I’ve been blogging from 2013.

I started dozens of sites, some of them failed and some of them succeeded.

I’ve tried most of the monetization strategies out there when it comes to blogging.

I tried and tested many things.

Some of them worked, some of them didn’t. Many people think that there’s some secret that pros are hiding from you and that is preventing you from earning good money from your blog.

No.

There’s nothing called “secret”. You need to put the right kind of effort, that’s the secret to success.

Or else, I’ll not be here putting tremendous value for you guys in the form of in-depth blog posts here at BloggingX.

Enough of this, let’s dive in.

When starting any blog, it’s very essential to know what are the all the possible ways to monetize your blog.

When you have that clarity in your head, you will be able to choose a winning niche and play a game that you know you’ll win.

In this guide, I’ll be giving you a crystal-clear clarity about what are all the possible ways by which you can earn money from blogging.

Why are you not earning good money?

Not earning good money

If you are a novice blogger and not earning good money, here are the five tips I can give you from my blogging experience.

  1. Mediocre content: For any new blog to succeed, and start running on autopilot, you need to create high-quality content consistently. Whenever you publish any blog post, you need to strive hard to make it the best article on the internet in its class. For the first 3-4 months of your blog, you need to forget about SEO and create high-quality content and promote it extensively on social media.
  2. Shiny object syndrome: Digital insanity is real, and it can eat you up alive if you’re not careful enough. You’re a blogger, do it with a full heart. Don’t get distracted by other things like eCom, dropshipping, CPA, etc. The career mastery is not possible when you have SOS. Yaro has a great snackable article on SOS in his awesome blog, do give it a read.
  3. Not treating it like a business: For many people treating blogging like a real business is a problem. I’ve been there. If you know my story, blogging was my hobby and later it turned into my profession early in my blogging days, I settled for mediocre and hesitant to invest in things. Like any other business, blogging needs proper investment to scale up faster. You need to invest money to earn more money, it’s simple.
  4. Impatience: Blogging is a long-term game. But the fact is that people always look for get-rich schemes. You need to build a solid reader base, Google needs to trust you. It all takes time. If you are impatient when it comes to blogging, you lose interest soon and yell – “Blogging is dead”. You need to be an HQ content machine for at least 6 months before thinking otherwise.
  5. Not thinking big: Bill Gates said – “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” The same thing is true in blogging. Don’t limit your vision, aim for a moon-shot. The best way to future-proof your business is to not settle for mediocre, whether it be mediocre content, mediocre vision, mediocre goals, or whatever mediocre.

Universal Laws of Wealth

Skip reading this section, at your own peril.

I’ll discuss many of the money-making strategies by leveraging blogging.

To understand the strategies in the way I want you to comprehend, keep the below law of compensation in mind:

The amount of money you earn is directly proportional to:

  1. Need for what you do: The blog niche you tap into should have an audience and they are in need of someone to solve their problems. If there is no need of your problem-solving abilities, your income will be limited.
  2. Your ability to fulfill the need: You need to be equipped with right skill sets and mindset to fulfill the existent need in the marketplace. You need to invest in the right kind of training courses and mentorship to acquire the skill sets and increase your ability to fulfill the need in your blogging niche.
  3. Your irreplaceability: How irreplaceable are you in the market? Are you publishing content that no other blogger in your niche market is publishing? You need to constantly upgrade your writing and marketing skills on your way to be irreplaceable in the market.

The above law of compensation is immutable, just like the laws of Newton. Keeping the above law in mind, read the rest of this blog post.

“The only people who make money work in mint. The rest of us must earn money.” – Earl Nightingale

If there’s no mindset shift happened in you after reading the above quote, read it again.

The above quote implies that money is what we “earn”, and is a byproduct of the amount of value we put in the marketplace and the quality of the services we provide.

Take any successful blogger. They are where they are because they deliver massive value to their readers.

Proven-Ways to Earn Money Blogging

There are dozens of ways to make money blogging.

But here in this post, let me discuss some of the most proven ways to earn money blogging.

