20 Ways to Make Money from Blogging

There are several ways to make money from blogging. Yes, it is possible to make money from your blogging passion. Being a blogger exposes you to a vast world of opportunities to make income.

So many bloggers out there are making a full income from their blogs or vlogs through one or more of these ways of blog monetization.

If you have a blog or are planning to start one you might be wondering how can monetize it.

Well here are 20 of the best ways you can use to monetize your blog whether you are looking to earn a passive income or to make blogging your main source of income.

1. Affiliate Marketing

This is one of the most popular ways to monetize blogs out there. In affiliate marketing, you basically market a product that is on sale and you get paid a commission for each sale made through your referral link.

These are popular because they don’t require you to have certain traffic to your blog.

Affiliate marketing requires you to tactfully incorporate your referral links in your blog posts so that people actually click on them when purchasing the product, that is how you can earn from them.

Some of the best affiliate marketing programs are:

• Amazon Affiliate program
• CommissionJunction
• Wealthy Affiliates
• Fourcornersalliance
• Themeforest

Other famous affiliate programs are hosting companies such as:

• Bluehost
• Siteground
• Hostgator
• Inmotion
• Dreamhost

…to name a few.

2. Cost per click (CPC) Advertising

This is most popularly done through Google’s Adsense. They require you to have certain minimum traffic in order to qualify. And basically, Google puts ads on your blog or site and you get paid per sale made when people click the ad from your blog.

3. Cost per impression (CPM) Advertising

Also known as cost per 1000 impressions made. This like CPC is very profitable if you have a lot of traffic on your blog. You basically charge advertisers per 1000 impressions made on your blog. For example $3 per 1000 impressions.

4. Selling Ad space

Selling advertising space on your blog to companies who want to reach your audience is another way to monetize your blog. You can approach companies with a report of your total blog views or following statistics and offer them to buy advertising space or sometimes you get approached by companies if they believe in your reach capacity and if you have the relevant audience they are looking for.

5. Sponsored blog posts/reviews

With sponsored reviews, you try out companies’ products and getting paid to write a review of their product in an effort to convince your followers to buy or use the same products.

Most times companies want you to have a significant following and traffic (however way they define that) before they can pay you to write reviews for them or buy your ad space.

But this is a profitable way to make money from your blog.

6. Selling eBooks

This is popular among bloggers. If you can successfully blog about your particular niche, chances are, you are able to write an eBook on it. And what’s great about eBooks is that they don’t need to be hundreds of pages long, they just need to provide value to your readers.

You can offer free eBooks as an incentive to increase blog membership. But you can also publish and sell them either on your blog or on a third-party publishing platform like Amazon, Gumroad, iBooks, and others.

7. Run a merchandise store

This is growing in popularity among bloggers. You can design and sell different kinds of branded merchandise like t-shirts, caps, mugs, stationery, etc. that are related to your niche.

There are platforms available where you can design merchandise and they take care of shipping. They basically do the sales for your design and you earn a commission of the sales. All you need to do is market. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

8. Selling online courses

In the same way, you can make an eBook based on your blog niche, you can also create and sell online courses based on the same.

There are loads of software you can look up that can help you create an online course without requiring any coding skills. There are also plenty of online communities you can sell your courses on like Udemy which is very popular and this can also help draw people to your blog.

9. Design and sell graphics and templates

If you are good at graphic design or you know how to use some design software you can design templates for other bloggers, planners, or social media graphics and sell them. You can even design your own unique font, this is also a good selling product among bloggers.

10. Develop and sell WordPress plugins and themes

This may require some coding skills but if you are able to develop good-looking themes and useful plugins, you only need to develop them once and you can price them well to get income from them over time. You can sell these on places like Themeforest and CreativeMarket.

They do however require you to provide support and updates to your customers over time, which you should be prepared to do.

All these ways of selling on your blog are most commonly done through a popular free plugin tool called Woocommerce which is available on all self-hosted WordPress platforms.

11. Offer services on your blog

You can offer one on one or group coaching and consulting services related to your blog’s niche to make money blogging.

If you establish yourself as an expet in your particular niche, your followers will be willing to learn from you and pay for your services.

You can set up your blog to accept appointments and bookings, and these can either be virtual via email or Zoom or in person.

12. Advertise events on your blog

You can get paid to advertise people’s events or your own on your blog. This can be done through a Calendar widget on your blog, a blog post with details of the event or you can use your mailing list to send the adverts via email.

Avertising events for businesses is an way to make money from blogging that anyone with a reasonable amount of readers can take advantage of.

13. Paid Membership

There are two ways you can do this. You can run your blog normally and charge members for premium content only, or you can have a premium membership-only blog. This means that people have to pay for a subscription to access any of the content on your blog or website.

This way of monetizing your blog requires you to have a good reputation for your particular niche for people to be willing to pay for your content and it might require some good marketing skills. For this, it’s important to note that there are a lot of free platforms probably providing similar information for free so there has to be something unique that draws your audience to pay for your membership.

While this is not very popular, a lot of people do run blogs with premium membership and are successful at it. It could depend highly on your reputation.

14. Paid live webinars

Hosting webinars is a good way to interact and build trust with your audience. You can charge for attendance to your webinars and offer live Q&As at the end to add value to them.

There are different webinar software out there to help you set this up, in case you were wondering how one can control who has paid or not from our usual social media platforms.

15. Create a private forum

This is almost similar to paid membership except you can create an extension of your blog in the form of a paid-for private Facebook or WhatsApp group forum for example, where your readers can meet other like-minded people and where you can also provide premium content and interact with them.

16. Create and sell apps

You can develop an app for your blog and sell it on popular app marketplaces like iStore or GooglePlay. The app can offer information about your blog niche or it can simply be a mobile place for people to access your blog posts.

If you are good at it, you can also get paid by other bloggers to create similar apps for them.

17. Sell your art and photography

Stock photos are a fast-growing way to make money online and if you have a passion for photography, you can easily get paid for your pictures. There are several places to sell your stock photos, but if you are running a photography blog then you can sell your photography as digital products directly from your blog.

If you are an artist, you can create a store on your blog to sell your artwork. However, you will need to arrange the shipping of your art pieces to your clients.

18. Making and selling blogs

You can literally make blogs and resell them to other people. Platforms like Flippa make this possible by creating a marketplace for blog buyers and sellers. The blog will need to have an interesting and good selling niche or domain to be attractive to the buyers though.

You can also offer to create blogs for your readers for an amount if you are good at it.

19. Start a podcast series

Podcasts may not be as profitable as other ways of monetizing your blog, but having them as an extension to your blog can help you direct traffic to your blog where you sell products or services, and your income can increase that way.

You can also do paid-for shout-outs and adverts on your podcast series as a way of monetizing the podcast.

A lot of people would rather listen to a podcast than go through long blog posts so you can maximize on that.

20. Accept donations

This is the last one on the list because it doesn’t generate as much income because it requires generosity, but you can add a donation button to your blog for people to donate money.

This is not a popular one because it requires people to feel moved to be generous to you. However if you are offering value, people will generously tip you with donations.

Which of these are your favorite ways of making money from blogging? And which ones would you like to try out so that you can make more money from blogging?

Let me know in the comments below!