13 Interesting Steps To Monetize Your Blog In 2021- Fully Updated

Starting and monetizing a blog has never been easier than it's 
Not too way back , creating an internet site would’ve cost you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to line up and maintain. Monetizing an internet site was even as difficult. PayPal was in its infancy, Stripe didn’t exist and email marketing was nowhere near as flexible because it is now.

Today however you'll start, maintain, and monetize a blog on WordPress with just a couple of hundred dollars (this can vary supported what you would like to do). But simply because it’s easier to form money together with your blog today, doesn’t mean that the majority of bloggers do.

According to ConvertKit’s 2017 state of blogging report, pro bloggers reported a mean profit of $138,064 the past year, while amateur bloggers (who made up 86% of these surveyed) made only $9,497.

This is terrible, especially once you consider that the majority of bloggers start a blog in order that they are often their own boss and quit their dull 8-to-5 job.

Why did you begin your blog? 

Image Source :  ConvertKit

So how does one go from being an amateur blogger to at least one of the pros hitting six figures every year?

Well, you would like a solid marketing plan, this includes content, a profitable niche, and an excellent monetization strategy.

Table of Contents 

When do you have to Start to Monetize Your Blog? 

Become a contract Blogger in Your Niche

 Sell Ebooks to Your Audience 

Create and Sell Online Courses

 Start a Coaching/Consulting Business 

Offer a Paid Membership 

Plan Make Money with Display Advertising (Banner Ads) 

Become an Affiliate Marketer 

Generate Revenue with Sponsored Posts/Reviews

 Sell Physical Products to Your Audience 

Sell Digital Products to Your Audience

Launch a Virtual Summit in Your Niche 

Accept Donations on Your Blog 

Start a Podcast 

When do you have to Start to Monetize Your Blog? 

There’s no concrete number out there for a way much traffic or how large an email list should be to form money from your blog because that each one depends on what you sell and the way you sell it. (Suggested reading: what proportion Is My Website Worth? and 77 Proven Tactics to Drive Traffic to Your Website). 

 However, having two things straightened out first will assist you a lot: Get steady traffic: You don’t need tens of thousands of tourists but a minimum of thousand visitors a month means you’re doing something right. 

Grow your email list: Again you don’t need to aim for love or money crazy here. We’ll show you samples of people that had a little list but still used it to their advantage. Now these two things matter, but primarily, monetizing your blog efficiently is all about the numbers.

 For example, if you would like to form $6,000 from your blog: You can sell a $200 product (say a course) to 30 people. Or sell a $600 course to 10 people. And even by charging $6,000 for consulting with a client. 

Monetization is math, not magic. This doesn’t mean that the key to monetization is just increasing the costs of what you sell. Rather it means you ought to choose a monetization strategy that aligns with where your blog is true now or where you would like it to be within the future. 

 In this article, we’ll show you ways you'll monetize a blog and make money online whether you get thousands of page views a month or you’re just starting out. We’re getting to show some solid strategies other bloggers have wont to generate revenue from their own blogs in diverse niches and teach you ways to try to to an equivalent together with your own blog. Monetization is math, not magic.  But you would like to settle on a technique that aligns together with your goals. 

1. Become a contract Blogger in Your Niche 

One of the simplest ways to form money from your blog is to become a contract writer for more prominent blogs in your niche. Think about it, you almost certainly started your blog because you've got experience/knowledge therein area, so why not use that to your advantage? Businesses are trying to find folks that can create content to fuel their marketing so who better to make that content than someone that has knowledge therein niche. 

 Freelance blogger Bamidele Onibalusi used his blog, Writers responsible , to point out his content marketing chops while also growing his audience. He now makes a full-time income blogging for other businesses. According to data from Glassdoor, the typical freelancer within us makes about $40k a year. confine mind that this figure is influenced by your experience level and therefore the niche you write in.

 Here’s a breakdown of what proportion you'll earn in several niches consistent with the Editorial Freelance Association: What average freelancer makes by niche What average freelancer writer makes by niche

Image Source : Contena Community

 You might not be ready to charge these rates once you begin, but as you gain more experience and credibility your rates go up. take care to not charge too low within the beginning though. 

 Charging $10 for a piece of writing might sound like a simple thanks to starting getting clients, but in fact, it can chase quality clients away as your skills are called into question, to not mention charging so little can drain your motivation to continue. Since we’re on the topic of pricing, it’s better to charge your clients on a per-project basis instead of on an hourly rate since it is often hard to work out how long it’ll take you to finish a task, especially when you’re just starting out as a freelancer. 

