How to Monetize a Blog: 17 Best Strategies

How to Monetize a Blog

How to Monetize a Blog

How to Monetize a Blog: 17 Best Strategies

Learning how to monetize a blog is a journey. My blogs have made millions of dollars and attracted over 50 million visitors and I will tell you the best way to monetize a blog is to focus on helping people.

I think the number one reason blogs fail is not getting enough traffic; It is working to earn enough money from the blog. Fortunately for you, I know many ways to monetize a blog. This includes advertising, affiliate marketing, selling digital or physical products, offering membership sites, selling sponsored social media posts, consulting or coaching services, accepting donations, hosting events, and selling your website or blog.

Each method can be effective if implemented correctly and tailored to your website's niche and audience. The two best ways we've found to monetize a website are affiliate marketing and selling our own products.

The main way bloggers monetize their websites

If you read our list of top earning websites, you will know that there are 15 main ways to make money online. Out of these 15 ways, I would say 8 are popular among bloggers. They are:

Advertising: The most popular way to monetize a blog. We all know what ads are, so they need no introduction.

Subscription model: Create a premium subscription service and offer members something extra, such as exclusive content or access to you.

E-Commerce: Sell your own products through your blog.

Digital Products: Sell templates, ebooks and other digital training.

Classified: Your blog has a job board where visitors can buy, sell or advertise.

Affiliate Marketing: Earn a commission every time you sell something to someone else.

Consulting Services: A great way to monetize a blog is to offer services that help your readers get to know you better and therefore make the sales process easier.

Email Marketing: Get customers, then email them about products you like and earn a commission.

Of these, I simply recommend email marketing, affiliate marketing, and selling your own products. How to monetize a blog using these strategies? Well, I have 2 main strategies, read on to discover them.

How to monetize your blog

If readers want better cameras or equipment, you can promote other companies' products and get a commission. This is called affiliate marketing.

If your readers want more advanced training, you can promote other bloggers' products. However, another option to consider is to create and sell your own products. This not only gives you more control over the content but can also be more profitable.

In my opinion the most effective websites are the ones where the monetization is so subtle that it is almost invisible. This means there are no visible ads, yet the site is still generating revenue. Effective monetization does not have to be public; In fact, it often performs best when it is seamlessly integrated into the user experience.

Real quick, let me tell you why we don't monetize our blog by selling ads:

It is more time consuming (constantly adding/editing/deleting advertisers).

Monetizing a blog with ads often makes your website ugly and takes away from the user experience.

Ads can lower your search engine ranking and increase your bounce rate.

Most importantly… it makes us less money!

Selling advertising, for us, is not worth it.

Over the years, we've tried more than a dozen ways to make money, and from our experience, making money from a blog falls into two categories.

Make money from affiliate marketing

and…

Earn money from selling our own products.

Below, I'll break down both techniques and detail how we use them at IncomeDiary.

So, with that in mind, it's time I share with you my ultimate guide to monetizing a blog or website:

How to monetize a blog through affiliate marketing

1. Finding affiliate products to promote

There are many ways to find affiliate products to sell on your blog. Something to keep in mind is that almost every product has an affiliate program, either the one you like or a very similar one.

Let's start with their biggest affiliate program: Amazon Associates. Amazon lets you promote their products and they pay you a commission if someone buys something through your link.

Then, there are marketplaces for affiliates, such as Impact and Commission Junction. You sign up, and then you can apply for each permit individually. So, for example, if you have a web design blog and you want to sell hosting, you log into your account and search for hosting and it will tell you that all the companies in its database offer hosting, which you can promote as one. The same applies to various products like affiliate marketing, fitness, fashion etc.

The last and often easiest way to find an affiliate program for a product you like is to type the company name into Google + the word 'affiliate'. It's common, especially for digital products, to find that a product has an affiliate program. Alternatively, when you're on a site you want to promote, if you go to the footer, you'll often see a link for affiliate or referral.

2. Cloaking your affiliate links

So now that you know where to find affiliate programs, it's time to start adding links to your website. We use a free WordPress plugin called Affiliate Links Lite to cloak our affiliate links, which means we hide our affiliate links. So, instead of very long URLs, our affiliate links look like this:

IncomeDiary.com/go/hostgator

When we write or edit an article and want to add or edit a link it will show us all the affiliate links for quick and easy selection.

I'm just monetizing an old blog of mine, and I started with an affiliate marketplace, as I showed you in the previous section. Once I found about 20 companies to promote, I added them to this plugin and then I went to work on where to put them on my website.