Wallet Undraw

Ad Revenue

Being a blogger, if you have good traffic you can place the relevant advertisements on your blog by applying for platforms like:

  • Google AdSense
  • Media.net
  • Propeller Ads
  • RevContent
  • Others

Google AdSense is the best way to monetize your high traffic website. Because Google with it’s a huge amount of data knows about the psychographics of every internet user and shows them ads that are hyper-relevant to them.

For this form of monetization strategy to work on your blog, your blog needs to be in a high-traffic niche.

How much I can earn from Google AdSense? Google pays you when visitors click on ads placed on your site (you’ll be banned if you do self-clicks).

Suppose if you are getting 1,000 pageviews per day, and the click-through rate on ads is 4%, and for every click, you receive $0.10, then you’ll end up generating 40 clicks and an income of $4 / day. Again this is just an example.

The CTR and earning per click varies greatly depending upon what niche and audience you are targeting.

If you manage to attract traffic from developed countries like US, UK, Canada, your earnings will be more when compared to traffic from developing countries.

And also, while writing the blog posts around the keywords, you need to take a look at the CPC of the keyword. You need to always target high CPC keywords in your blog post so that you earn more money from every click that visitors make on your ads.

Target high CPC keywords

For this, you can use the tool KeywordTool.io

There are many bloggers, earning great income using Google AdSense as a monetization method.

RJ Weiss from The Ways To Wealth was interviewed on Chris Lee’s blog. There he outlined the exact process of how he grew his blog to $10K/month in 2 years.

After reading that post, here are the key takeaways I got.

  1. You need to have a massive passion in your niche, or else you can’t achieve good figures.
  2. Never focus on only one source of income. His income, 35% is from ads and rest from affiliate marketing.
  3. The competition is more today, but there’s always room for well-researched quality content.

Again, I would like to emphasize that earning good money out of Google AdSense is a traffic game. You need to learn the art of keyword research, targeting the high traffic keywords and ranking for them.

In the case of AdSense, keyword research is very crucial. You need to be able to find really low competitive and high volume keywords, for which there’s a scarcity of content.

You need to spend a lot of time in niche research, keyword research, and also on-page optimization.

Akshay recommends: How to Choose a Blogging Niche? (Don’t Regret Later!)

You can refer to this article by Alex Chris, on his success story in Google AdSense and also he has shared some great tips for earning good money out of AdSense.

Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you promote the products of other people and earn a good chunk of commission out of it. The commission ranges anywhere from 5% to 100% (you heard it right!) depending upon the niche that you’re in.

This is my favorite.

Because 80% of my income comes through affiliate marketing apart from my agency business.

I’ve tried both the Ad revenue and affiliate marketing model.

For me, affiliate marketing worked great and seemed lucrative.

Again, it depends upon individual strengths. If you have good writing and marketing skills, affiliate marketing may be good for you.

There’s no good or bad.

Nowadays, if you look at authority websites, they are leveraging both ads and affiliate marketing to boost their revenues.

In affiliate marketing, you can promote two types of products:

  1. Physical products
  2. Digital products

Physical products

If you want to promote physical products, you can join marketplaces like Commission Junction, Amazon Associates, Walmart’s affiliate program, and others.

 Finding affiliate program

Whatever your niche is, just search in Google for “{niche} affiliate program”.

You can also search for in-house affiliate platforms by searching for the below keyword regarding your niche.

With physical products, you don’t need to worry about inventory and shipping.

The main advantage of physical products is that they are easier to sell than digital products due to tangibility.

But the disadvantage is that the commission rates will be a lot less as the profit margins are low depending upon the product. For example, on average the affiliate commission rate on physical products varies from 2% to 15%.

Digital products

On the other hand, digital products are the ones I promote here at BloggingX. I leverage content marketing to promote relevant affiliate products to my audience.

You have many marketplaces like:

There is a wide range of digital products like:

  • Softwares and apps
  • eBooks
  • Training courses
  • Membership sites
  • Premium forums
ClickBank

For finding products in your niche, you can head over to any of the affiliate marketplaces I’ve mentioned above and just search for a keyword.