 Charging a fee supported by the project itself means you get rewarded for finishing quicker and your client's skills much they’ll pay from the onset.

 According to WriteWorldwide, here’s what proportion you'll charge per project in your first year as a contract writer, without accounting for your niche or previous writing experience. How much to charge for writing How much to charge for writing (Image source: Write Worldwide) The best part about freelance writing is that you simply don’t need tons of traffic on your blog to start out making money, all businesses really care about it that you simply can write great content.

Image Source : Writer Worldwide

Jorden Roper, for instance , made $5,000 in her fourth month of being a contract writer and Jennifer Gregory pulls in about six figures a year from her freelance writing business. As a contract blogger, your job is to make written content that draws visitors to a business’s website so a number of these visitors can convert into customers for the business. According to Content marketing institute’s 2019 report, marketers are set to spend extra money on content creation and 50% of the marketers surveyed expect their content marketing budget to extend in 2019. B2B increased spending on content creation B2B increased spending on content creation (Image source: CMI SlideShare) If there are businesses making money in your niche then as long as these businesses are creating content then you'll bet they have writers. 

 Notice that I discussed that the business has got to be making money. one of the worst mistakes you'll make as a contract blogger is picking a distinct segment where businesses can’t afford to pay you. For example, writing about art could be your idea of fun and you would possibly have extensive knowledge of it, but what percentage of blogs pay you often to write down about that? The path to profitability as a contract blogger is finding the proper market to position yourself in. 

 A quick thanks to testing whether there’s money to be made in your niche is to seek out a minimum of ten writers that cover the niche you would like to write down in. you'll do that by simply making an inquiry on LinkedIn with the keywords for your niche. For example, once I look for individuals with the precise title of “freelance personal finance writer” on LinkedIn I buy about 42 results. you'll also roll in the hay without quotes for a more broad search which can generate even more results. Freelance personal finance writer search on LinkedIn Freelance personal finance writer search on LinkedIn This is a simple thanks to validating your niche. 

 We’ve already established that you simply don’t need tons of traffic to form money as a contract writer but that doesn’t mean people will just find your blog and hire you. You have to travel out and promote your service. 

 When you’ve created writing samples on your blog and perhaps guest posts on other blogs, you'll start reaching bent businesses you would like to write down for. You can also use freelance marketplaces like Upwork, SEOclerks, and Fiverr. But while there are a couple of freelance writers that make tons of cash, like Danny Marguiles who remodeled $100k a year on Upwork, the bulk of freelancer writers on these platforms make little or no money.

 To avoid the race for rock bottom that's freelance marketplaces, you’ll need to do most of the outreach yourself.

 How to Find Blogs to write down For

 The best thanks to find businesses or blogs in your niche to write down for is to easily make a Google look for keywords associated with that niche and see what comes up.

 Because clearly, the blogs that show up within the first few pages of Google are investing tons in content marketing. For example, if i used to be trying to find blogs to write down for within the fitness niche, making an easy search term like “Fitness blog” demonstrated this:

 Fitness blog Google search Fitness blog Google search You can also look for terms associated with your niche specifically, for instance, within the case of fitness something like “Workout plans”: Workout plans Google search 

Workout plans Google search Now all you've got to try to to is contact the blog owners and pitch them your freelance writing service.

 Take Advantage of Your Own Site Besides checking out new writing gigs, you ought to also cash in of your own site, you’re a writer in any case . Use inbound marketing and SEO to drive people to your site where you'll then offer them your writing and blogging services. Freelance writer, Maddy Osman does this on her freelancing site, The Blogsmith. Maddy Osman freelance writing prices Maddy Osman freelance writing prices 

 2. Sell Ebooks to Your Audience 

Selling ebooks is one of the foremost popular ways bloggers prefer to monetize their blogs. It’s perfect because it’s relatively easy to make and is typically priced adequately enough that the majority of visitors can purchase it. But ebooks do quite let bloggers monetize their blogs quickly.

 As a blogger selling an ebook are often the fastest thanks to testing if people have an interest in what you’re covering enough to buy it. Ebooks also are a low-risk way for your website visitors to gauge the worth you'll bring before buying costlier products.

