It is easy? Absolutely.
It's fast? Quite the opposite.
Last week I shared with you some tricks that had helped me write better posts, and today I want to talk about different ways of monetizing (yes, I love this word) a web page.
Many people start writing a blog with the idea of getting a little extra, but they think there are only two sources of income: AdSense and affiliate marketing. The reality is that there are more ways to make money.
Whether you have a blog with lucrative intentions or not, this post interests you. If you are in the first group, what I am going to tell you next will give you new ideas to extract economic performance from your efforts; If you are in the second, when you finish reading this article you will better understand how the authors of the most popular Internet pages earn their bread.
Want to know how to blog and earn money? I will explain all the ways that I know and that exist if you continue reading.
Making money with a blog is a career in the background, not a sprint
Before proceeding, I would like to warn you that making money with a blog is always a long-term plan. A VERY long term.Traffic, authority, trust, connection with readers ... are essential things that can not be achieved in two days, so if you are looking for rich in 3 weeks I feel disappointed.
Today there are millions of blogs on the Internet, of which 99% are abandoned after a few months. That is why, if you want yours to bring you economic benefits, one of the essential qualities you need is constancy. And I'm not talking about months, but years.
Are you willing to write on your blog for the next 5 years? If not, it may be more convenient to invest your time in something different, or to take your blog as a hobby and not as a business.
Once clarified this point, we can begin 🙂 These are 9 ways to make money with a blog.
1. CPC Advertising (AdSense)
The easiest and fastest way to monetize a blog is through PPC advertising. The acronym CPC stands for "Cost Per Click", which means that you are paid each time a user clicks on one of your ads.
There are many ad networks CPC, but certainly the most popular and the one that works best is Google AdSense. Registering is as simple as entering this website and filling out a small form. Once Google approves your account (it usually takes less than 48 hours), you'll be able to insert advertising blocks of different sizes into your blog.
What distinguishes AdSense from other advertising systems is that you do not choose the ads that are displayed, but Google does it for you. The big G analyzes the content of the page in which you have inserted the block and shows publicity that it considers relevant for your readers. In this way, Google kills several birds with one stone:
- Ads displayed (in theory) are interesting to your users.
- Being interesting, they are more likely to click and therefore you earn more money (and Google too)
- Advertisers can reach potential customers despite not knowing you or your page
Click-through revenue depends on the competition that exists in that niche. The more advertisers there are, the more they have to pay for your ad to appear and therefore more money can be shared between Google and you. For example, in some super-competitive topics such as "forex", "insurance" or "criminal lawyers" you can get 3 or 4 euros per click, but it is normal to receive only a few cents.
If you want to know how competitive is a term, you have two options:
Do a Google search and look at how many ads appear on the screen. If all the spaces are complete (above the search results, below and in the sidebar) that means that it is a competitive niche in which the click is well paid.
Enter the Keyword Planner and look for that term. The CPC column will give you an estimate of what companies pay per click for your ad to appear in searches and blogs related to that topic. What you would charge is less than half of that CPC (about 30-40%).
But not everything is pink and wonderful in the land of AdSense. Before you post to advertise on your blog you should consider the following:
It is possible that your readers get angry and consider you a sold. Sometimes, having bad publicity gives and leaves seriousness to your blog
Typically, for CPC advertising to be profitable you need to have a lot of traffic
Google has the right to close your AdSense account at any time and without any explanation. It has happened to me in the past.
Examples of blogs with CPC advertising:
Digital Photography School. Darren Rowse's popular blog generates a high volume of revenue through AdSense. If you enter any article you will see ads in both the sidebar and the bottom, just before the comments.
Intexmedia. This cacereña company has a network of blogs called Dinablog that includes sites with high traffic like bebefeliz.com or buscartrabajo.com that bill thousands of euros per month only with the clicks of its users.
2. CPA Advertising
Another less well-known type of advertising is CPA (Cost Per Action) advertising. In this case, when a reader clicks on your ad, you are redirected to a landing page where you have to perform an action, such as opening an account, filling out a survey or giving your personal information to receive more information. For each user who completes the action you take a commission.
As you can imagine, the conversion rate (the people who click on your ad and also take action) is much lower than in the case of CPC advertising. However, this is offset by a much higher conversion fee - typically several euros.
Here's an example of an insurance company landing page. When the user clicks on your ad, he arrives at this page asking him to enter his name and his telephone so that later they call him and try to sell him insurance. If you do, you take 1.75 € (although the user then ends up not buying anything).