In the above screenshot, I searched for “Ketogenic Diet” in ClickBank. It returned me all the affiliate products I can promote in the niche.

Like this, you can search in any of the affiliate marketplaces or also in Google search.

There are many people earning great money out of affiliate marketing.

Some bloggers like Pat Flynn, MatthewWoodward, reveal their income transparently on their blog.

Pat Flynn earnings

The above screenshot is of Pat Flynn. Although this screenshot is of 2017 earnings, you can easily determine what he’s earning this year.

Almost 70% of his income is from affiliate marketing and the rest 30% is from his books, podcasts, courses, niche sites, and his apps.

 2017 earnings

The above is the income of MatthewWoodward that he made during 2017. As of publishing this blog post, the recent earnings report was not available. Again, if you drill down his income stats – his 70% of income is from affiliate marketing and rest from consultation and other income which he won’t disclose.

If you can see any of the top affiliate marketers, there’s a healthy income diversity. They have also created many web assets apart from their main blog by reinvesting the money back into the business.

Selling products

In case of selling products too, you can either sell digital or physical products.

People sell physical product through dropshipping, eCommerce so on. If they are your own products you may want to make use of Amazon or handle your inventory, marketing, and shipping.

I’m a big fan of selling your own digital products in the form of apps, eBooks and also training courses.

At my blog, apart from my affiliate income, a good chunk of my income also comes from my training courses. I teach what I learn and implement in the form of training courses.

I’ve never done my own Saas product yet due to my lack of programming skills and personal interests.

There’s absolutely no necessity to create your own products to earn money. Initially, you can start as an affiliate marketer (market other people’s products), and later create your own products.

If you are in a blogging niche, where your audience are facing a particular problem and you have proper skill sets to solve their problems, you can consider creating problem-solving digital products and promote them through your blog.

They may be apps or informational products.

Spencer Haws

A good example here is Spencer Haws from NichePursuits. Apart from being in the Amazon associates and FBA game, he still has/had many software apps like LongTailPro (he sold it) and also WordPress plugins.

He markets all of his digital products on this main blog where he teaches other bloggers on how to do effective affiliate marketing.

He also runs an insider group that’s a premium community for affiliate marketers.

Here’s another one – Ryan Biddulph from BloggingFromParadise. Apart from his blog, he also has training courses and also has over 50+ eBooks on Amazon.

Ryan Biddulph

He branded himself as a blogging digital nomad. He travels the world and does blogging.

Note from Akshay: You need to always create digital products related to your niche. The products you create should feed each other and also benefit your blog’s SEO and popularity.

Coaching and Training

You can also offer training courses and training for people in the niche you are blogging in.

The fact is that you are already showcasing your expertise in the niche you’re blogging in. All you need to have is a consultation or training page on your website.

eLearning industry

According to the report, the eLearning industry has set to reach $325 billion by 2025.

If you want a sweet pie of the eLearning market, it’s your time to create training courses and offer consultation online.

If you are a niche blogger, chances are there that you are an expert in your niche. So, I highly advise you to repurpose your expertise in the form of teaching other people too.

Training courses

You can host your training courses on platforms like Udemy or on self-hosted platforms like Teachable.

Apart from training courses, you can also offer consultation and mentoring on your blog as I described you earlier.

As a blogger, you already have an existing audience in your blog, who may be interested in buying your courses. All you need to do is to check whether your audience are ready to buy training courses.

You can do this with the help of surveys, polls, and also asking your already existing subscribers.

As bloggers, you may also find it easy to promote your training courses as you have content on your blog that is getting traffic.

Here are some of the ways by which you can market your training courses with the help of your blog.

  1. Include training course links in your popular blog posts.
  2. Create content around buyer-intent keywords searched by course lovers like “courses on {niche}”, “{niche} training”, so on.

When it comes to the marketing of your training courses, just stick to the marketing channel you’re already leveraging and scale it.

Are you driving traffic to your blog via SEO?

Just publish more and more strategic SEO-friendly content and strategically promote your training courses in them.

