This post may contain affiliate links.
Let’s say you are new to blogging and are curious about making money with your newfound venture. This post will cover the options for monetizing your blog for passive income as well as options that require some effort on your part. Let’s dive in and discuss the options.
Affiliate Marketing
Becoming an affiliate for products/services in your industry/niche that you can easily promote is the quickest way to monetize your new blog with a passive income stream. The barrier to entry is low, but you do need to take the time to complete a few tasks.
- Find a product or service you want to promote. I typically stick to products or services I use and trust.
- Apply to become an affiliate of the product/service.
- Create content with mentions of the products/services you are promoting along with your affiliate link.
- Test your affiliate links to make sure they work.
- Promote your content!
Helpful Tips
- Keep a list of all the affiliate products and logins, web links, etc in Trello for easy access when needed. It prevents the need to repeatedly login to all the different affiliate platforms for the info.
- You’ll need to fill out tax forms (1099) for each affiliate program and have a payment method on file.
- Don’t forget to update any broken or changed links in your content.
- Check your affiliate platforms regularly to see which links or promotions are converting. Make any necessary adjustments.
- Use the power of Pinterest to get free traffic and hopefully conversions! If you are new to Pinterest, check out our free course that will help you learn to create beautiful pins quickly and easily. You can sign up here.
Banners/Ads
Income from banners/ads is usually pretty small unless you have massive amounts of traffic. Therefore, carefully consider if the income potential is worth adding these types of advertisements. If not done carefully, they can detract from your content and cause visitors to leave your website.
If you decide to use banners/ads, monitor your success. At times, it can be difficult for new sites with minimal traffic to get approved advertisements. However, if you use WordPress, you can set up ads with the Jet Pack plugin even if you are just starting out. This is easily configured in the plugin settings.
Typically, income from banners and ads is pretty low. This type of blog income isn’t my first choice because ads look out of place and the money I could make isn’t enough for me to put up with spammy looking ads on my website.
Another consideration is your bounce rate. If you are using banners/ads it could be slowing down your website and/or annoying visitors who leave your website for the aforementioned reasons.
Selling Physical Products or Services
This type of blog income is not passive, but can be lucrative and a fast way to build your business online. If you are selling physical products, obviously that income will be the backbone of your online biz! If you are selling a service such as coaching, social media management, etc. a similar concept applies. Though if you choose this model, the income isn’t passive.
Most bloggers have multiple streams of income, but selling products or services is usually the fastest way to get your new online business making revenue soon after launch.
When selling your services, you may run into a caveat when you are ready to scale your income and grow your business. There is only so much talent and time to deliver the services. As you grow, you’ll need employees or contractors to help perform the work. In lieu of this, you can pivot into a more sustainable income stream that can grow without additional effort on your part.
Helpful Tips
- If you are selling products and services, make sure you are networking and promoting your brand in the right places. This can include FB groups, online discussion forums (Quora), social media channels, Pinterest, etc.
- You’ll need to perfect your pitch and sales copy. You can find everything you need inside The Business Lounge. It is an online training program geared towards entrepreneurs in the online space. If you use my link, you can get a 7 day trial for only $1. This is an easy way to see if the programs are for you, and enough time to take a course or two even if you decide to cancel after your trial.
- Take advantage of virtual assistance or hire gigs on Fivrr as you start to grow. This will help free up your time. If you spend all your time delivering services, there won’t be any time left to manage and scale your business!
Sponsored Posts
You can choose to pitch and partner with companies to promote their products/services. Companies are willing to pay for advertising if you have a lot of traffic or are positioned as an influencer. This is harder as a new blog, but definitely possible!
In order to land sponsored post deals, you’ll need to strategically pitch your ideas to other brands. If your pitch is accepted and agreement is made, you will write content promoting the partner’s products and services for agreed upon payment.
You can check out this course “Making Sense of Sponsored Posts” offered by long-term blogger Michelle Gardner who has lots of success in this area. I am not an affiliate for this course, just giving it a shout-out!
Paid Memberships
This can happen in a variety of ways. Perhaps you have a Facebook Group and charge to be part of the group because you provide coaching/insights, etc. that your audience finds valuable and will pay to access. You can monetize your blog through facilitating a relationship between your audience and a social media platform such as Facebook.
Another common way to use memberships is setting up paid content for your website. This is a community that you can build within your website with a membership plugin or through using a learning management system. You promote your paid content and offer value at regular intervals and charge subscribers a fee to access the content.
Lastly, some bloggers even have paid newsletters or insider emails where tips and tricks are shared. This requires the subscriber to pay to get access to these documents or be on your mailing list.
Events/Masterminds/Group Coaching
If you’ve positioned yourself as an expert or coach, perhaps you want to have in person or digital events! You charge a fee for each attendee and present, teach, or coach for the duration of the event.
I like this strategy because you can maximize your time and efforts. For example, if you provided a service to five individuals you need to make time for each and every one. If you coached all five of those individuals in a group, then you drastically reduce your time investment allowing for other important business activities. You get to cover the material once rather than five times. It is a win, win!
Online Courses or Digital Products
Some bloggers build a business around online courses or digital products such as eBooks. To create courses, you can choose to use a plugin on your website (if you are a WordPress user), or a course building platform such as Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, Kajabi, etc.
Personally, I have found Teachable to be the best fit for me. They provide a lot of free training and valuable resources. The support team is great, and it is a very encouraging community.
If you are into eBooks, you can sell them on the major marketplaces or offer them up for sale on your website. If you need help formatting your eBook, it is pretty easy to hire help on Fivrr 🙂
Conclusion
There are several options for monetizing your new blog. Some of these methods require more time or effort than others. In most cases, it will take longer to build sustainable income on passive income streams like affiliate marketing than it does for service or product-based monetization methods.
This is often the case because you can charge higher prices for services and need fewer sales to make sustainable income. Whereas, with passive methods you might be earning smaller commissions. Don’t get me wrong, there are some big-ticket affiliate deals, but those are not as common.
Personally, I believe online courses are a good compromise! You do need to put in a lot of work in before you get paid, but once it is up and selling it is a semi-passive income stream that you can charge a decent price for.
Have you tried any of the above methods to monetize your blog? If you have, drop a comment and share your experience. We would love to hear your feedback!
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