How to Make Money Blogging 11 Steps When Blogging for Money

how to make money blogging, simple steps, start blogging for money

How to make money blogging: 11 simple steps to start blogging for money

How to make money blogging:

Through affiliate links
Sponsorships
How to make money blogging through ads
Make money blogging through digital products
Through a membership subscription site
Use your blog to make money through clients
How to make money blogging through reviews
Drive traffic to your site
Choose a blog host
Choose a blog domain name
Choose your blogging platform

1. Make money blogging with affiliate links

Many bloggers make a decent living by using affiliate links on their blog sites.

An affiliate link is a website link in their post that when clicked on and used pays out money.

Affiliate links can pay out for several reasons:

Payout for a purchase through the link (most common)
Payout for signing up for something
Payout for clicks (uncommon)
Payout for taking certain action through the link

A good example of a company that pays out for a purchase would be Bluehost. They have an affiliate program that pays out a decent commission when someone uses your link to buy their web hosting service.

You can find their program here.

An example of a company that pays for free sign-ups would be Ebates.

Sign up and get $10 right now for starting out and then you can start making referrals on your social media and blog and you can get $25 per sign up unlimited. That’s not bad.

Affiliate links are a great way to make money blogging because the payouts can be very high.

In fact, Kinsta offers big payouts and lifetime royalties for sign-ups you get as an affiliate.

You can see Kinsta offers here.

For more detailed info on Affiliate Marketing see this post: How to Make Money As a Blogger with Affiliate Marketing for Beginners!

2. Use your blog to get paid sponsorships

You can make money blogging through sponsorships.

A sponsorship is basically when a company hires you to do a specific post or campaign for them on your blog. They pay you an agreed amount to make the post and promote it. It is another way for companies to use your blog to advertise to their ideal customers.

Expect to get sponsorships after creating heavy traffic to your blog consistently.

Getting sponsorships is closely related to getting freelance work, but you’re not gonna get a sponsorship without a blog or a large social following.

If you want to look for sponsorships to monetize your blog you are going to need to create more traffic to your blog through social media and SEO.

3. Make money blogging with ads

Ads is an easy simple no brainer way of making money with your blog.

If you generate traffic daily, there is no reason for you not to have a few ads making you extra money.

Ads work when you get views and clicks. The amount of money you make per view or per click is completely up to the program you sign up with.

There are program stipulations you need to be aware of for each program. Some are more lenient than others, but some won’t accept your application if you don’t have enough site views.

It might not be a good money maker starting out, but if you have a decent flow of traffic it can be a very passive income as you just set the ads on your page and that’s all you really have to do. After that, the amount you make really depends on your traffic.

Be aware that having ads on your page can slow your page down and some readers will not stay as long based on the ads getting in the way of your good content.

Also, be sure to communicate with your ad program and know how many ads they are going to add to your pages and how that will affect your traffic.

4. Sell digital products on your blog

At some point along your blogging journey you may decide it’s time to make your own informational products and promote them on your site.

You can make:

Ebooks
Online Courses
Books
Guides
PDFs
Subscription memberships

Online Courses are doing very well right now and if you want to make more as a blogger than this might be a great route to head next.

With an Online Course your skills in blogging, writing, and communication can transfer very well.

I’ve taken online courses that are mostly videos, some that are mostly writing, and some that are a great mixture of the two.

It doesn’t really matter what medium you choose to focus on as long as you deliver AMAZING content that changes people’s lives when they purchase it and learn from it. That’s at least how I feel as someone that purchases online courses.

5. How to make money blogging through a membership subscription site

Membership sites are like FB groups on steroids. Some are FB groups that are made private until you subscribe. Or you can include private FB groups in your online courses as well.

Either way you want to have continual posts in your membership community that daily move the group forward and creates TONS of worthwhile information for your memberships to want to be a part of.

The key to making great consistent money through a membership subscription is that once someone tries it they have the feeling that there is valuable information they’ll be missing out on if they lose access to it.