 Contrary to popular belief you don’t need tons of traffic on your blog to form money together with your books. for instance, David Oudiette converted the knowledge he’d gained building landing pages into a 252 page $39 ebook. 

 He didn’t have tons of traffic on his blog as all he did at the time was consulting, but David was ready to generate over $13,000 in revenue from his ebook. The landing page cookbook ebook The landing page cookbook ebook (Image source: your landing page sucks!) Here’s what David had to try to to to sell that a lot of books: He asked his blog subscribers about their landing page, gave them free tips then pointed them to his book. He answered questions and gave feedback about landing pages on Quora and Reddit, then pitched his book as a further source of data.

 David also added the book on Product Hunt. Even more impressively, David cold emailed businesses and gave them free feedback on their landing page, he then answered replies and linked to his book. So David didn’t have tons of traffic but he did do tons of labor. There’s also Taylor Pearson who sold over 5,000 books in four weeks and in 2015 had remodeled $60k from just that book.

 Taylor had just 700 email subscribers at the time. Taylor credits the success of his book to a couple of things: Getting fans of his blog to become beta readers during the writing stage. Creating a Facebook group to speak his book’s progress with core readers (Read: the way to create a Facebook page). 

Sending the book to everyone on the Facebook group in order that they could leave an honest review on Amazon. Keeping everyone on his list informed about the book’s progress which makes them more involved and certain to shop for afterward . Synchronizing social media messages during and after launch. Sending a customized email about his book to each one among his Gmail contacts. Doing a giveaway to market the book. The book ended up a bestseller on the Amazon small business section and therefore the rest is history.

IMage Source : Amazon 

What’s great about both of these examples is that they show that with the right marketing and a good book, you don’t need that many subscribers and you certainly don’t have to be an expert writer.

None of these authors published and hoped, instead, they did a lot of work for their books to take off.

Where to Sell Your Ebook

You can then choose to sell your ebook directly on your blog or through platforms like Gumroad or Podia.

Selling your ebook on your own site can be advantageous, as you get to keep 100% of the profits. For example, Harsh Agrawal of ShoutMeLoud has an entire section of his site dedicated entirely to his different ebooks.

You can easily create something like this with the Easy Digital Downloads WordPress plugin.

If you choose to publish your ebook as an Amazon Kindle then you can only keep 70% of the profits but it comes with the added advantage that the more books you sell the more exposure you can get which leads to even more sales.

Selling ebooks aren’t restricted to a particular niche either. There are ebooks on blogging, photography, fitness and anything you can think of.

For example, if you had a blog that taught gardening you can sell an ebook that taught your audience in more detail how to grow their own gardens or a particular plant.

You can even repurpose some of the content you’ve already written on your blog and then add more detail and context.

How to Make the Book

If you don’t have the time or skill to write a book yourself you can hire ghostwriters to do it for you.

You can find ghostwriters on LinkedIn, Scripted, Upwork and even Fiverr. Keep in mind that, like anything, you get what you pay for. More experience ghostwriters will charge you more than beginners.

You can also create your book cover yourself with tools like Canva, Photoshop, and Snappa or you can pay for a service like 99designs and let a professional do it for you.

3. Create and Sell Online Courses

Another way to monetize your blog is by selling online courses. What holds most bloggers back from creating their own course is that they think you need to be some sort of expert to teach a course.

But this isn’t true, all you need to really teach a course is to know more than the people you’re teaching and to be able to present this information in a way that people will get value from.

Ramit Sethi of IWT makes millions from the courses he creates not because he’s a certified financial planner but because he helps people eliminate problems in their lives.

You don’t need to be a certified chef to create a course that teaches people how to cook. If you can cook better than most people and create your course material in a way that can truly teach people how to cook then there’s nothing holding you back from creating your course.

More people are taking online courses than ever before, the e-learning industry is expected to grow to about $325 billion by 2025.

You also don’t need to be an influencer like Ramit Sethi to make a decent income from your courses.

There are people like Joseph Michael who made $40k as a newbie teaching writers how to use the popular writing software, Scrivener.

Scrivener course

Image Source : Scrivener course llc

Joseph didn’t have thousands of visitors or a gigantic email list. He sold his course by reaching out to influencers and promoting his course on webinars he spoke on.

How to Come up with Course Ideas

If you already have an audience then you simply need to identify a problem that a lot of them share that you can solve.

