Top 10 ways to make money from your blog

Interested in how to make money from your blog? Well, making money blogging is DEAD! I’m sure you’ve heard that before, right? Just like we’ve heard that this industry or that industry is dead and it’s time to move on. Well, I can assure you that making money from your blog is getting easier and easier. Today I am going to go over 10 different ways you’re able to make money from your blog, starting today! No need to wait months upon months in order to start generating revenue, you can (and should be) monetizing your blog now.

 

Monthly Advertisements

One of the main ways blogs start to make money is by selling advertising space on their pages. You know, the 125×125 sidebar ads you see everywhere? Yeah, those are the ones I’m talking about. There’s a reason everyone is using them – because they work and they make you money.

 The beauty of it is, with a place like Buy Sell Ads to run your ads through, you can virtually sit back and watch the ads get purchased and run without requiring you to do anything. You could also sell advertising directly on your site with an “advertise here” page letting the visitors know how to pay you for the ads, which works well because you don’t have to pay a % of your profits to Buy Sell Ads, although you’re going to have to do more work (add their advertisement to the page, remember when to remove it, etc).

 

Pay Per Click Advertising

The next most popular way to make money with your blog (it’s even the most popular for some sites) is with PPC advertising. The most popular way to run PPC ads is through Google Adsense. With Adsense, you’re able to pop some code into your website and let Google pick out the proper ads that match up to the content on your pages.
Then, every time someone clicks on the link in the ad, you get paid. Pretty simple right? Yup, and thats why most people use Google Adsense when starting out.

 

Digital Downloads

You can see this type of money making method in use on websites that sell ebooks or other digital download products (ie: WordPress themes, premium design resources, textures, etc). This works great because its a more passive way to earn income from your blog. Once you set the link up for people to pay & download, you never have to touch it again and it can make you money over & over again.
To streamline the process of digital downloads, I’d recommend checking out e-junkie. With millions of users and the ability to sell your products for as little as $5.00 per month, e-junkie is the perfect solution to have someone pay (to your PayPal account) and instantly download your files.

 

Affiliate Promotions

Here’s a method of making cash off of actual products that you can promote on your blog without actually needing to make the products yourself. Becoming an affiliate for someone else allows you to make a cut of the earnings when you send them traffic and sales.
For instance, you can sign up and promote WordPress themes from Elegant Themes, Books at Amazon, Audio files at AudioJungle, etc. It’s a great way to mix up your earnings through your blog and if you’re promoting quality products, your visitors won’t mind a bit.

 

Donations

Another way to make money from your blog is to push out tons of useful, free content and just ask for donations. You may not get donations from every visitor (in fact, I’d bet that you don’t) but you will get people who feel like you’re providing too much value to just take it and run & they’ll donate to you.
You can do this by setting up a PayPal donate button in your sidebar or at the end of your articles. Let the visitor click the button and then choose what amount they’d like to donate to you. Lost & Taken is a website that provides tons of useful texture downloads for free and has a donate button at the end of each post.

 

Membership Packages

When you run a blog, you can always set up a membership area with various membership scripts like amember or wishlist member that allows you to post your regular content for viewers to check out for free and then also offer up that “extra special content” that the user has to pay for. You know, the downloadable source files for tutorials, ebooks, free themes, etc.
Chris over at SpoonGraphics is a perfect example of how you can turn your blog into a membership package machine. Chris regularly posts up “premium” content that is only available to it’s members, while the rest of the blog remains free and open to the public. This generates interest because he always has amazing content, so you just KNOW that the membership package is going to be worth it.

 

Sell Your Services

If you run a blog and also work as a freelancer, the odds of you being able to make some cash from your blog by offering your services is pretty great. For instance, if you run a blog that teaches people on how to make money from their blog and you also design blogs, why not promote your design services right on your blog? People who are interested in that topic should also be interested in the importance of having a killer design for their own blog.
You may also want to showcase writing you do for blogs if you’re looking to write blog articles for other websites. This shows that you can write on a variety of topics and also puts your name up their as an authority who knows how to write content that generates traffic.

 

Reviews

There are a couple of different ways you can go about building a blog that generates money through reviews. First, you can toss in some product reviews of related products to your blog topic and let your readers know that they’re paid reviews. The App Storm websites run by Envato does this pretty well.
Another way to do this is by building an entire blog around product reviews. You see these a lot with web hosting company review blogs and others in that market but there’s no reason you couldn’t venture out into a music review website, movie review website or something completely different.

 

CPM Advertising

If you’re building a website and relying on lower quality traffic sources like Stumble Upon or other places that generally send visitors who don’t click ads or buy products, then CPM advertising is probably a perfect solution for you. What CPM advertising is, is a payout for every 1,000 ad views you generate. So, if you can get 10,000 visitors to each post from Stumble Upon, but they’re not clicking on any ads, it might be time to switch to a CPM advertiser like Casale Media or Tribal Fusion.

Consulting & Coaching

This is a bit different than the services we mentioned above because here, you’re basically offering up your time instead of a service. When you run a blog and become an authority on the topic, odds are that some of your visitors will turn to you for advice. Instead of giving personalized advice away on a regular basis, why not offer consulting to them for an hourly fee?
Michael over at Remarkablogger turned his blog into a consulting machine and generates income from his website by offering personalized consulting & coaching to his visitors while still regularly pumping out awesome content. Why can’t you? If you’re an authority on your blog topic, you can – and should.

What methods do you use?

Out of the above list, which methods are you currently using on your blog? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.