Love email marketing?

Upgrade your copywriting skills and grow your email subscribers. You can create lead magnets for your blog and drive traffic from them. You can also offer content upgrades in your blog posts.

One great example here is Ramit Sethi from IWillTeachYouToBeRich. He is an author, blogger and trainer. On this blog, he blogs regarding personal finance, self-development, and business.

Ramit Sethi

As of me writing this blog post, he has 14+ training courses on self-development to personal finance.

He recently launched his training course that made $5m in a week as reported by John Havel from TheHustle.co. This is a must-read case study that you need to read to get the taste of what it’s to be like to tap into the giant eLearning industry.

Do you know what channels did Ramit use to promote his courses?

Subscribers

As you can see, blogging and writing weekly emails for his subscribers are the major ways that enabled him to hit the numbers. He did not focus on SEO, copywriting, podcasts or SEO.

Another great example here is Gael and Mark from AuthorityHacker.

Gael and Mark

These guys on their blog, provide extremely actionable strategies to start an online business – the authority way. Their target audience are bloggers, site-owners, SEOs and also other online business owners.

They run their own authority sites, and also document what they learned and experiments they did in the form of blog post content and podcasts.

They also have a course called “Authority Site System” is where they guide you to build highly-profitable authority sites from the ground-up.

This is a great example of repurposing knowledge that you already know and create training courses out of it.

These days, even if you are a great blogger, people won’t read your content in-depth. Some people prefer watching videos instead of reading articles. You’ll be catering to that kind of audience by creating training courses.

Memberships

Apart from the training courses, you can also consider offering premium content to your audience in the form of memberships.

In turn for a small monthly fee, you’ll be offering them great content that they can’t find easily on the web.

Many bloggers and publications are doing the same.

They gate the content behind a subscription form. This is also called “Content gating”.

This is not a new thing at all.

Benefits of premium membership content for bloggers:

  • Recurring income based on the subscription model you have
  • It will increase the value of your content
  • It will ease out the process of building a tribe around your business

It’s easier than you may think. You can make use of WordPress plugins like S2Member, MemberMouse, Memberium, and others.

Many major publications like New York Times are already doing it.

Membership

Do you know Stuart Walker from NicheHacks?

On his blog, he gives some great tips for niche blogging and affiliate marketing. He has great content on his blog when it comes to affiliate marketing.

He reveals some of the greatest untapped niches when it comes to niche blogging and affiliate marketing.

He has a great loyal audience on his blog.

Now, he researched what are the pain problems of niche bloggers and affiliate marketers.

It’s finding the niche that’s profitable, researching and validating it.

So here it is.

 Offering premium content

He has his insider community called NicheHacks Insider.

In his community, you get access to the premium blogging niche reports, business ideas, checklists, cheat sheets, monthly Q&A sessions, and also access to the “inner circle” community.

As he already has great local readers for his blog, marketing the insider’s platform is not a daunting task for him.

So, if you already have a successful blog with loyal readers, you may want to consider opening a premium platform for your readers to access the premium content and create a community around it.

Another great example is that of Design TutsPlus.

If you’re into graphic design game, you surely know this site. This site is a great place to learn everything regarding design.

This site was created by Envato co-founder Collis Ta’eed after buying it for $1200.

After they bought this site, they placed high-quality adverts, affiliates and also created a premium membership area for people who are serious learners.

Previously, it was called PSD TutsPlus catering only Photoshop learners. Now it is Design Tuts Plus and is a part of Envato Tuts+ – filled with eBooks, courses, tutorials related to Photoshop, Illustrator, and all design stuff.

 Blog posts

They also have an awesome tutorial blog, where they write blog posts to attract new search visitors.

Presently, as of writing this blog post, they had over 7,344 blog posts on their blog.

They will sell to the people who visit their blog with graphic design templates and also membership to Envato Elements, which is their product.

Consultation

You can have a consultation form on your website. In that page, you need to clearly mention why people need to hire you as a consultant, and also your hourly charges.

You can also offer them a free consultation if you are looking to pitch your products or services.