Ways to Identify Pain Points Your Audience Needs Solved:

Send a survey: The fastest way to know what problems people in your audience have is to ask them. You can do this by sending a simple survey through email.

Here’s an example of Ramit Sethi doing just this in one of his emails just before the New yea

Read blog comments: Your comment section can be a treasure trove of ideas if you pay attention to them. And if you don’t have that many comments on your blog you can read comments from other blogs in your niche.

Blog comment

Image Source : Nerd Fitness 

If you don’t have an audience, however, then you can come up with course ideas by brainstorming a list of things you do better than most people.

Here are a few questions to help you figure this out:

What do your friends compliment you on?

What do people come to you for advice for?

What does everyone around you complain about, but you seem to have no problem with?

What have you learned from your past job?

What can you do better than most people you know?

For Joseph, he knew how to use Scrivener which most people found to be too complex. In your case, it may be playing an instrument or dressing. As long as you can do it better than most people you can teach it to them.

Hosting Your Courses

You can choose to host your courses on WordPress with LMS hosting for WordPress, in which case you’d keep most of the profit from your course but you’d have to set up everything on your own or hire a developer to help you with it.

There are also third-party platforms you can host your courses on. These platforms either charge a monthly fee or a percentage of sales and in exchange, you get a more professional platform to host your course on.

WordPress Extension for Your Courses

WP Courseware

LearnDash

LifterLMS

LearnPress

Third Party Platforms to Host Your Courses On

Podia

Teachable

Kajabi

4. Start a Coaching/Consulting Business

Sometimes people want more detailed and personalized instructions than a book or course can provide them and so they turn to one on one coaching (or consulting depending on the type of services you offer).

Coaching or consulting is a monetization strategy that most blog owners who’ve found success in selling books and courses turn to when they want to create an additional revenue stream.

It’s not just for established bloggers however, consulting can also be your monetization strategy from the start.

Coaching like most of the monetization strategy we’ve already covered banks on you being able to use your skills and experience to help people solve problems in their lives.

Brennan Dunn for example, helps businesses sell more with marketing automation and charges about $9k for a consultation and Nagina Abdullah makes over 100k a year coaching with clients that want to lose weight.

If you’re already generating revenue with books and courses, consider offering one on one consultations to people in your audience.

And if you’re just getting started, the low volume nature of consulting means that you can start to generate revenue without much traffic.

With consulting it’s not just about how much traffic you generate, it’s more about getting the right kind of traffic, i.e people that need your services and can afford to pay you.

That means writing targeted blog posts on topics your type of clients care about, it means speaking on a podcast your audience listens to and going to events where they gather so they know about you.

5. Offer a Paid Membership Plan

Businesses with subscription models are becoming increasingly popular, so much so that some people have started calling it the Subscription economy.

Everything from Netflix, web hosting providers and membership sites are part of the subscription economy.

Subscription economy

Image Source : Emma

A membership site is a gated section of your online business where members subscribe either monthly or annually to receive exclusive benefits.

The people in your community share a common interest and the benefits they pay for can include exclusive articles, advice, reports, webinars, in-person meetups and just being around like-minded people.

Membership sites not only allow you to reach more people, but it also gives everyone a sense of community and belonging.

One thing I love about membership sites is that everyone’s part of a group whether they realize it or not.

That means that if you have an interest in something the world is so big and the internet so connected that you can find other people just like you.

For example, Ryan Levesque loved Orchids and knew how to grow them so he created Orchids made easy where he offers his members exclusive content and provides them a platform where they can meet and learn from other Orchid lovers.

Ryan’s members pay $9.95 every month and since he has 1,800 members that put his revenue at a cool $18k a month.

Even better, based on how much you charge for your membership you might not need that much traffic.

Will Hamilton of Fuzzy yellow balls teaches tennis players how to up their game and he once had 600 members paying him $25 every month. That’s over $15,000 a month from just 600 people and this was back in 2010.

You can create a membership site for almost anything as long as the people you’re targeting have money and are dedicated.

For example, tennis players put in hours of practice to be good so they’re committed and they also spend money on tennis gear, so they have money to spend.

Another great example is golfers. Golfers are willing to put in the effort to improve their skill and they also spend money on equipment.

Which is probably why Sean Ogle of Breaking Eighty was able to get 150 members to join his golf membership within 8 months of starting his blog. Breaking Eighty members pay between $250 to $500 annually.