3. Identifying where to promote approved products

So, to identify which pages of your blog are best for monetization, start by looking at your website tracking (Google Analytics). It makes sense to prioritize the pages that get the most traffic first.

For example, when monetizing this blog, I looked at the ten pages that got the most traffic. Half of those ten pages had high-traffic content that readers weren't interested in buying, such as success quotes and top earning websites. These pages get me a lot of traffic and links to my website, but they have no real target audience, so I ignore trying to monetize them.

The remaining five pages were very targeted. One was about website building, another was about search engine optimization, and another was this page, where I discussed monetizing a blog (this article).

Below is an example of tools or products I might recommend to this audience:

Create a Website: Domain Name, Web Hosting, Website Design,

SEO: Keyword Research Tools, Content Creation Services, Content Creation Automation,

Monetizing a Blog: Affiliate Plugin, Shopping Cart Tool, Checkout Page Software

Then, I went about updating these articles to recommend these products. It is important that when you add links, they are something that you think is really good and adds value to the article. If you are trying to add as many affiliate links as possible then no one will read your articles. I've seen this many times, and the content becomes unreadable, which increases bounce rates, decreases search engine rankings and website traffic.

Bonus Affiliate Tip: Login to your Google Analytics and look at your outgoing clicks, which are the external links people click the most on your website. Next, visit these websites and see if they have an affiliate program. I've made over $100,000 with this strategy alone.

4. Creating content for affiliate link promotion

Some of the content on your website should be created with a different purpose than making money, like all of my top motivational lists. These articles are created to increase our credibility and get us backlinks.

On the other hand, there are things that are about money. I'm referring to reviews and guides, which can be extremely profitable if done correctly. By strategically promoting affiliate links within this type of content, you can potentially earn substantial income.

When you have credibility, your readers want your opinion. They come to your website to focus their attention and find out what to buy. Writing articles about your favorite resources and tools is a win-win because you earn money while telling them about something they need. For example, when I mentioned my guide to building a website, I won as an affiliate selling hosting and design; My readers win because they get the information they need from a trusted source.

There are three ways to create such content in 2024:

Write Content Yourself: The Most Authentic Method, Time-Effective. Writing a good article sometimes takes days. Now is the time to take full advantage of blogging, and if you are new to it, you cannot write everything yourself because you have to do a lot of work to communicate with your competitors.

Outsource Content: We've bought hundreds of articles, and it's worth it. If we didn't buy so much content you probably wouldn't be on this website right now. Outsourcing allows us to save time as well as get a lot more traffic through social media and search engines, which means we are able to focus on other aspects of the business. When it comes to article writing, we recommend FatJoe writing services.

Create content with artificial intelligence: AI is the fastest and most cost-effective way to create content right now. Come up with an idea, give it a few pointers and within 30 seconds, you have a great article that's at the top of Google. SEO company SEMrush just launched a great tool to do this called ContentShake AI (affiliate link, see how it works?). This tool is a game changer, and since it is developed by a team of SEO experts, I believe it will work well for SEO.

The best approach is a combination of all three.

When I start writing a review or a guide, my approach is as follows:

First, I do keyword research for keywords I want to rank high on Google; This leads to long-term passive income. Next, I list all the affiliate products I want to promote. Often, in one review, I promote multiple companies. That way, if they choose not to go with my recommendation, I still make money if they go with another company.

Next, I write a breakdown of the article, because I want to cover the article. Then I send it to my article writer or type it into ContentShake AI. Below is an example:

Write a 1500-word review about the benefits of using SEMrush for keyword research. Include a 5-sentence introduction that mentions "keyword research", "using SEMrush for keyword research" and "increase search engine rankings". In conclusion, list the top ten benefits of using this tool.

Hopefully, this gives you an insight into how to write articles and at the same time illustrates how easy it is to get what you want.

5. Using affiliate links to monetize your blog design

I found that two things converted really well for us - the first being the 'offer box' below.

In the past, I've used banners provided by affiliate managers and designed some really flashy boxes, but this clean, simple box with a green stop sign converts the most.

Probably because it looks more like content than an ad

How to monetize a blog with ads

I want to promote two offers on the box, one low price and one high price Fortunately for my high price offer above, I was able to secure a $1 trial and conversions were high. (Top tip: If you're promoting a high-value offer - try and get a special rate or introductory offer to entice people to take action.)

