched. What is the best way to figure out how in depth an article is? By checking how many words it has.
There is a definite correlation between the length of blog posts and how well the post ranks. So, how many words should you shoot for in your articles? Well, it depends on a few factors.
First, don't write more just to please search engines. If you have to ramble on and start repeating yourself just to get some extra words on the page, you shouldn't do it.
You should conclude the post once you feel like there is nothing left to be said on the subject or when you want to turn the reader's attention to something else.
Don't ever sacrifice quality for quantity when it comes to blogging. Second, look at the competition you are up against when trying to rank an article.
How many words do the top articles have on page one of search results? That should give you a good idea of how many words you will need to be competitive.
It's time you stop writing dinky little 300 word articles and start giving yourself a chance to actually get some more traffic by ranking.
17. Sponsored posts
Some companies will pay you to write about certain topics or post on social media about their brand. These are called sponsored posts.
These posts can be a great way to make some extra money by allowing companies to use your blog to get some extra brand awareness for themselves in exchange for a fee.
Sometimes they want you to publish one of their articles or want you to write your own about them. Don't do a lot of these because your audience will catch on and might not appreciate it if you start posting tons of sponsored posts.
One or two here and there might not be too bad though. Like I said, you can also do this with social media. Someone like Kloie Kardashian can do one sponsored post on Twitter and make around $40,ooo.
It all comes down to you having a big audience that companies want to get in front of and what kind of price both parties negotiate to make it happen. To start doing this, you might try a site like Sponsored Tweets.
18. Show your expertise
Branding is everything in today's world. It's not always who you really are, but how people see you, as we find out in the worlds of politics, business and others.
If people see you as an expert, it is easier to build a loyal following and get people to buy your courses or services. Doing that isn't always easy though.
Having countless, in-depth blog posts that show your expertise on different subjects really goes a long way, but there are other effective methods for building credibility.
For instance, you see a lot of people using labels like: New York Times Bestselling author, Forbes Top 50 Social Media Influencer, Digital Marketing Accredited Professional, and things like that to boost their credibility on their blog.
You also see companies list their biggest partners, testimonials, satisfied clients, etc. These things work.
If you have any kind of credibility boosting labels or achievements you can use on your blog and social profiles, you should leverage them.
You may hear people tell you to “fake it till you make it” and that may be true, but when you make it, even if it is one decent achievement, you need to let it be known to the world, so they will trust your brand a little bit more.
Credibility will ultimately get you more opportunities, traffic and customers for your brand.
For more on building credibility, read these articles:
- How To Brand Yourself As An Expert In Your Field in 10 Steps
- How To Establish Yourself As An Authority Figure Online
- How To Become A Certified Professional In Internet Marketing
19. Try private advertising
If you want to allow ads, but would rather charge your own prices for them, you could try private advertising deals. With services like Adsense, you get a percentage of the ad revenue when someone clicks ads on your blog.
When you do private advertising you have to actually negotiate with the company wanting to put an ad on your site. You usually give them a banner on your site for a fixed price per month, cost per click or cost per 1,000 impressions.
It might be harder to get ad deals, but if you get them, you get to keep 100% of the ad revenue as opposed to maybe 50% or so from a service like Adsense.
20. Classifieds or job section
Another way to earn some extra income on your blog is to have a classifieds or job posting section of your website… kind of like a mini Craigslist.
Say, you have a blog about animals. You could have a classifieds section on your site where people can post animals that they have for adoption.
You could even have people post their animal training or grooming services on there. All they would have to do is pay the posting fee of $25, $50 or whatever price you think is fair and leave their post up for a month.
Then, if they want to post an ad again, they pay the fee and you put the ad up again or leave the same one on there another month. It's a pretty cool concept.
If you want some ideas, look at the Problogger jobs section or the Entrepreneur classifieds.
21. Add a forum
Remember how content is king? Well, one great way to get loads of new content for your blog without even blogging is to have a forum.
Some sites succeed with this concept like Moz and others fail, but it can help you increase traffic, as well as engagement on your blog. On top of that, it shouldn't take up much of your time, like writing blog posts does.