If you have an audience that’s dedicated and already spend money to improve then creating a membership site might be the most profitable thing you can do. You can easily start making thousands of dollars with only a few hundred members.

When it comes to creating and managing your membership site, you can use WordPress plugins or third-party platforms.

Managing Memberships Sites on WordPress

Learndash

s2Member

Memberpress

Ultimate Membership Pro

Managing Membership Sites with Third-Party Tools

Uscreen: If you have mainly video content.

Podia

Kajabi

Wild Apricot

6. Make Money with Display Advertising (Banner Ads)

There’s a lot of hate on display ads in the blogosphere. Most people talk about how it’s a bad monetization strategy because you can’t make anything decent with it.

In most cases, they might be right, but there’s a reason display ads are still popular despite all the bad press they get.

The reason is that they work and are the fastest, albeit not the foremost profitable thanks to start monetizing an internet site .

In fact, some bloggers start with display ads until they will find more profitable monetization strategies. for a few people, those first few dollars give them enough motivation to continue with the blog.

For example, Alborz Fallah of Car Expert began monetizing his website when a lover bugged him to place display ads from Google Adsense on his blog. The ads allowed Alborz to travel from making nothing on his blog to earning a gentle $200 each day while he kept his full-time job.

Suggested reading: 22 Best AdSense Alternatives to think about for Your Website in 2019.

Alborz later started working directly with car manufacturers that paid the maximum amount as $30,000 for sponsorship deals. All of this wouldn’t are possible if that friend hadn’t convinced him to monetize his blog with Adsense first.

Alborz isn’t the sole one that’s found success with display ads either, so has entrepreneur Jon Dykstra from Fat Stacks.

Here’s a snapshot of Jon’s Adsense earnings in 30 days.

Image Source :Authority Hackers

Not bad for a poor monetization strategy right?

Jon says the key to his Adsense success is perfect ad placements, generating tons of traffic on the various sites he owns and picking niches where display ads work.

A great free WordPress plugin you'll use to optimize your ad placements is Ad Inserter. With it, you'll easily A/B test your Ads to ascertain which perform better and it even allows you to customize how and where your Ads appear on your website.

For example, if you would like a billboard to point out in your article, but only after the primary two paragraphs of content, you'll easily do this.

With ads, you are doing need a product of your own to sell but you do need traffic, and therefore the more of it you'll generate the higher you perform.

It might take a while for ads to start out working for you as you start to grow your blog and improve your content marketing but eventually, you’ll get there.

Ads don’t even need to be permanent, it can just be short-lived thanks to making money together with your blog until you'll find better how to monetize it.

But we live within the age of ad-blockers and that they are affecting your income in a negative way.

7. Become an Affiliate Marketer
You can’t have a piece of writing about monetizing a blog without mentioning affiliate marketing. It’s one among the foremost common ways bloggers make money online.

In fact, affiliate marketing powers tons of the online , approximately 15 percent of the digital media industry’s revenue comes from affiliate marketing and within the U.S affiliate marketing drives as many e-commerce orders as email.

With affiliate marketing, you promote the products of other businesses and obtain a commission for each sale you help usher in .

Affiliate marketers work an equivalent way as most salespeople. they assist promote and sell a company’s product and obtain a commission when someone buys.

Here’s a visible breakdown of how it works:

How affiliate marketing works

Image Source : Hubspot 

It’s really that straightforward , say for instance your commission is $5 for each sale, and you get 200 people to shop for that product, you would’ve have made $1000.

What attracts people to affiliate marketing is that you simply can just piggyback on an excellent product and sell that to your audience.

With Affiliate Marketing you simply Need Three Things
A niche (This seems to be shooting up tons doesn’t it? 😉).
An affiliate product.
And an audience to market the merchandise to.
You build your audience by writing about topics associated with your niche and once you've got an audience, you'll find products from affiliate networks like:

Rakuten Marketing
Amazon affiliate (make bound to inspect the AAWP WordPress plugin)
ShareASale
eBay Partner Network
Clickbank affiliate
We even have an affiliate program here at Kinsta. Kinsta’s affiliate program comes with 10% recurring lifetime commissions and lots of bloggers are already earning tons of passive income through it.

Affiliate pie

You can also check what affiliate products other blogs in your niche are promoting, and reach bent those businesses yourself.

One thing to stay in mind when monetizing your blog with affiliate marketing is that you simply should be focused on providing value to your readers and not just pitching products so you'll make a purchase.

