9 Tested Ways to Monetize Your Blog:

Blog monetization is one of the most discussed topics for the bloggers. No matter whether you are a beginner or a seasoned blogger, everyone wants to increase their revenue.

Your blog cannot survive long enough if it is not generating any profit. That’s why bloggers are always keen on finding the best ways to monetize their blog.

Although there are hundreds of ways to monetize your blog, however, I have chosen 9 tested ways to monetize your blog in this post, which actually works and can help you to make money online.

Note: Please read this post till the end because there is a bonus waiting for you in the last section.

9 Tested ways to monetize your blog:

1. Google Adsense

Expected earnings: Low

Google Adsense is one of the most popular ways to monetize your blog and to make money online. Ask any beginner how he/she is planning to monetize his/her blog and the first answer will be Google Adsense.

What made Google Adsense so popular is its ease to place ads on your blog. It’s really very simple to place google ads on your website. Google will give you a ‘code’ according to space (size) that you are allowing for the ads and all that you need to do is to place that ‘code’ in your blog. Rest everything will be taken care by Google.

Google will show the relevant ads according to the type of visitors that you are getting on your blog. Therefore, you do not have to worry about which ad to place and which not to.

Because of these reasons, Google Adsense has become the darling of the bloggers to start their online earning.

Nevertheless, when you get little used to google adsense, you will realize that it isn’t one of the best ways to monetize your blog. The earning from google adsense is quite low.

Although the earnings from the google ads are decided on various factors like your blog niche, CPC (Cost per click), CPM- which is the cost per 1000 views etc, however, in general, the earnings from google adsense in India varies between $1-2 per 1,000 views.

If you are lucky and your blog is a high CPC niche, you might earn a little higher rate ($2-3 per 1,000 page views).

Nevertheless, if we calculate the earnings of a small blog, which is getting a monthly page view of 20,000, it turns out to be between $20-40, which is equivalent to Rs 1300- 2600. This isn’t enough. Is it?

Unless you are generating millions of page views per month, you won’t be able to earn a big sum from google adsense.

Even for the big blogs, which are generating over million page views per month, this earning is not worth the effort that they are putting. For blogs which are generating over 1,000,000 page views per month, an earning between Rs 65,000 to Rs 130,000 doesn’t make much sense.

That’s why google adsense is not considered as a good revenue source by the big bloggers. Most successful bloggers treat the earnings from google adsense just as an overhead earning and focuses on other more-fruitful ways to monetize their blog, which we are going to discuss in the next sections of this article.

2. Affiliate marketing

Expected earnings: Low to Medium

What is affiliate marketing? It is a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

In simple words, affiliate marketers are similar to flat brokers.

The flat brokers do not own the flat but they get a commission whenever they are able to find a renter. In a similar way, the affiliate marketer does not own the product. They just divert their blog traffic to the product in order to generate sales.

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to monetize your blog as you do not need to create or own a product. Just divert your blog traffic to that product sales page and if the product is reverent to your audience, they might purchase the product and you will get the commission.

One of the best websites for the bloggers to become an affiliate is AMAZON.

Why? Two reasons.

First, you can find a number of products on Amazon for every niche. Even if you writing in a very typical category, there are chances that you will be able to find relevant products in your category, which your audience might buy.

Second, it’s quite simple to become an Amazon affiliate.

You can become an Amazon affiliate within a day. All that you need to do is to visit Amazon affiliate website (https://affiliate-program.amazon.in) and create an account by filling the details about you and your blog.

In most of the cases, the affiliate account gets approved with a day.

Once your account is approved, all you need to do is to add the link to the Amazon product on your blog, drive traffic to the product and hope that someone buys it ;D

For example, let’s say you have a fitness blog and you wrote an article on ‘How to increase your running speed?’. In the article, you discussed how it is important to wear proper running shoes in order to increase your speed.

Here, you can make some money using affiliate marketing.

Just add a link to the best running shoes in the same article and recommend it to your readers. If your article is good and getting some traffic, the chances are that few of your readers might click on the link and if they find the shoe attractive, they will purchase it and you’ll get your commission.

For different products, the commission rate is differentAmazonazon. Here is the list of the commissions for different product ranges.

From the above table, you can notice that the commission for the Men’s apparel is 12%.

For the same example of selling shoes by affiliate marketing, let’s consider that the price of the shoes is Rs 4,000. Then, you will get a commission of 12% of 4,000 = Rs 480 on the sell on a single shoe.

This is called the ‘EASY MONEY’.

Moreover, if you are able to get 100 sales of those shoes in a month, you can easily earn Rs 48k, without doing any work. You are not the buyer or seller, still, you are making money.

