13 ways to make money from your blog

Your blog might have started as a hobby, somewhere to preserve your family memories. However, somewhere along the line your blog has become so much more than that. You spend so much of your time trying to build your numbers, engage with bloggers and trying to attract the attention of brands. It can be exhausting! Then sometimes you wonder if it’s actually ever going to pay off.. where are the dollar bills!?

Fear not, you know I wouldn’t give you an intro like that then leave you hanging. No my lovelies, I’m going to show you ALL the lovely ways that you can put your blog to work and start bringing in the moolah. WITHOUT it taking over your life or working you into the ground in the process.

So many people are under the misconception that the only way you can ‘earn’ from your blog is by sponsored posts or adding affiliate links, but I have news my friend, there are so MANY other ways you can earn an income from your blog. So let’s dive in!

COULD YOU OFFER SERVICES?

First up, you can offer your services to other people in your industry. Your blog gives you the experience and a platform from which you can legitimately sell your services to others. So, maybe you’re a super organised person, then you may choose to offer your services as a Virtual Assistant to other bloggers. Or maybe you have some mad skills on a particular platform, like Facebook or Pinterest. If that sounds like you and you get know for this skill, you could start offering those services to others. Here are some other avenues you may with to pursue.

• Blogger outreach

It’s quite possible that you could go down this route and be the middle man between a brand and a group of bloggers and get paid for it. You help the brand find bloggers for a particular campaign and then manage them through the project and in return you get paid! 

• Coaching

If you have experience and knowledge in a particular niche then you may well be able to offer coaching to others. You might not even be a trained coach, as the thing people want more than anything is to learn from someone who has proven results, either they have done it themselves or have got other people results. I offer Blog coaching as I noticed that people were coming to me for advice and I’d built up a reputation in the community for helping people to get results and for getting results myself. As with all one-to-one services this is a hard one to grow and scale and so your earnings will be impacted by the number of hours in the day.

• Expert services

This is going back to the examples I shared above, if you have a particular skill within blogging you can potentially monetise that and other bloggers will be happy to pay. Elizabeth Goddard is a VA who loves ConvertKit. She took the accreditation they offer and has now grown a substantial income from being a tech VA with a Converkit specialism. I know bloggers who have done a particular niche course and have then gone on to offer those services to others really successfully.  

• Speaking at events

While it’s totally possible to earn money speaking at live events, the chances are when you’re starting out that you may have to speak at lots of unpaid conferences before you can raise your profile enough to get more lucrative invitations. Again this one is definitely NOT scalable. 

Feel like you want to move away from one-to-one services? then Read on.

Two words, passive income. I think they are literally my favourite two words in the English language. BUT passive income is not completely passive and does require planning, time and energy. In the end though, you can earn money while you sleep. Which is ALWAYS a good thing. 

Creating your own products take your assistance to other bloggers from one-to-one to one-to-many and THAT is pretty sweet, let me tell you!

E-products are a way to make money day after day without much additional effort after the product has been created. Let’s look at some of the things you can create.

• E-books/Workbooks/Self-published books/Templates/Spreadsheets.

I LOVE these sorts of products. They don’t take too much time to create, they are super useful to your audience AND they bring in the money. I get a little ping on my phone everday letting me know I have made a sale on products that I created once and that continue to sell over and over again.

Whether you choose to do a book or a workbook or one of the other options depends so much on you, your style, your available time and your audience. However, these products remain a great addition to your portfolio of products and services.

• Courses

I produced and launched my first course just over a year ago. I was amazed that a course I put together on a plane, sold time after time and was still selling until I closed enrolment prior to a upgrade of the course material. Yes, the course was valuable and gave super actionable information, but I create it once and it sold over and over. Just before I closed the doors for enrolment I did a webinar and that webinar (selling an old course what I didn’t have to create) made just under 2k in an hour. This is in addition to the money the course had already brought in.  I’m now revamping this course and next week it will go on sale again, hopefully bringing in more income.

There’s no trading time for dollars with e-products you create and then sell as many times as you can without injecting anymore time. Now, creating a course isn’t easy and if you want to create a polished course that WILL sell, you do need to take time to create awesome content. Then launching it into the world also takes time and effort, but it’s so worth it. 

• Webinar/workshop

A webinar or a workshop is easier to create than a full blown course. You might choose to prepare slides, but then you’re presenting the material live. So there is no editing to suck up your time.  With either of these options you sell tickets in advance and then run the workshop or webinar on a set date. However, this does mean that you can use the recording, maybe edit it and continue to sell this product. Double win! 

• Membership community

As someone who has recently started a membership community, I couldn’t recommend them enough. However, it certainly won’t be an option for everyone.  Each month your community members pay you a fee to be in the community. The community can include various sorts of material and this will need to be updated regularly (at least once a month). In my membership community, The Inner Circle members have a private Facebook group, access to all of my courses, hot seat coaching with me, group strategy calls, impromptu Facebook live training, blog critiques. I’m also in the group daily, offering one-to-one support and giving feedback on particular queries/issues. The amazing thing about membership communities is that it allows you to be able to give more personal help to people and there’s also monthly recurring revenue too.

• An virtual summit

Similar to a webinar of workshop, just on a larger scale. You can get speakers together in a similar niche, who will all present of a topic. You can then sell tickets for the event OR make the event free (as that it builds your mailing list) and have the extending replay version a low ticket item (such as £97).

• Physical products

You can also earn income by selling your own physical products. You will probably have to pay for stock upfront and then work out shipping and all the other logistics, so the product definitely needs to be right for your audience. 

Pimping out other people’s shizzle

There are various ways you can earn by promoting the work of someone else. Let’s have a look!

• Affiliate programs

Affiliate programs are one of the most well-known ways to monetise a blog. In simple terms you place links to a companies product and if someone clicks through and buys this product you will receive a commission. The commissions paid by affiliate schemes can vary a great deal, so it’s worth thinking what would be most popular with your audience and then shopping around. This source of income is definitely passive, however, it might not be reliable. It is also important to be an affiliate for brands you use and love, for me this would be Lightroom, TSO, Convertkit, Tailwind, BoardBooster and Social Oomph*.

• Adverts

So placing adverts on your blog is super easy and super passive, but there are downsides.  You spend lots of time and effort getting people on to your site and an ad could take them straight back off again. Running lucrative adverts tends to rely on lots of traffic. They can also be distracting and take the audiences focus off your content! Which is NOT what we want!

• Working with brands

Besides affiliate schemes working with brands tends to be the monetisation method most bloggers are aware of. You can work with brands in many different ways, sponsored posts, ads, paid reviews, social media campaigns, and videos. A word of caution would be to select brand partnerships carefully and don’t turn your blog into a sponsored post fest! Keep your authenticity and a good proportion of organic content. 

I hope this post have given you lots of ideas which might work for you to help you monetise your blog. Some aren’t as scalable and require you to trade time for money, while others are more passive and have greater scalability.

Which monetisation idea do you think you will try? I’d love to know.

LIKE IT? THEN PIN IT!

*Affiliate links.