Case in point, the simplest affiliate marketers don’t even encounter affiliate marketers.

Take, for instance, Ryan Robinson who makes tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate earnings monthly through his blog.

Affiliate earnings

Image Source : Ryan Robinson

Ryan creates tons of valuable content for his readers and pitching products he likes and uses desire a natural a part of that.

Since more and more businesses now have affiliate programs you'll start promoting products regardless of what niche you’re in.

8. Generate Revenue with Sponsored Posts/Reviews
Making money with sponsored post and reviews is one among the smallest amount common ways of monetizing a blog, probably because you’ll got to have tons of traffic and credibility to tug it off.

With sponsored posts and reviews, a blogger will charge a corporation a fee to write down about their product on the blog and provides their opinion of it. the merchandise gets exposed to the blogger’s audience and therefore the brand gets more exposure and new customers.

When you believe in influencer marketing, your mind quickly pulls up images of the influencers you recognize on Instagram and Youtube.

But writing sponsored posts on your blog is influencer marketing and it’s exploding immediately. quite 63% of companies who already use influencer marketing, decide to increase their spending this year.

Influencer marketing has already experienced tremendous growth and is predicted to possess a market size of about $6.5 billion in 2019.

When featuring a product on your blog confirm to offer your honest feedback about it because it’s not worth losing the trust of your readers for a couple of bucks.

For example, Matthew Woodward who charges on the brink of $1000 for a sponsored review clearly points out on his advertising page that a paid review doesn’t mean an honest review.

Being transparent together with his audience maintains the trust he’s built with them which is far more valuable than $1,000.

Michelle Gardner of creating sense of cents, who charges around $5,000 per sponsored post and makes $10,000 to $20,000 a month from sponsored posts writes mainly on products and services she uses herself. That way she will make sure that the people in her audience will like it too.

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As I’ve mentioned before, the sole downside to sponsored posts is that you simply need a to possess a solid online presence before you'll get companies to pay you anything substantial.

Companies got to know that paying for a sponsored post will cause sales to form it well worth the investment. So sponsored posts might not be the simplest monetization system for beginners but are great for skilled bloggers.

If your blog is already generating traffic you'll start reaching bent businesses in your niche whose products or services you already use and offer to write down a sponsored post or review.

For example, if you write on the technology you'll do sponsored reviews for companies that make smart doorbells, laptops, cameras, etc.

Alexis Schroeder of Fit Financials writes about fitness and private finance so when she started generating enough traffic she reached bent companies in the personal finance and fitness space.

Alexis charges around $750 to $1500 per post and makes a mean of $3000 per month from them alone.

9. Sell Physical Products to Your Audience
Another way you'll monetize your blog is by selling products to your audience. Some bloggers even move from selling just a couple of items to launching full-fledged e-commerce websites alongside the blog.

The popular e-commerce store Beardbrand, for instance, began as a blog where founder Eric Bandholz wrote about beard grooming before he started selling the beard grooming products Beardbrand is understood for today.

Eric turned his beard blog into a business that’s been featured on the ny Times, Inc, Shark Tank, and now makes quite $100k a month.

Beardbrand

Image Source : Bearbrand 

Eric isn’t the sole one to get that selling product to your audience is a superb thanks to monetizing your blog.

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal makes about $375,000 a year selling merchandise associated with the comic he draws on his blog.

Both Eric and Matthew can monetize their blogs this manner because that they had built a fanatical community that really wanted what they offered.

If you’ve already built up an audience, one among the foremost profitable thanks to monetizing it, is to sell products to these people.

They already trust you and since you cater to them you almost certainly know more about them than most manufacturers and retailers.

Shari Lott started Spearmint Baby as a blog for mothers and as she grew her online presence she began to find out more about what her audience of mothers wanted.

Shari launched Spearmint LOVE, an eCommerce store that sold baby clothes, and in but five years grew it into a business that made $1.5M in 2016.

Baby clothes ecommerce site

Image Source : Spearmint LOVE

If you have already got an audience, then start listening to the issues that they need and see if you'll sell something that’ll help them solve it.

10. Sell Digital Products to Your Audience
Sometimes the simplest thanks to solve the issues your audience have isn’t with a physical product but with software and digital downloads.

Clay Collins got the thought for Leadpages through his blog where he wrote about optimizing landing pages. When Clay started for free of charge |freely giving|giving freely"> making a gift of landing page templates for free he acknowledged that folks wanted more from it.