For CPA advertising to be successful, it is important that it be very relevant to the niche of your blog. If you have a personal development blog and put a Movistar ad to attract new clients, it is most likely to be a failure. However, that same announcement in a blog about mobile rate offers will work much better.
In general, the more specific the topic of your blog, the better the CPA campaigns (as long as they are relevant, of course).
The best-known CPA advertising network in Spain is Adjal.
Examples of blogs with CPA advertising:
Rastreator. Although more than a blog is a web, Rastreator is a good example of CPA advertising. This company is dedicated to making comparisons of the products that pay the highest commissions for conversion (insurance, mortgages, ADSL ...), and shows CPA ads of each company in the results of those comparatives. You can do the same in your blog, but on a smaller scale 🙂
3. Private advertisers
An alternative to the ad networks I've commented on in the above points are private advertisers. Just as magazines rent their pages to companies, you can rent areas of your blog to companies in the sector for a fixed monthly price.
There are two ways to find private advertisers:
Offer your services to potential clients. This strategy consists of contacting via e-mail or telephone with companies in your niche that might be interested in advertising on your blog. You can start with those who have hired AdSense advertising, because you know they already invest in online advertising every month. If you are able to show them with data and graphs that it would be more profitable to advertise on your page than through Google, they may be willing to make the change.
Let them get in touch with you. If you get your blog to become a referent within your niche, it is very possible that the companies themselves will contact you to advertise on your website. The easiest way for this to happen is by publicly showing that you accept ads on your website. For example, you can have a banner with the message "Advertise in this blog" that leads to a page in which potential advertisers can download a dossier with the statistics of visits last year, the reasons why it would be profitable to advertise in your page and prices.
As with CPA advertising, the more specific your niche is, the better this method of monetization will work, as there will be more companies interested in advertising on your page. In addition, the more traffic you generate the more money you can ask the advertisers, as more people will see your advertising every day.
If you want to see the look of a good dossier for advertisers, I recommend that you take a look at the Police Forum. You can download it here.
Examples of blogs with private advertisers:
Baballa is a blog for working moms. Its author, Lucia, writes about a lot of topics: anecdotes with children, crafts, things to do with them, things to do without them, beauty, things to give away ... The page became more and more popular and now it works with the sponsors' income you can see in the sidebar.
Requirements National Police. When I started looking for ways to make money online, I created this page with the idea of making money with announcements of academies of oppositions and gyms. Failed for lack of traffic and only managed to sell an ad (live!), But still can serve as an example. I use a plug-in for WordPress called CrankyAds that manages everything automatically. If you want to see how it works, go to the page and click on the banner below the whole and that says "Click here to advertise in this space."
4. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is nothing more than a specific type of CPA advertising in which the action that the user has to perform is to buy something. That is, you act as a commercial, promoting in your blog a product or service of another company, which pays you a commission each time you generate a sale.
Affiliate platforms work as follows:
- Sign up as an affiliate
- Through the platform you create special links with your identifier, which point to the page of the product to promote
- You put those links in your blog
- A reader clicks on any of those links, makes a purchase in the next X days (X depends on the company) and you take a commission
- At the end of the month you enter into your checking account the total amount of all commissions
Easy, right?
The first affiliate program in history was Amazon, but nowadays there are many more and practically in all sectors: travel, telephony, digital products ... To find them you just have to search Google in the company name followed by the word "affiliates".
Sometimes it is the companies themselves that manage their affiliate programs, but most commonly they do so through affiliate networks. These are some of the most important:
- Amazon UK
- TradeDoubler
- Zanox
- ClicBank
- CommissionJunction
The amount of the commission varies depending on the company, and ranges from 3-5% over the sale price in the case of physical products up to 50-70% when it comes to digital products.
The key to success with affiliation is to intercept the users who are in the middle of the buying process and take them to your blog, and the most common way to do this is by writing articles about offers or product reviews and positioning them on Google for terms commercial. I explain.
If someone searches the word "coffee maker" in Google, you do not know what it means. You may want to buy a coffee maker, but perhaps you already have one and you have broken down, or maybe it is a boy looking for photos of coffee machines for a school job. However, if you are looking for "coffee maker", "coffee analysis Nesspreso" or "coffee price Tassimo", we know that you are thinking of buying a coffee maker and, therefore, it is much more likely to end up generating a sale. This second type of user is the one that interests you to visit your blog.
Examples of blogs that use affiliate marketing:
- Offerman. The author of this blog publishes every day different offers of electronic products, accompanied by a brief analysis. All links on the web are affiliate links for which a commission is taken. I do not know how much money I'll make a month, but I think it should go pretty well.
