If you are reading this article it is probably because you own a blog and you want to know how to monetize it, right? or maybe, you are already earning money from that and want to know more ways to increase your earnings. There are lot of blog monetization techniques and we will discuss the best blog monetization techniques here in detail.
Here are the 9 ways you can use your blog to earn a living out of it:
1. CPC/PPC advertising
Cost per click (CPC) or Pay per click (PPC) is one of the best & simplest way to monetize your blog especially if you are a newbie blogger. In CPC advertising, ads are served on your website and you will get paid from advertiser when someone clicks on that ad. These ads are served through ad networks such as Google Ad-sense, Info-links, Media.net, Chitika, etc. Ad networks works as intermediator who connects advertisers (whose ads are going to be shown) and publishers (website owners like you) for some commission. e.g. Google Ad-sense, very popular ad network in the world takes 32% commission and passes 68% to you. Setting up for CPC ads is very easy, once your website / blog gets approved by ad network, you can select the size of your ad and define the place where your ad will be shown.
Benefit of CPC advertisement is you don’t have control on type of ad to be displayed. These are targeted ads and it differs from user to user. e.g. If I am searching to buy some ‘Pen drive’, it will show me ads of Pen drive and if my friend is searching for some Yoga classes on google, same type of ad will be shown to her. Due to high targeting of ads, probability of user to click on that particular ad increases hence increasing the revenue for your blog.
Also, once you have setup this CPC ad, you can forget about them and paycheck will be delivered to you after a month.
Although being the most used method of monetization, experienced bloggers don’t prefer this way due to it’s low earnings. You really need a large amount of traffic to earn via this method. Also, increasing use of Ad blockers don’t show ads in front of users.
2. CPM advertising
Cost per mile (CPM) advertising is similar to CPC advertising with only difference that instead of number of clicks, you get paid for number of impressions on ad. e.g If CPM rate is $2, it means you will get paid $2 per 1000 impressions. This method is not very effective if you have less number of visitors to your blog.
3. Direct advertisement
If you are getting good amount of traffic and wants to monetize your blog using ads, this type is most suited to you. In this, you directly sell your advertising space to advertiser for some fixed amount. e.g. You can define like for 300*250 ad, it may cost $100 for a month. This will also help you more revenue as your ad is now not depending on amount of traffic and you cut out the commission of ad network. If you are following this method, then it’s better to create ‘Advertise with us’ page where you can show the ad format & size you support, traffic metrics, Alexa rank etc. which will help advertisers to get the basic information.
Having problem to find advertisers for your blog, BuySellAds will help you out. It is an online ad-marketplace where you can list your ads for others to buy. It takes 25% commission like other networks but take hassle of finding advertiser from you.
4. Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is one of the best & most popular way to monetize your website and has a good potential to earn good amount of bucks. This method is commonly used by many big bloggers around the world.
What is Affiliate marketing and how do i earn with it ? – Affiliate marketing refers to when you refer someone to any online product and when that person buys the product based on your recommendation, you receive a commission. e.g. I like Godaddy hosting and so recommend it to others. Being an affiliate, When you click on any of the link on ShoutNinja that redirects you to Godaddy (or any other affiliate partner) and do any purchase, i will get commission for referring you and amount of commission differs company to company. You will not pay any hike in price (even get discount 🙂 ), but as i referred a customer to company, they pay me from their margins. You can place your special crafted links aka affiliate link on banners or text as hyperlink. Special crafted link will be used to identify who has referred a customer. One of the feature i like about this method is use of Cookies. Different companies have different expiry time for cookies. e.g. If some company ‘X’ has cookie period of 30 days, and you go their via my affiliate link but did not make a purchase now. If you make a purchase withing next 30 days, i will still get paid out.
Thinking about being affiliate or reseller. Check this out.
5. Paid reviews
When you put ads on your website, it won’t pay you much and that small amount also takes up time to reach you. But on the other hand, Paid reviews can give you large amount of money at once.
Excited to use this method, but what are Paid reviews ? Being a blogger, many a times you review some products you are using or new products launched recently. You can connect with product owners whose product you are going to review and ask them to pay. This is called Paid reviews. How much you earn per review depends upon traffic you get and blog niche but it can range from just $20 to $2000. If you have a quality website, product owners themselves reach out to you for paid review as it can get them 2 benefits: First, Your blog audience got to see their product and second, they get a back-link from your high quality website which enhances their site’s SEO. It’s good to include option of Paid reviews in your ‘Advertise with us’ page so that potential buyers also get to know about this option.
Big mistake bloggers make is they review any product they get offer for, even if product is bad. This decreases the trust your users have in you, so try to avoid this habit and review only those products you self trusted on.
6. Podcasting sponsorship
Most of the blogs that records podcasts instead of writing posts, use this as primary method to monetize. Their users will not going to read any thing, so having ads makes no sense. In podcasting sponsorship, advertiser’s audio ad for few seconds is embedded at start, middle or end of the podcast episode. Now, this ad will surely server to all the users who will listen to the podcast and you will get paid for it. Also, audio advertisement is better than text or banner advertisement so this method has high potential to earn more money. Some podcsats even take worth $1000 of sponsorship per episode.
7. Job boards
If your blog has large audience and that belongs to specific niche, you can create job boards so that companies interested in your users skills can post job for them. e.g. Famous blog Problogger that gives you tips about blogging and has niche audience around it, has created job board http://jobs.problogger.net/ where different companies posts freelance jobs for writing, marketing, etc. Here, companies pay Problogger $50 for 30 days listing.
8. Donations
Most of the websites don’t have ads on their website to keep away from distractions and provide free useful information to it’s users. But, thery still have to pay for their servers and other operating costs. Some readers who find the information useful and get benefited from that info, donate the money to them. e.g. Somebody reduces their weight by following tips on a particular site, they become happy and donate some bucks to them. We know percentage of kind people who donate to bloggers are very less but not zero, even some bloggers earn 4 digit from this method only. Even some bloggers write the reason to blog like having server cost, donating this money to charity,etc. Donate button mostly has small code which redirects users to pay via PayPal. These days ‘Donate’ word has been getting replaced by ‘Buy me a Beer’ by most bloggers to have a casual look 🙂
9. Auction your site on Flippa
So, you have created a website, getting some traffic but stop working on it after some time. Now, your site is sitting idle and you are planning to shut it down as you cannot work on it anymore due to personal reasons. Why to leave it as it is ? – Use Flippa. Flippa is an auction site for domains & websites where users put their website/blog for auction and sell it to buyer with maximum bid. Even your not working asset give you some bucks.
Now, you know the multiple ways you can monetize your blog. You can also apply more than 1 method at once. You can sell advertisement space for direct advertising and apply affiliate links on products you have reviewed. Choosing the best method or combination will depend upon at which stage your blog is, how much traffic you are getting and in which niche you are writing. All of the above mentioned methods works best when you have good traffic and good traffic comes from good SEO. So, doing SEO of your blog is more important than monetizing it.
Read about SEO basics here.