They wanted to customize it, integrate it with their tools and even to hold out split tests then he created Leadpages. A business that now has $38 million in funding and generates $25 million a year.

If you've got other skills, beyond just blogging and creating ebooks, don’t allow them to attend waste. If you recognize the way to code you'll create software or WordPress plugins then sell them to your existing audience.

Even if you don’t skills to code, you'll always hire a developer. Omar Zenhom of Webinar Ninja built the primary version of his product with developers he hired from Freelancer.

You can even sell digital products like templates, themes, and even audio recordings to your audience if which will help them solve a drag they need .

For example, Relaxing noise sells audio tracks that help their listeners relax and nod off . The Luxe Lens sells Lightroom and Photoshop templates to photographers. Camera gear website Shotkit sells Lightroom to earn a commission.


The Luxe Lens

You can even sell printables like Jennifer of lifeismessyandbrilliant who sells digital planners and stickers on her blog.

11. Launch a Virtual Summit in Your Niche
If you retain up with internet trends, then you’ve probably heard or have even attended virtual summits before.

Keep in mind that virtual summits or web conferences are different from webinars.

The main distinction is that virtual summits are tons more interactive and interesting. They’re essentially conferences you'll attend online with a number, Q&A sessions, and multiple speakers covering a selected topic.

Now while the virtual summits themselves are usually liberal to attend, you'll only access them for a limited period of time. The organizer makes most of their revenue from selling an “all-access pass” that permits attendees to travel over the conference material anytime they need.

Tom Morkers who runs the $100k Launch School summit made quite $20,000 from selling all-access passes after one summit.

Hosts of virtual summits also make money by selling related products like membership plans and courses on the subject after the summit is over.

The part about virtual summits that creates them an excellent monetization strategy even for newbies is that you simply don’t get to be a well-known blogger to host one. Mostly because you’re pulling credibility by interviewing other influencers in your space.

Jon Schumacher for instance only had about 2,000 email subscribers when he launched his Webinar Mastery Summit.

The summit not only resulted in on the brink of $26,000 in sales after just 10 days, but it also added 2,854 subscribers to his email list.

Virtual summits exist for nearly any niche you'll consider . for instance , in publishing, there’s the simplest Seller Summit that teaches the way to write and publish a best selling book.

And Membership Site Summit teaches entrepreneurs the way to launch and grow a successful membership site.

If you’ve already built up an audience albeit it’s not large, you'll create a virtual summit by partnering with influencers in your space.

The best way i do know to seek out influencers you'll connect with on any niche is to use a tool like Buzzsumo.

All you’d need to do would be to travel to the Buzzsumo home page and sort in your niche keyword.

For example, if I wanted to carry a virtual summit on book publishing, I’d type in book publishing within the search box.

Image Source : Buzzsumo

Enter a keyword in Buzzsumo

Then confirm to click on the influencers tab:

Buzzsumo influencers

Image Source : Buzzsumo

You can then filter by follower count, reply ratio and whatever criteria interest you.

When you’ve found the influencers in your niche it'd be tempting to succeed in bent them immediately and ask them to talk at your summit but that rarely works.

Instead, you would like to create a relationship with them slowly before you create any quiet ask. Start by following them on Twitter, then read, comment and make guests posts on their blog. In other words, you would like to deliver value before making an ask.

12. Accept Donations on Your Blog
You can also monetize your blog by making it possible for your audience to form donations. This works particularly well if you’re a nonprofit.

You can accept donations with WordPress plugins like Give, Charitable, and PayPal Donations.

Here’s how the Charitable donation plugin looks on the Uganda water development campaign page:
Uganda water development

Now while accepting donations are the norm for non-profits they will even be wont to monetize blogs that aren’t non-profits.

You might be a touch skeptical about how well donations can work for a blog, so was I until I started reading about bloggers like Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex who makes $2493 monthly from just 410 fans on Patreon. confine mind that Scott only blogs part-time and still features a day job.

Patreon

Image Source : Patreon

There also are bloggers like Tim Urban of Wait But Why who makes over $12k per month on Patreon alone.

This doesn’t mean that any blog can make money with donations though.

It took most of the bloggers I discussed quite a little bit of time to start out getting substantial income from donations.

That’s because you would like to possess a very dedicated audience to form donations work for your blog which requires giving tons of valuable content for free of charge first.