You can use tools like Calendly or SimplyBookMe to enable them to schedule the appointment without you need to communicate them to and fro via a bunch of emails and losing track.

If you are publishing great content on your website, some times people will have doubts that simply can’t be clarified via blog commenting or emails.

In those times, people will be eager to get your consultation.

You can also target some of the search keywords like “Best {{niche}} consultants in {{location}} in your consultation page.

Consultation

These are some of the low baller keywords that you can easily rank for if you have enough relevant content and good topical relevance in your blog/website.

As your blog begins to grow, you’ll receive dozens of emails every day by product owners willing to publish sponsored advertisements on your blog.

On the other hand, you can also outreach the product owners directly for sponsored advertisement requests.

How to outreach for sponsored content? You can follow the below email template to outreach product owners to pay you to publish sponsored content on your blog.

Hi {{name}}, I’m Joe from example.com.

I recently came across your product {{product}}. Really an awesome product. I really loved how it does {{feature1}} and {{feature2}} without much hassle.

I couldn’t help but sign up for the product and decided to test it out. I absolutely loved the tool.

Now, I’ve decided to create an in-depth review of the tool on my site – example.com, shout it out to my social media followers, and also email list of 10k subscribers.

Let me know if you are interested in taking this further.

Cheers, 
Joe.

This is just a generic template I’ve created for this post’s sake.

You need to obviously add in more personalization and make the email much more irresistible by answering the question – “What’s in it for me?” that the receiver keeps on asking in his head when reading your email.

How to attract sponsored advertisers? The best way to attract product owners to express their interests to advertise on your blog is to build the authority of your blog and also readership.

You need to also make sure that your blog gets a lot of comments from readers. It signals the potential advertisers that your blog has great loyal readers and followings.

Added to this, you need to also consider adding “Advertise with us” page on your blog. This is essential for potential advertisers to know that you are accepting sponsored posts.

Advertising

The above is an example of a perfect “Advertising” page from Investopedia.

Essential things to include in the advertise with us page:

  1. Contact us form or button
  2. Your website traffic
  3. Your social media followings
  4. You can offer them the reasons why they need to advertise with you (especially if your blog is not extremely popular)
  5. Pricing (skip this if you have variable pricing options)
  6. Advertising specs
  7. Media kit
Investopedia

Above is the screenshot from media kit file of Investopedia. You can see, they’ve included their Analytics data like geographic and demographics of the visitors.

Further down in the PDF, they’ve also included the testimonials from the sponsored partners they worked with.

Make sure that the sponsored posts you accept are highly relevant to your niche. Don’t accept sponsored post/ad offer from the product that is irrelevant to your niche as it’ll hurt your reputation.

And also, in your published sponsored post include the below text to follow the FTC guidelines.

This is a sponsored post. I was provided compensation and/or free product in exchange for my honest opinion. For more details click here – Affiliate Disclosure

Offer services

If you have a fairly popular blog in your niche, you can consider offering services that your target audience find it useful.

For example, if you have a blog related to Digital Marketing you can offer services like:

  • Website audit
  • SEO services
  • Outreach services
  • Web design services
  • Blog management
  • WordPress customization
  • Landing page design
  • PPC advertisements
  • Much more

For crafting the kind of services you want to provide, first you need to determine what kind of people are visiting your blog and whether they really need the kind of service you are offering through surveys and feedback.

A great example I can give here is Fabrizio from Magnet4Blogging. He owns a blog similar to my blog BloggingX.

Fabrizio

He provides blogging, content marketing and WordPress tips on his blog. He has a good audience on his blog.

Along with blogging, he also offers certain design services and products on his blog.

You can see below the services he offers.

Services

He also has various products in his store like landing page templates, blog planner and also a course.

Offering  products

As I told first, you need to have a clear idea about the requirements of your readers, and you can offer them strategic services to boost your blog revenue.

How to market your services?

You can create separate “services” page on your website to grab the eyeballs of your visitors. You can also consider softly pitching your services in some of your popular blog posts.

