Blogging has already appeared on this list, but it’s also worthy of its own entire section. Because having a blog is basically the same as running your own business, or owning a shop on the high street, with a lot less of the drawbacks.
Bloggers can make anywhere from $10 to $100,000 a month. And depending on how much effort you put into it, you can take over your own current income (if you have one) in a short time.
But one of the common questions is “How do you make money from a blog?”, because you don’t really get paid for the posts you write (or do you?). So, let’s look at how to make money off your blog …
2.1: eBooks
eBooks are books that only exist online, and they’re a great way to make money from your audience.
If there’s a topic, question, or burning issue in your niche, you can write an eBook about it to sell, for example:
- How-Tos and Tutorials Recipes Workout and Nutrition Travel Guides
You only need to search, ‘your topic + “ebook”’ in Google to see a whole host of eBooks to give you ideas, too:
This can be a pretty good way to make money on its own, or attached to a blog, too. In this post from Arman Assadi. he interviews Saeed who is making $2,700 a month of passive income from Amazon Kindle eBooks just from America alone.
But don't worry, creating an eBook isn't a hard task either. You can simply create them in Microsoft Word, save them as a PDF, and export them to eBook software like these sites below:
2.2: Online Courses
By running a blog, you become an authority in your niche. And that gives you the perfect opportunity to put together a course video, or otherwise for people to follow and learn from.
Take a look at this guy, Sergey Kasimov. who has started to make an income only out of selling video courses to his audience. By just using the platform Udemy to host and sell them, he's been able to generate nearly $20,000 in sales in his first year:
It might not be record breaking amounts of money, but that's enough to absorb a minimum wage job in the UK, and if his growth continues in that way he'll soon be making $40,000-$50,000 a year in courses.
Now imagine attaching that power of online courses like that to a blog with 2,000 or 3,000 email subscribers.
2.3: Mastermind Groups
A mastermind is a forum for all your blog followers. They can discuss ideas, learn lessons from you, and get access to content and resources they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. It’s also a great sales tool to have all these people in one places, too.
For example, Stuart Walker’s Nichehacks Mastermind has over 10,000 people and keeps growing every day. That’s a lot of people to sell to.
You can set up a mastermind by:
- Creating a private Facebook group Adding a forum area to your site Creating a separate site, like Jeff Goins's Tribe Writers. that’s totally independent
2.4: Podcasts
Creating a Podcast, kind of like creating a standard blog post, won’t make you much money. But when you throw advertising into the mix your profits can start to skyrocket, provided you have an audience that listens.
Dave Jackson of School Of Podcasting has managed to consistently make money from Podcasts, and even managed to make $1,700 from one single health and nutrition podcast through affiliate marketing. advertising and donations.
Starting a Podcast is a little beyond the scope of this article, so if you’re interested, I’ll have you over to this article from Pat Flynn that explains the process more in-depth.
2.5: Sponsored Posts
Native advertising creating valuable content to advertise a product is becoming more and more prolific. If you’re not sure what I mean, let me give you an example:
You run a blog about fishing. You have a decent sized audience and people like your style. So, Fishing Lines Inc. come along and ask if you can write an article about their product, and they’ll give you cash for it.
You create an article that will work for your audience, and provide links out to their site, as well as exposing their product to your audience. They make money, you make money, and it’s all good.
Zac Johnson of Blogging Tips took a look into Native Advertising and the company. Ayboll. While this may not be true native advertising, it's as near as makes no difference to you as a blog owner.
When he asked them to provide some information on what people were earning for having their ads on their site, they came back with this rather impressive screenshot of one of their top performers:
Yep, that's $212.48 in a day from having their adverts on one site. Not bad, huh?
There appear to be few credible sites selling sponsored posts anymore. But, if you run a blog, there is no doubt they’ll come to you. Or you can take the Ayboll route mentioned above and see how much you can generate from having them on your blog.
2.6: Paid Links
White hat. Black hat. Whatever. People are always going to be paying for links because as long as Google doesn’t have the power to go through your piles of receipts, and you do the link in context, there is no way they’re going to penalise you for it.
If it benefits you and your audience, you might as well cash in when and where you can. It might be risky at times, but the horror stories from bloggers are few and far between.
Now, I'd love to provide you with a case study here of people buying and selling links to make money; but most bloggers like to keep the fact that they sell links under their hat.
But I can tell you from experience I've been offered in excess of $300 for a link on a site before, and although I personally never take these offers, I'm sure if I did I'd have a much bigger TV in my house.
Clients tend to come to you for this, much like paid posts. But you can also buy and sell links on sites like Backlinks.
2.7: 26+ Other Ways To Make Money From Your Blog
Okay, if you’re still here, it’s pretty clear that you want to make money from a blog. So, the last six methods you read about are the main ways you can turn a profit from it. But, there are 26 more that you can do to.
For the sake of brevity, you can read about all of them in this article I wrote for Matt right here.
How Much Can You Earn From Blogging?
The income reports for bloggers are wildly different depending on where you read from, and who you read about.
Which means that based on that figure 34,390,000 bloggers will make more than $100 a month.
If you put the effort in the odds really are in your favour.
If you follow Matt's One Year To A Six-Figure Blog guide, you could build up to a comfortable $300-$400 a month in just a few weeks. And the scope is really limitless after that.