For example, Tim Urban spends between 40 – 80 hours writing and researching to make one among his blog posts, a number of which are longer than the ebooks people sell.

That’s tons of labor that go into creating something he’s for free of charge |freely giving|giving freely" making a gift for free.

His audience realizes this and loves Tim’s work much a lot that they support him with donations. Tim wouldn’t are ready to get donations if he just churned out 100 words listicles hebdomadally .

How to Accept Donations on Your Blog:
So far I’ve acknowledged samples of people accepting donations with the Patreon platform or using WordPress donation plugins.

But which do you have to use? That depends on what matters most to you.

Accepting donations on Patreon are often costlier because they take a 5% fee on your incoming revenue and you furthermore may need to pay another 5% in transaction fees.

In return, you've got a platform that’ll handle all the chargebacks and declined payments. Plus it’s easy to simply accept donations and manage your donors with minimal effort. Patreon even features a WordPress plugin to assist you create money from your blog’s content.

If you select to use WordPress plugins, on the opposite hand, you’ll pay fewer fees but you’ll need to do most of the found out on your own. You’ll even have to handle the transaction errors and make how to manage donors on your own.

So essentially, if you would like to urge started as quickly as possible and don’t mind paying extra for an already built platform, Patreon may be a great option. If you don’t mind fixing donations on your own and managing donors yourself, then WordPress plugins are perfect for you.

13. Start a Podcast
Podcasting is exploding immediately. consistent with Paid Insights, as of April 2019, there are over 700,000 active podcasts and over 29 million episodes.

More people are starting to hear podcasts everywhere the planet . Here’s the share of the population that now hear podcasts round the globe:

The State of Podcasting

Image Source : Statista

If you have already got a blog, including a podcast are often a very smart thanks to get more traffic by piggybacking off the expansion of podcasts.

Podcasts are great especially when you’re a newcomer because most of the established blogs in your niche have more written content than you are doing .

But what percentage of them have a podcast?

Podcasts are what allowed John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur ablaze to travel from making $69,879 in revenue in 2012 to $1,545,090 in 2018.


Podcasts do so well that even popular bloggers like Noah Kagan and Darren Rowse now have podcasts alongside their regular blog content.

Podcasts don’t just assist you get your name out there and generate more traffic for your blog. It also can be another source of revenue for your blog.

With an outsized enough audience, you'll start selling sponsorship slots on your podcast to businesses that want to succeed in the people in your audience.

Andrew Warner from Mixergy generates additional revenue by offering companies an opportunity to succeed in his audience of entrepreneurs through his podcast.

Here are two of his sponsors for an interview he did with the founding father of Codementor:

Podcast sponsors

Image Source : Mixergy

Where to Host your Podcast?
To get started with podcasting you’ll need an area to host your audio files very similar to how your website is hosted.

A media host may be a company that permits you to store your audio files in order that they are often streamed and downloaded by listeners.

A few media hosts for podcasts include:

Libsyn
Blubrry
Buzzsprout
and Transistor
There also are WordPress plugins which will assist you manage and even host your podcasts like Seriously Simple Podcasting, Smart Podcast Player and straightforward Podcast Press.

What you would like to start out a Podcast
Most people overestimate what they have to start out a podcast then never begin, but if you have already got a computer you’ll need just a couple of more things to urge started, such as:

A microphone: you'll get one for as little as $10 on Amazon.
A headphone: you almost certainly have this already.
Audio editing software: There are free options like GarageBand (Mac) or Audacity (Windows).
Podcast hosting: you'll get plans as low as $12 a month.
A Skype or Zoom account: If you propose to try to to interviews on your show.
That’s it, you'll now start creating episodes for the planet to concentrate to.

Summary
While it’s easier than ever to start out a blog, most bloggers, because the ConvertKit study shows, have trouble monetizing it. Blogging alone doesn’t generate revenue unless you'll find a monetization strategy that works for your blog.

And as most of the examples have proved, you don’t need that much traffic or results in start generating income from your blog. And while your niche does matter, it’s not the foremost important factor that determines if you’ll succeed.

We’ve seen people make money with tennis, beards, golf, baby clothes, cars, and even orchids.

What you are doing need is an understanding of the numbers needed to form your monetization strategy successful and therefore the determination to figure hard to market what you've got to supply .

Reading this is often the primary step, we hope you now have the strategies and tools to start out making money together with your blog.