Consider publishing some of the informational blog posts revolving around the keywords that your service-seekers may search for.

Nathan Gotch is a great example here. He has his awesome blog GotchSEO, where he has really good SEO tutorials and content.

In his informational blog posts, he softly pitches his own SEO services. It’s been working great for him. In his blog, he has an entire silo around the keyword he’s willing to target – “Blogger outreach”.

SEO services
Blogger outreach services

He is even ranking very high for the money keyword.

This is a classic example of a site making use of strategic SEO to rank for service-related keywords in their niche.

Try to find low competitive service-based keywords in your niche. Create a services page revolving around that keyword. Add some internal links to that service page (you want to rank) from your other blog posts with anchor text containing the service-based keyword in it.

If you have enough informational content revolving around that service, your service money page will eventually rank higher due to topical relevance.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to boost your blogging income. In fact for some bloggers, the reason why they blog is for building email lists.

For email marketing to work on your blog, you need to have lead magnet to offer the subscribers on your blog. You can offer lead magnets to your blog readers like:

  • eBooks
  • Checklists
  • Courses
  • Mindmaps
  • PDFs
  • Access to your FB community

You need to boost your email list by providing them useful lead magnets.

The lead magnet you provide should attract the right kind of people to fulfill the final objective you have with your funnel. If the lead magnet attracts the wrong kind of people, your entire funnel will crumble.

So it’s always advised to have multiple lead magnets on your blog, especially if your blog niche is broad. Because multiple lead magnets allow you to segment your subscribers based on their interests and also allow you to personalize and tailor the newsletter based on their interests.

You need to have a proper email marketing funnel in place before you even create your first lead magnet. Because, planning prior implementation is very important as you can see in the below infographic by GetResponse.

Email marketing

You need to create content on your blog that creates awareness about your brand in the minds of the readers. Later, if they opt-in to be a subscriber on your blog, that means they have considered your brand and are familiar with your brand.

Now you need to build rapport with your subscribers, evaluate their interests and finally convert them into buyers (affiliate marketing or your own products).

You can make use of tools like Thrive Leads or Convert Pro for collecting the email addresses of your visitors if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform.

For email marketing, you can make use of tools like ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, GetResponse, etc. These tools enable you to send newsletters to your subscribers and also autoresponder sequences.

I highly advise you to collect your visitor email addresses from day #1 of starting a new blog.

Because, if you’ve the email addresses of your readers, it means that you own that audience and you can generate traffic on demand to your blog and also sell the relevant products and services to them.

Flipping websites

Flipping websites

I’m not talking about domain flipping or domaining here.

Do you know that there are people who grow websites to say $500/month, and sell it for up to 20x the amount at like $10,000?

They do this at scale, and earn a lot more money than other bloggers who stick to their personal websites and not sell it? They treat the website flipping as flipping apartments and sites – they call it the virtual real estate.

For this to work, it’s highly essential that you should not be emotionally attached to brand you’re growing.

Personally, if you ask me till date (as of writing this blog post) I’ve flipped only 2 websites as I was finding it difficult to run and manage them. First one, I sold it for like $2700ish and the second one for $500ish.

One example is Chris Guthri from UpFuel who sold a website for $55,000 in 20 months.

Before buying any website people look at the following things:

  • Brandability of the domain name
  • Quality of content published on the website
  • Quality of backlinks pointing to the website
  • Social media followings
  • Age of the domain
  • Much more

If you consider to start and grow a website solely for flipping it, make sure that you keep the above things in mind. Because, when you sell it people quote you the price of the site based on the above factors.

You can consider services like Empire Flippers, Flippa, FE International and so on.

If you consider doing this website flipping as a business you consider to hire a team of content writers, content managers, and SEOs.

What’s next?

These are some of the proven ways by which you can earn money blogging.

It’s important that you don’t get intimidated by all these ways to make money blogging. You need to do all the above ways to earn money blogging. Stick to one or two of the above methods to begin with, and later while you are scaling you can spread your wings to multiple streams of income through your blog.

Hope you guys found these blog monetization strategies helpful.