However, there are few points that you need to understand regarding the affiliate marketing.

1. You can earn a moderately high amount of commission if the price of the products that you are selling is high. For example, if you are in photography niche and recommending cameras worth Rs 35,000 or more, then you can make lots of money through commissions of these high-end products. Similar is the case with electronic items like phones, gadgets etc, where the price of products is quite high.

2. However, if your blog niche supports only low-priced products, then you might not be able to earn big amount through affiliate marketing. For example, let’s say you write stories on your blog. Then, the best that you can do is to recommend books to your readers. Generally, a book costs somewhere between Rs 200-400. Even if we consider books that you recommend are worth Rs 400, still you will make only Rs 40 on the sale of one book. Moreover, even after selling 100 books, you will make just a commission of Rs 4,000.

Therefore the earnings from affiliate marketing totally depend on your blog niche. If your blog can sell high-priced products, then ‘hurray’. You can make sh*t lot of money from the affiliate marketing.

However, if your blog can sell an only low-priced product, then you won’t get enough commission from the sales.

Therefore, if you are just starting to blog and confused which niche (category) to choose to write about, then consider affiliate marketing as one of the big factors.

Nevertheless, if you have already created your blog, then do not get dis-hearted. There are plenty more ways to monetize your blog, which we are going to discuss next.

3. Kindle Publishing

Expected Earnings: Moderate to High

Kindle publishing is one of the ways to monetize your blog which is still untouched by many of the Indian Bloggers.

Do you know that you can self-publish eBooks and paperbacks on Kindle for free? 

With the help of Kindle Direct Publishing, you too can become an author (without having to worry about where to find publishers for your book) and reach millions of readers on Amazon.

Moreover, it’s quite simple to become a Kindle publisher and make money through your books. There are few simple steps that if you follow them correctly, you too can become an author on Amazon.

The first thing that you need is a book.

Your book should be an original one, which means that it shouldn’t be copied and should not have any plagiarism. However, being original doesn’t mean you have to write the book yourself. If you are not interested in writing, just hire someone to write the book, tell them your idea (what to write), pay them for their work and publish the book on your behalf.

Nevertheless, even you do not have the money to hire someone, write it yourself. You need not write 50,000 words for your first Kindle book.

Start small. Even a book of 2,000-5,000 words will work fine on Kindle. Definitely, you cannot charge high for the small books, may be between Rs 50-100, and hence your earning per book might be less if you write a small book. But hey, it’s good for the beginners, isn’t it?

One time work and lifetime earning.

Further, if you are able to write a big one, you can sell it even for high prices like Rs 200-400 on Kindle and earn big money.

Few things that you will need while publishing book on Amazon Kindle, that you should keep prepared are:

1. Book (in pdf or word format)
2. Cover image (i.e. the book cover)
3. Description of the book
4. Pricing of the book

However, this stuff can be taken care of once you have written the book.

You don’t even have to hire a professional to create your book cover. You can create it yourself using websites like Snappa or Canva. These websites have a number of pre-designed templates for the book cover. All you need to do is to edit the template.

After publishing the book, most of the authors have difficulty in finding the readers. Where to sell their newly published book. However, if you have a blog, you can easily divert your blog traffic to your book or just recommend your readers to read your Kindle book.

If you have written a good book and are able to market it properly using your blog, you can easily make tons of money.

Kindle publishing is one of the best passive ways to monetize your blog, which I will highly recommend you to try.

4. Services

Expected earnings: HIGH

Providing services to your blog readers is one of the active ways to monetize your blog, which means that you will need to be actively involved here.

The more time you give for the services, the more money you will make. Here, you need to trade your time with the money of the readers to solve a problem using your expertise.

For example, let’s say you have a blog on web development where you write how to create websites and other similar topics. Here, you can offer your expertise to your readers. You can provide a service to your readers, where you offer to create their websites in return for some genuine price.

As your readers are already familiar with your expertise, they might be willing to avail your service and will be ready to pay you.

Providing services is a good way to monetize your blog in you are looking to build an online business. You can easily create a huge empire if you have a good expertise in the field.

Moreover, it’s your own business, and you can raise the price whenever you feel it’s the right time (don’t need to beg your boss for the raise as an employee even if you are working hard).

There are few blogging niches which can easily be monetized by providing services. Few of them are- App development, Video-creators, Electronic/Electrical based blogs, Photography etc.

5. Coaching and Consultancy

Expected Earnings: HIGH

Providing coaching and consultancy are again one of the active ways to monetize your blog. However, you can earn tons of money if you have proved your expertise in the field to your blog readers.