If you want to add a forum to your blog without doing a lot of advanced coding or hiring someone to do it, you might try the BuddyPress plugin if you have a WordPress blog.
22. Donate
Believe it or not, people will actually donate to your blog if you have a place where they can do it. Especially if you put together really high quality content consistently.
Some bloggers put a donate button made through Paypal in their sidebar and say “Buy me a coffee” or something like that.
When you actually do something like that, you probably won't get tons of donors, but it might be enough to pay your Starbucks bills.
23. Offer an affiliate program
I know, I know, I mentioned affiliate marketing already, but earlier I was talking about you doing the marketing. Now, I'm talking about others doing the marketing for you.
Instead of you promoting other people's products for a commission, you can let others do the same for your products.
In fact, you might like this better because it helps you grow your brand and get more sales that you wouldn't have previously gotten.
So, not only would get to keep 100% or the revenue from you selling your products, you would keep maybe 50% of the revenue from other people working on your behalf.
You can do this by making your own private affiliate program or using a service like Clickbank to help. Or, of course, you could even do both.
You could have an affiliate program with private links on your site and just use the Clickbank version to reach more affiliates. It just depends on how you want to do it.
To do this through Clickbank, just create a vendor account and follow the steps.
24. Hold a contest
If you want to get more email signups through your blog, you might consider holding a contest for a cool prize. You just need to do a little math before you start it.
You need to calculate your average lifetime customer value. Then, using your conversion rates, figure out how much each lead's average lifetime value.
For example, let's say each customer on your blog buys an average of $150 worth of stuff over time. Then, if 5% of your leads become customers, you need at least 20 leads to get one customer.
This means each of your leads is worth about $7.50 to you.
Now, if you are giving away a free weekend trip to the beach where they will meet, hangout and get coached by you that is worth $2,000, you need about 268 leads to make from the contest to make it profitable.
If you want to double your investment in the contest prize, you might need more like 500-550 leads. So, you would need to make sure you're confident that you could get that many contestants before starting that contest.
Obviously, these numbers are purely made up and it would all vary, but you get the idea.
A contest can easily get you hundred or even thousands of leads and if you can convert them, the cost of the prize will be peanuts compared to the sales you will do long term.
25. Email Outreach
Sometimes, you need a little help. For example, one social share from an influencer with 100,000 followers would do a lot more for your blog post than you sharing a post multiple times to your 3,000 followers.
Try to reach out to people that might want to share your articles. Obviously, not everyone will, but even just one influencer enjoying your work and sharing it to their fans could make a huge difference for your blog.
Or, you could even try to get some backlinks from these influencers. That could help a lot with your organic rankings, as well as domain authority.
Here's a couple of templates you could use to reach out to influencers:
For social media shares:
Hi (their name),
My name is (your name).
I follow you on (social media site) and noticed that you shared one of my favorite articles: (article title). That is such a great post. It's such a great blog. I was hearing from my readers that they wanted something more in-depth about the topic, so I went ahead and created this post: (URL)
If you have time, I'd love for you to check it out.
Thanks!
(Your name)
For backlinks:
Hi (their name),
I was searching for some articles about (your topic) today and I came across this page: (URL of their post)
I noticed that you linked to one of my favorite articles: (article title)
Just wanted to give you a heads up that I created a similar post. It's like (name of the article they linked to), but more thorough and up to date: URL
Might be worth a mention on your page.
Either way, keep up the awesome work!
Cheers,
(Your name)
Now, of course there are a lot more templates you could use for different situations besides these, but those two can give you an idea of what to do.
Just keep in mind that if you are going to reach out to an influencer for a share or link to a post, they need to get something out of it too.
For instance, if they have a broken link, you could give them a link to your article instead, therefore getting rid of a bad link from their site.
You could give them a better version of a post that they shared and got a lot of engagement from, therefore getting you some traffic and them some new social followers.
Just give them a reason to share or link to your stuff that will actually benefit the influencer. Don't expect anyone you don't even know to do things for you just out of the kindness of their heart.
