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Monetizing your blog

Marieke van de Rakt 3 February 2016 21 ,

Just writing a blog post every day does not pay the bills. For some bloggers, the ultimate goal of their blog is to be able to make a living out of it. But in what ways can you actually make money with your blog? In this post, we’ll talk you through a few ways of monetizing your blog. We’ll give some practical tips and discuss the up- and downsides of these different strategies!

1. Selling your own products

Of course, you could make money with your blog by selling your own products. The moment you start selling your own products, your blog will also become a shop. Selling products doesn’t necessarily mean selling physical products. You could also sell digital products like eBooks or apps.

Read more: Things to consider for your online shop »

For lots of (larger) companies, the blog is a section on their website, mostly used as a marketing tool. A company blog could be a really powerful tool to get some indirect sales. If you blog regularly about relevant topics, you show your audience your expertise and involvement. Also for people who offer to consult, or give workshops, for instance, a blog can be the way to present yourself to the world. The exposure to your blog will, in the end, result in more sales for your company.

2. Advertising

You can set up an area on your blog’s homepage dedicated to running advertisements. You’ll get paid based on the number of clicks on the banner, or on the number of times the ad is shown to your audience. Google Adsense has a relatively easy pay-per-click model you can set up in just a few steps. Google Adsense will then decide which ads will be shown on your webpage.

Advertising is simple to set up, but it won’t make you rich unless you have a lot of visitors. Also, ads can make your site much slower and potentially annoy your readers if you place too many. Above that, ad blocking has become more and more prevalent. A growing group of people uses software that will hide all advertisements. This trend is making advertising with Google Adsense somewhat more difficult. It’s hard to predict how ad blocking will develop from here.

Of course, if you’ve got a blog with a large audience, perhaps there are companies who want to put an ad on your website directly. You’ll have to reach out to them and communicate a bit more in that case. A major advantage of communicating directly with the companies that place ads on your website is that you’ll have complete control over the types of advertisements shown on your blog. That way you can make sure that the ads fit your blog and that you agree with the content of the ads. Advertising in such a way won’t make your site much slower and ad blockers won’t hide these advertisements from your audience.

In the early days of Yoast, we had a great experience using BuySellAds.com. They sell ad space on your site but you can approve each ad individually. Especially when there are advertisers in your space you’d rather not have on your site, this is a very good idea. These ads can also be paid by the time period they’re showing on your site, irrespective of the number of page views or clicks.

3. Promoted posts

If your blog has a large (and loyal) audience, companies may be interested in reaching your audience, telling them about their stuff. They could ask you to write about their products. And they could pay you to do so. Lots of bloggers receive products to review and use. Some bloggers are only paid by the free products or services they receive, but some companies also pay bloggers to write about their products. Writing posts in which you promote a product can be a nice way to make money with your blog.

Writing promoted posts also has a downside. Your objectivity as a blogger could become the object of speculation. It could be wise to make clear to your readers when you’re being paid for your opinion (in writing, or by making it clear in the design). It all depends on your blogging style and subjects.

When you’re selling promoted posts, receiving products for free or adding affiliate links to your site, make sure to disclose this to your readers. Not only is this the morally right thing to do; you’re also required to disclose this by law in many countries.

4. Affiliate

Another way to make money with your blog is via affiliate products. An affiliate product is a product that you recommend or write about in a blog post, or for which you place a banner or an ad on your website. If someone clicks on the link on your website, they will go to the webshop of the company which product you are promoting. If people actually buy that product, you will receive a percentage of the amount they are paying.

A lot of retailers offer an affiliate program. You will receive a trackable link that you include in one of your blog posts (or in an ad). You will get a commission if someone clicks on the link and buys a product via your blog. How much commission you’ll get varies greatly on the type of product. It could be only 1 or 2% for physical products, but for digital products, it could really be a lot more.
There are some affiliate networks you could join, large ones like CJ and Shareasale, but there are also company specific networks, like Amazon’s affiliate network and the eBay affiliate network. What fits well really depends on your niche and what type of product you could sell to that niche.