Most people take a consulting only when they have a problem, which they cannot solve themselves. And if you are able to solve this problem, you can easily charge them a decent amount of money.

Moreover, the readers will be willing to pay this money and come back to you again and again, as you are the ‘come-to’ person in that field and they are now confident about your expertise.

For example, let’s say you are a financial advisor and write about investing.

There are many people who have sh*t lots of money but do not have any financial literacy. Apart from real estates (property), they do not know where to invest, what are stocks, bonds, mutual funds etc. Further, saving tax by investments seems a big mystery to them.

Here, you can offer them consultancy about how to invest.

If you have written genuine articles on investing and your blog readers are aware of your expertise, they will definitely approach you for consultancy.

There are many bloggers who charge as much as Rs 2,000-5,000 per hour for consulting.

And why shouldn’t they? If they are offering help to their clients about where to invest Rs 30 lakhs for high returns or how to save taxes for people in the highest slab of income tax (30%), then asking for such high rates are genuine.

Some financial bloggers even ask in percentage as commission instead of a flat fee. For example- 1-2% of the investment amount. Imagine if the client is investing Rs 10 lakhs, these financial bloggers can easily make Rs 10,000- 20,0000 from their client just by offering consultancy.

Further, offering coaching is again a high earning ways to monetize your blog.

For example, let’s say you are a fitness blogger. Then you can offer to coach to your readers regarding weight loss, running, exercises, yoga etc and charge for the coaching.

The coaching you provide can be a ‘one-on-one’ coaching or a group coaching. Many times, you don’t even have to physically present to offer to coach. You can just coach your clients on phone or via video calls/online.

If you are getting a good traffic on your blog and have a skill which you can coach, then providing coaching is definitely a good idea to monetize your blog.

Here is the example of few niches where you can provide coaching and consultancy – Investing, Personal finance, coding, guitar lessons, dancing, cooking, language etc.

6. Online courses

Expected earnings: Moderate to High

Creating and selling your online course can be one of the best passive ways to monetize your blog. Just create your course once and keep selling it.

However, to earn money on your blog from online courses, you need some expertise, on which you can create a course and sell it.

One of the biggest advantages of online courses is that these are ‘online’ but not ‘live’. Most of the people who are willing to buy the course are ‘BUSY People’ and cannot attend scheduled classes. However, it there is a course which is pre-recorded, which they can watch whenever they are free i.e. the course is self-paced, then these people might be willing to buy that course.

Moreover, you do not need to be a genius to create a course. Even if you have a little expertise in any field, you can make a course on that. And trust me, if you blogging in any niche, you definitely have some expertise.

For example, let’s say you have a ‘language’ blog, where you teach foreign languages like ‘FRENCH’, ‘SPANISH’, ‘ITALIAN’ etc, then create a course on them and sell it to your viewers.

Or You are a SEO expert and write about how to optimise your blog for search engines. Then make a course on SEO, and teach your expertise to your students.

Or let’s say you are just a blogger who has been blogging for last 5 years. Then you can create a course on ‘HOW TO START A BLOG’, where you can teach how to write perfect blog posts and increase blog traffic.

There is at least one field in which every blogger has some expertise if they are writing a blog. Make a course on it and start making money online.

Do not worry about the technicalities like how to record the videos, where to host the videos etc. These all can be taken care of and you can learn all these once you have a definite plan for your course and it’s content.

7. Webinar and workshops

Expected Earnings: MODERATE TO HIGH

Apart from coaching, consulting or online courses, you can also monetize your blog by organising webinars and workshops.

These are comparatively easier ways to earn money online compared to consulting or online courses.

Why? Because you can organise an online webinar of just 1 hour or even less.

In case of workshops, you can organize it for a 3-hour workshop or 2 days workshops.

On the contrary, for creating online courses you have to put a lot of efforts to create the complete course. For consultancy, you might have to give a lot of time to just one client. Overall, webinars and workshops can be a better approach.

There is no limit on the number of attendees on your online webinar.

Let’s say you a motivational blogger and are organising a webinar on Public speaking. You can charge Rs 200 per webinar and even if 100 people join the webinar, you can easily make Rs 20,000 by the work of just 1 hour. If you get more registrations, you might earn even higher.

For the workshops, the price is generally high.

Although, you might have to spend some initial money to book seminar hall, set audio system, mic etc, however, the returns for organising workshops are quite good.

Generally, you can easily charge an amount of Rs 2,000 to 5,000 per head for attending the seminar. If you are getting even 100 attendees, you will make Rs 2-5 lakhs.

Even after deducting the initial expenditures, the returns will turn out to be pretty high.