26. Create a course
If you have expertise in the industry you blog in, create a course that teaches people how to do certain things.
I've seen people make fortunes selling courses on marketing, blogging, social media, cooking, losing weight and even teaching parrots how to talk. I'm not even kidding.
Trust me, if you have any kind of skill or extensive knowledge in any field, you could make a course and sell it on your blog. There are people trying to learn how to do just about everything.
If you aren't technically skilled or just want to get a course put together as quickly as possible, you could try making a course with Udemy.
Udemy is always doing promotions and getting new customers, so you will probably have an easier time promoting courses through them as well.
If you create a course and it does well on your blog, you can add the affiliate aspect to it to get even more sales.
27. Sell solo ads
You're going to be collecting leads from your blog anyway, so you could consider letting advertisers place an email ad to your list for a fee.
Many advertisers would pay a few hundred dollars or more to just send a promotional email to your list. In fact, many marketers build their own list and make a living doing their marketing this way.
Just make a page on your site that outlines the details about the costs for advertisers to do solo ads and maybe have a link in your footer where they can find it.
Then, you can communicate with them, set up the ad and get paid.
28. Try brand licensing
If your blog gets really big and your brand is known by at least hundreds of thousands of people, you could try getting into brand licensing as a side income for your blog.
Brand licensing allows you to make a deal for a certain payment and time period to use your brand name in association with a product, service or other brand.
Big brands like Entrepreneur do this. You can make huge amounts of money and even grow your brand without having to do too much.
You just have to come to an agreement on what your brand will be associated with, how much they will pay, how long license will be for, what the contract details are, etc.
This may be something that isn't that realistic until you get further down the road, but a lot of brands need a little association with other successful brands just to get started.
You could help a lot of smaller brands get going. You could even just put your name on a product you endorse, let the other people do all the work and then get a percentage of sales.
29. Blog communities
Social media platforms aren't the only places to share your blog content. In fact, there are plenty of blog communities out there that specialize in helping people get more traffic and fans for their blog.
Some are paid. Some are free. But, you could get your blog discovered by a whole new audience of people if you share your blog with communities geared towards helping people like you out.
Here is a list of 56 blog communities you can use.
30. Infographics
There are multiple advantages to using infographics for your blog. They ultimately can make you more money by helping you increase your traffic in two key ways:
- getting you backlinks
- getting you more social shares
Infographics are just blog posts compacted into one big image format. To see an example of an infographic post, you can go here.
Infographics, as long as they are high quality, do very well on social media. People love sharing posts with infographics as well as the individual infographics themselves.
For instance, Pinterest is a very popular place for these. If you go look up just about anything on Pinterest right now, you will see that a big chunk of search results are infographics.
On top of that, they work very well for getting backlinks.
You can put an embed code in your blog post that contains the infographic and a percentage of people that like the post will actually copy the code and embed it on their blog, linking back to yours as the source.
They are also great for email outreach strategies. If you have a high quality infographic, you can email other blog owners that are in the same industry and see if they would like to do a post with your infographic.
Here's a template you might use for this:
Hey [their name],
I hope your [insert day] is going well. I noticed your blog and thought you might want to check out this infographic we just rolled out about [topic of infographic].
Check it out when you have a minute and let me know what you think.
[URL of infographic]
The embed code is located under the infographic for an easy copy and paste (just in case you want to share it with your readers).
Thanks for taking a look! Hope it was of interest to you,
[Your name]
You can expect about 8% of them to actually embed it using a template like this, so plan accordingly.
Related: 20 Website Traffic Tips – How To Get 100k Visitors A Month
Conclusion
Making more money blogging isn't as hard as you may think. There are so many strategies you can use to increase traffic, get better conversions and increase income.
With these 30 effective tactics, you can take your blog to a whole new level. You can build a global brand and know what it really feels like to have a site that is among the elite.
FREE VIDEO COURSE:
"How To Make $10,000 Per Month Online"
We'll go over exactly how you can copy our simple, online business model that has made $10,000+ per month for countless people.