The second thing that converts really well is adding a text ad to the top of my list posts, like in our Top Earning Bloggers post. I added a link saying, "Want to follow in their footsteps? Check out this product". This works because as soon as they read the post, the reader is highly inspired and inspired and wants to see themselves on this list one day.

6. Comparison and Resources Page

These pages are usually used to reinforce a recommendation that I have already made. People like to choose ingredients, but in reality, usually, one product is better than the rest.

When you put this product up against competing products, it just shows how good it is and should give your reader the confidence to go ahead and buy. If they don't go with your recommendation and choose a different product, well, it's an affiliate link too, so you'll keep making money.

You can see an example of this on our website creation page.

How to monetize a blog as an affiliate

Note: It's also okay to compare something that won't earn you a commission – if you're authentic and build trust, which you should be, your audience, especially your more 'internet marketing savvy' audience, will appreciate you. 'Neutral' approach.

7. Make money from interviews

One of the best ways to make money promoting a product through interviews is to prepare for interviews as soon as the product is launched. Why? Well, if the product has just been released, no one has bought it and therefore you have increased your chances of making a sale.

Not only that, anyone interested in the product will search for more information on Google and social media and when your post comes up they will come to your site and hopefully buy from you.

I suggest you do the interview over the phone (I use Skype) and record the call and transcribe it. Then you add the call as an MP3/Podcast to your site and add the transcript for those who prefer to read rather than listen. (Transcription gives you a lot of valuable search engine content). During the interview you can review the interviewee's products, ask them questions about it - and then at the end of the interview, you can add your own mini-review of the product and why the audience should buy it.

Usually your interview will only touch on common techniques used by the interviewer but if done right your audience/reader will want more. This is when you promote the interviewee's product as a way for your followers to learn more. Depending on the interviewee and the product, you could easily walk away with dozens of sales and a steady stream of future sales depending on how often future readers find the interview.

8. Making an affiliate income from publishing guides

Another technique I use is to create 'how to' or guide posts - just like this one.

You provide great content that really helps your readers and at the same time you promote affiliate products. Visitors can see you using the products so they can decide if it's for them, and those who notice you're promoting an affiliate product won't mind because you're helping them for free.

Very important: This is very important – take time to create good content/how to post. Despite what some gurus try to convince you - there is no such thing as free money - you have to work to provide real value to your readers - do this and the money will follow through affiliate sales. So often I see bloggers making 'half-hearted attempts' to create guides - frankly, if you're going to do it, you shouldn't bother. Readers can tell what you're talking about and if you're passionate about it.

9. Making affiliate income from review posts

Every post you make can be a partial review post if you do it right. This is the essential bit here - no one is going to pay any attention to your review post unless they respect you, trust you, relate to you. In other words, they feel you can be trusted.

As mentioned in the previous post, this is why page likes, about pages and my story pages are so important

To build that trust and relationship you must first provide good content, valuable content. So often readers tell me they can't believe how much good content I'm giving away for free – if you start getting comments like this, you're doing it right. Build relationships and you'll have a better chance of selling what you recommend.

10. Using Email Marketing to Drive Traffic to Increase Affiliate Sales

Email marketing is often thought of as a monetization strategy. But really, it's a traffic source. It allows you to send traffic anywhere. And it's good.

Getting people to subscribe to your email list is probably the most profitable thing you can do with your blog – especially if you follow up with quality emails, which further help your readers.

If you ask any big internet marketer, they will tell you one of the things they do when they start building their list. Done right (which means delivering quality information first — not a load of spammy offers) then email marketing to a strong list of followers is as close as printing money online.

Let me walk you through how my email marketing funnel works:

1. Opt-in boxes appear all over our website - this is why we offer a special free gift to entice people to sign up. We add a well-designed ecover to make this free product even more valuable.

63.9% of IncomDiary's email subscribers come from our popups. Use Omnisend to add a popup to your own website today! The second best way to get our subscribers is through our opt-in box at the bottom of our blog posts, but it converts much less than our popups.

You would do well to focus on these two strategies first.

2. Get visitors to sign up for your email list

3. When we have a new blog post or we find good quality offers related to our niche, we email subscribers. Sometimes we can earn thousands of dollars from just one mailing by doing this.

When it comes to email marketing and autoresponder software, we recommend Omnisend.

Additional Email Marketing Monetization Tips:

When someone subscribes to your list, you usually offer them some kind of incentive, like a free ebook or some kind of training. It should be monetized with affiliate products and/or it wants them to get better training from you that you sell.

You should save every email that converts well for you and add it to your autoresponder list, so that new customers automatically receive your highest converting offers.