8. Digital products 

Expected Earnings: Moderate to HIGH

Digital Products examples- Ebooks, PDFs, Softwares, chrome/browser extensions, mobile App, checklists, guides etc

Digital products are the darlings of the old bloggers. You can find a number of bloggers who sell digital products on their blog. This is again an ‘easy’ money.

For example, let’s say you are good in online marketing and write about it on your blog. Then make an ebook about online marketing. You do not even need to publish it on Kindle. Just sell it on your blog. Tell why this ebook is beneficial to the readers or what problem it can solve and ask a decent price for the ebook.

If you are getting a good traffic on your blog, you can easily sell hundreds or thousands of these ebooks. Just place a banner of your book on the homepage, header or sidebar. It will sell even better if you recommend your readers to read the book in few of your blog posts.

Few simple digital products which you can easily create are Ebooks, PDFs, Checklist, Guiders etc.

On the other hand, there are few complex digital products which if made correctly, can make you big money. For example- Softwares, browser extensions, App etc.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you are a personal finance blogger. You hired some developer to create a mobile app which can calculate mutual funds or SIP returns for a long period. You can tell your readers the benefits of the app and ask them to download it. If you get a large number of downloads on your app, you can further monetize it and make lots of money.

Overall, if you want to make easy money, then create simple digital products like PDFs, eBook, guide etc.

However, if you’re willing to spend some money in order to make large money, then create some useful software or app for your readers.

9. Paid/Sponsored Posts, Reviews or Banners

Expected earnings: MODERATE

Once your blog starts getting some traffic, you will receive a number of emails regarding sponsored posts, reviews or banners.

Let me explain how these ways to monetize your blog works actually.

There are many SEO companies who work to create traffic, backlinks or just to increase the page ranking of the websites/blogs of their clients. For this, they are charging a heavy amount from their client.

Now, as your blog is getting lots of monthly traffic, these companies will approach you and ask you to write a sponsored post or review on their client’s website. They will be willing to pay you money for your work because they are confident that it will help them to get traffic for their clients or increase their backlinks.

Many times, you might be offered as high as Rs 1,000-2,000 for a sponsored post or review. Further, for the banners, they might be willing to pay Rs 4,000-5,000 per month.

Sometimes, these company also might just ask you to place a link in your footer or sidebar. Again, they will be willing to pay Rs 2,000 to 4,000 or even more for the link building.

Sponsored posts and banners are a good and fast way to make money from your blog. Here, you do not have to put any efforts.

However, while using these ways to monetize your blog, you should make should that the posts or banners are relevant to your blog.

For example, if you have a fitness blog and you get a sponsored post for the cryptocurrency, do not post the article just to make some easy money. This will decrease the brand value of your blog and you might also lose some of your viewers.

However, if you write about personal finance and you get a sponsored post for the cryptocurrency, then it’s okay to accept that post (it the content is genuine).

In short, sponsored posts, reviews and banners are good ways to monetize your blog as long as they are not hurting your blog reputation.

Conclusion:

Here are the 9 ways to monetize your blog and make money online that are discussed in this post:

1. Google Adsense
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Kindle Publishing
4. Services
5. Coaching and consultancy
6. Online courses
7. Webinars and workshops
8. Digital Products
9. Sponsored Posts, Reviews or Banners

Bonus

As promised, here are few bonus ways to monetize your blog:

1. PPC Ads: 

PPC stands for paid per click. You will make money for every clicks on these ads placed on your blog.  Google Adsense is not the only ways to monetize your blog through ads. There are many other alternatives available where you can earn money. Few of the PPC Ads in India are Chitika, media.net, Infolinks etc.

Read more here: The Best Google AdSense Alternatives For Your Blog: 2018 Edition

2. Membership sites: 

You can charge your readers for the premium contents through membership sites. Let’s say most of your contents are free to the readers to generate traffic. However, for some premium contents, where you teach/share advanced stuff, you charge a membership price.

The price of membership sites varies according to the premium offered. Few sites charge as little amount Rs 99 per month. On the other hand, there are few websites which charge as high as Rs 999 per month. Nevertheless, both are getting members and making money.

3. Donations:

This is not a consistent way of earning. However, you can still make good earnings through donations. Just add a banner to donate in your header or sidebar.

There are many people who will be willing to donate to your blog if they find it genuinely helpful.

Also read: 11 Insanely Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

That’s all. Although there are still many other ways to monetize your blog, however, these are the 9 tested ways to make money online from your blog.

Further, if I missed any big way to monetize your blog, which is worth mentioning here, please comment below. I’ll be happy to include it on the blog.

#HappyBlogging.