At that point, you can grow a consistent monthly income from the members only site alone.

Any membership site can have churn out, but the more you are able to have a consistent valuable discussion going on and add value to the group weekly and monthly the less churn out should be.

6. Use your blog to get paying clients

If you like working with people more than just writing than you will absolutely love finding clients to work for.

Client work is challenging. You have to know how to get what is in their minds onto your page.

Some great tips for landing clients on the first try:

Decide beforehand to ask good quality questions
Know which questions you are going to ask before the interview
Treat the client like a friend you are having coffee with
Listen intently
Repeat Important information back to the client and they will feel understood and that you care
Listen more than you talk
When you hear them state their problem, be sure to address how you are going to solve it

Doing well with clients means being a good communicator and serving the client.

If you don’t like that idea then client work might not be for you.

Freelance writing is 50% working on communication with clients and 50% writing.

That ebbs and flows given the client and the freelance writing you are doing for them, but just know that writing for clients is not purely writing like blogging for yourself, it takes a lot of communication skills.

If you want to see how I do freelance writing and charge for client work you can see my UpWork profile here.

7. Make money blogging using reviews

Reviews are a great way to share with your readers what you think about a product or service.

What’s better than getting to try amazing new products and then getting to tell people about them?!

It’s nice because you can be honest in a review and just say what you like and what you don’t and you don’t really feel like you’re selling anything to anyone.

After you share your honest thoughts on it, you leave it up to your readers to make a good choice and get the product or not.

Reviews are an easy way to make money as a blogger.

8. Drive traffic to your site

Blogging isn’t ALL writing.

A good amount of the work you will put into any successful blog will be promotion and figuring out ways to get eyeballs looking at your site.

You have to drive traffic and keep traffic. Both can be difficult and have different but key strategies.

Driving traffic is a mixture of using social media to spread the word about valuable information and products on your site and using SEO best practices.

Keeping traffic is about setting up promotions to your blog that turn into LONG LASTING sources of traffic.

Long lasting traffic comes from strategic guest posts and automated or manual social media systems you set up.

9. Choose a blog host

If you want to make money blogging you will have to get blog hosting and own your own domain.

Ad networks and affiliate programs won’t work with you unless you own your website and clients most likely won’t take you seriously if you send them to a free blog page.

I use Bluehost and they have been great so far.

You can check their pricing out here to see what works for you.

Another great choice but pricier is Kinsta.

Kinsta is more expensive, but you pay for what you get. Their hosting creates faster site speeds which leads to better SEO and is better for sites that have high amounts of traffic.

You can see your options here.

Just know that no matter what host you choose, you will be able to switch hosting or upgrade when you need to.

10. Choose a blog domain name

When choosing a domain name, try to be creative, but choose something precise and memorable.

Choosing something that is a play on words can be helpful.

Pick something that is going to make sense for your niche.

Or can you always start out by buying your name as a domain name.

Bluehost gives you a free domain name as an intro deal. Blogger and Godaddy sell domain names, but you don’t “own” it. See their terms of use.

You can see Bluehost’ offer for a free domain name here.

11. Choose your blogging platform

Choose your blogging platform. You should take a few moments to understand the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org.

Understand that they are not the same and they are vastly different in user friendliness depending on how you want to make your site and the versatility of what you might be looking to monetize with it.

Just a couple things, wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to use free plugins but wordpress.org has a massive amount of free plugins to help you make your blog everything you want it to be.

I personally use WordPress.org. So far I like it and I REALLY enjoy the resources and the free plugins I can use.

I recommend wordpress.org but, If you would like to check out wordpress.com you can find some of their programs here.

Overall, there are many strategies to making money with your blog and I would definitely recommend doing a little bit of everything.

You should definitely do your best to diversify your blogging income then if one doesn’t work out you have more to rely on.

I would also suggest working on one or two at a time. Focus in on one form of income and make it work really well. After you nail down one or two forms of blogging income you will feel ready to get another one working for you.