11. Increase your affiliate conversions

While the following may seem like small things, in some cases the increase in conversions can be 1000%, so pay attention.

Ask for a coupon code

Most companies will have the ability to create custom coupon codes, you just need to ask them they are great for increasing conversions as coupons can make a huge difference whether it's a trial offer or something free. People like to think they are getting a good deal.

How to monetize a blog by offering coupon codes

12. Ask for a special offer

Some of my best converting affiliate links convert so well because of the special offers I am able to offer my readers. For example, a $1 trial or a bonus offer is only available to my readers

13. Ask for a higher commission rate

If you do a good job promoting a product, it is very possible that you can get a good commission rate. If it's a digital product you're promoting, the cost per customer to the seller is very low, so it's almost 100% profit. So they can often pay more than 50% commission and are often prepared because what they earn is often the result of very little earnings.

Some product owners are even ready to pay a 100% commission rate because the money is earned not only through the first sale but also through future sales and not forgetting the ability to email their promotions.

How to monetize a blog by selling products

14. Brainstorm for product development

Often, creating a product is a simple task. If you're doing a good job, your readers will tell you what they want

If you're stuck for ideas, look at your most popular posts and ask yourself, could you build a product around one of these articles? Not only have you proven popular content, you already have a very targeted traffic source to sell.

Here's a list of the different types of products I've seen bloggers create:

Ebook

Checklist (110 blog post titles proven to get the most traffic)

Services (complete with your blogging service)

Suggestions (talk about how you can improve your blog)

Membership website (8-week training course to launch your first product)

Software

15. Creating your product

If you're creating a digital product and aim to deliver it as an ebook or through a subscription website, start by outlining what you want to teach. Next, decide whether to offer it in text, video, or both.

For text-based distribution, add the download link to the page after they purchase (and via email). If you choose a membership site, you'll need to install membership website software on your blog (we recommend the WordPress plugin Ultimate Membership Pro). This process may be straightforward, but depending on your skill level, you may need to enlist the help of a developer. If your training is in video form, upload it to AmazonS3 and embed the videos on your site.

If you're considering building a software product, it's important to find a great developer and make sure you have the budget to see the project through. Proper planning is essential to avoid unexpected expenses.

16. Sell your own products

You should plan to do this in two main ways, through your own website/mailing list and affiliates.

Let's start with what you will do on your own website:

First, you need to make your readers aware of what's coming. You want to excite them. You want to buy a second one for their sale.

We once launched a product and before it was announced for sale, two people found the sales page and bought it. The next 98 customers signed up within 100 minutes.

Because we've already sold our audience. Not only that we have added scarcity. We told everyone that, for the first day, we were only going to offer 100 accounts for sale. So they had to be quick!

To start selling, you need three things:

A landing page. (Pages dedicated to selling your products).

Merchant account. (We use Stripe and PayPal).

Checkout page software.

Readers go to the landing page, click the buy button, go through the checkout page process, and then pay through your merchant account.

Then once they pay, they either end up on the download page or receive an email with a link to download the product there.

How to monetize a blog selling your own products

17. Authorized to promote your products

If you want affiliates, you need to create an affiliate area on your website for them. I suggest you use SamCart for this, or alternatively, you can use this WordPress plugin.

Once you have an affiliate territory, it's all about knocking on doors, emailing and networking. Advertise to customers and your blog that you have an affiliate program.

You will make much more money selling your product than promoting your product.

Quickly, you'll notice that your focus is less on blogging and more on creating products and building a business. Often, bloggers give up blogging because they no longer consider it a priority.

It's important to remember that a blog isn't just a platform, it's a tool that can establish your credibility, increase your authority, and increase your understanding of the industry you're in. This is our experience so, I would not recommend to quit blogging because you are not making that much money. If you really don't have time, hire someone to write for you.

Take Action: How To Monetize Your Blog Today

There you have it, our two best strategies on how to monetize a blog or website.

If you can only take 3 things away from this post, I hope they are:

1. I was able to significantly increase my daily email opt-in rate (304% +) using a popup opt-in. I wish I had started using it sooner. Use Omnisend to add a popup to your website today!

2. Check promotions for different products, one product that I promote, outsells all others by at least 20 to 1 and I wouldn't know if I didn't change the promotions on my site.

3. Ask! My conversions and sales continue to increase because I always ask my affiliate managers for something more, a free trial, coupon codes, different landing pages - if it gets you more sales, it makes them more money and their earnings. At least you should try to help.

Good luck!