Affiliate can be an excellent way to make money with your blog. As with promoted post, the risk with affiliate could be that the objectivity of the author could become the object of speculation. In our view, you should make sure that the products you promote are products you really like. Products you would recommend to your friends and family as well. That way, you will make sure that you’re not promoting things to your beloved audience that do not fit you or your blog.

Make sure to add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to each affiliate link and to any and all links in promoted posts, so they don’t count for Google and other search engines. You need to do this to make sure you’re not getting penalized as Google might deem you to be selling links.

Conclusion

In my view, there are four major ways to make money with your blog:

  1. By selling space on your blog for advertisements;
  2. By writing promoted posts;
  3. By affiliating (promoting products or services on your blog and getting paid if someone buys that product or service via a link on your blog);
  4. By selling your own products or by increasing indirect sales with your (company) blog.

The way you choose to make money largely depends on your own preferences and on the audience your website attracts.

Keep reading: Blogging: the ultimate guide »

Avatar of Marieke van de Rakt
Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke was Head of Strategy and former CEO at Yoast. During her time at our company she wrote a lot. Topics that she loves writing about include SEO copywriting, site structure and readability.

Discussion (21)

  • Thanks for the post Marieke. Monetizing a blog is not always easy though. Some topics are fairly easy but some can be quite a challenge. You need to go an extra mile in innovation and hardwork

  • Apart from Adsense, There are many in-text advertising networks Like Viglink that works in a very different way than other blog monetization methods. VigLink converts your standard outgoing links into affiliate links, and if users make a purchase, you earn a referral fee from it.

  • Blog is very powerful tool to approach to your potential audience, but I don’t think that the blog itself should have the main purpose to be monetized. Simply because there are many great blogs written by professionals in various fields that do not make not even nearly you would think of.
    If someone wants to start an online business, I would always suggests them to start with online shop or offering some sort of service rather than writing a blog. Blogs can bring money, but I believe that those who receive the cash were usually not focused on making the money in the first place.

  • Thank you for posting this article.

  • I’ve been looking at your website for two days, and I still can’t figure out what Yoast does. That seems to me to be not a functioning website! I read the guide. I’m none the wiser.

  • Great tips.
    I agree with Abhishek. You first need to create a product before you can sell a product, and you also need to create something that is worth buying. That’s the big challenge.

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    Two things :-

    1. I would love know as Christian asked – how many visitors per month do you think you need to get some decent money from Adsense.

    2. For ecommerce – I use ecwids ( http://www.ecwids.co.uk ) it is so easy my Granny could use it – but because it is cloud based – you copy/paste the code anywhere – including Facebook – Selling in FaceBook is so much more direct than Google search – as facebook ads mean you can Geo target you exact audience – eg females in the UK that have changed their status from single to engaged – means they are looking for marriage gifts etc.

    Angela

  • Well, to sell something, one needs to create something first. And there comes the problem. This is what I think.

  • I would be really interested to know if anybody has any data around the tradeoff of advertising: revenue vs. reader annoyance, page speed impact, and potential loss of traffic (if advertising works it takes traffic AWAY from your site right)?

    I also have about 300,000 visitors a month and I’ve never experimented with it for these reasons but honestly have no data to back up my decision, just gut instinct. I use adblock software and if I turn it off, most of my favorite sites become a horror show of advertising. Thus I’m biased :P

  • How many visitors/month do you recon is needed in order to make any noticable amount of money using google adsense?
    In other words: when is it worth it?

  • Thanks for Great Article.

  • This post help to gain few tips regarding content and help for SEO.

  • Great article, I run a travel website with over 300,000 monthly visitors (www.bigboytravel.com) and have been looking for alternatives to Adsense. While my revenue per thousand visitors has remained strong despite ad blockers, there is a huge drop off on revenue per thousand visitors on mobile compared to desktop. I see this being as big of an issue as ad blockers as more and more people browser on mobile.

    Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the mobile issue.