- Running Shoes. The web of Luís Clausín is the reference page on running shoes (a good example of a super-specific niche). All links are affiliated.
- Otogami. This game finder created by David Bonilla and his partner Jerónimo tracks 29 stores and tells you where you can buy at the best price. Obviously, the purchase link is an affiliate link 🙂
Interested in the world of affiliation? Visit the specialized forum affiliate.com.
5. Own products
The most lucrative method to make money with your blog is to sell your own products, since there are no intermediaries and therefore the margins are wider.
The most common on the Internet is the sale of digital products, and more specifically the info-products such as ebooks or courses. The advantage of these types of products is that duplicating them is free, so once created it costs the same to sell one million. In addition, the entire sales process can be easily automated thanks to platforms like E-Junkie, Gumroad or even Amazon (as I have done with my book).
In addition to digital products, it is also possible to sell physical products through a blog. For example, I could sell posters on my manifesto or, if I had a decent logo, sell t-shirts and other merchandising 🙂 The biggest drawback of this monetization strategy is that it does not work automatically: you have to keep a stock, go to mails to make the shipments and manage incidents and returns. However, this glue can be solved using a sales system called dropshipping, which consists in passing the orders directly to the supplier. This, in exchange for a fee, is responsible for making the shipment directly to the user. This way you do not have to worry about anything
Selling your own products is not easy, since to be successful you have to do many things well. Creating something that others want to buy is already a challenge, but that is just the beginning. Besides creating the product you need to have knowledge of marketing, copywriting, pricing policy, customer search and a long etc. That is why 99% of people who try to create and sell their own products fail.
Examples of blogs that sell their own products:
- Lifestyle squared. Frank is a specialist in online business for a single person, and through his blog sells multitude of courses: e-mail marketing, blogging, creation of ebooks ... You only have to see your monthly reports to see that you can really earn money with a blog (and much).
- Unchained. Borja Prieto organizes webinars (online seminars) for payment through his blog. While he teaches them, he records them and then turns them into training pills that he sells for 19 euros a unit.
- Templates to be taller. Miguel Pálmez, one of the most veteran readers of the blog, created a page of templates to be higher several years ago that still gives him a few euros a month. Ask the templates to China through a website like alibaba.com and resell them in Spain much more expensive. As his sales volume is not very high, he himself takes care of maintaining a stock and making the orders against reimbursement.
6. Services
Having a blog and writing on it frequently on a topic will help you position yourself as an expert in your niche. After a while, you can take advantage of that authority to offer your services. As you have shown that you know about your field and have established a trusting relationship with your readers over the months, some of them may be interested in what you offer and become a customer.
The key to this monetization model is trust. Demonstrating your knowledge with what you write is not enough; your life must be a faithful reflection of what you preach, that is: you have to live your own story. Or would you hire a fat dietitian to lose weight?
Here are some ways to build trust in your blog:
- Credentials. If you enter the website of Andrea, a Mexican entrepreneur who travels and adores soccer, you will see that underneath the presentation video has a section that says "As you saw in ..." along with the logo of some important pages and conferences. That conveys confidence and serves to prove that she is not a stranger, because if it has appeared in all those places ... it will be for something, right?
- Testimonials. The opinions of other satisfied customers are one of the best ways to get new customers to trust you. To get the first ones, start working for free or at half price in exchange for a positive testimonial when finished. Each time a reader writes you an e-mail saying something nice ask permission to use it as a testimony in the future.
- To face. Let your readers see you in photos and videos conveying closeness. People like to interact with people, not robots.
- Design. The design of a blog matters a lot. It is not the same to enter a blog with domain xxxxx.wordpresss.com and the default template, than to enter the blog of Javier Megias. The former transmits distrust on all four sides, while the latter is much more professional. A web with a good design is shouting "I'm serious!".
I will release my own service page myself shortly. I'm sorry if you're interested in hiring me!
Example of people offering services through your blog:
Javier Malonda: has been writing for years about NLP. Anyone who comes to your blog and read you will consider you an authority in the matter. That is why, in case you need an NLP session, that person will go to Javier instead of looking for other options in Google or in the yellow pages. Because Javier is not unknown, but a "friend". The reader knows his philosophy, how he thinks and even details of his private life.
Hana Kanjaa offers courses, workshops, conferences and coaching sessions through her circus blog 🙂
7. Promotion of your company
If you already have a company, a blog can be a fantastic marketing tool. Your clients are interested in knowing who you are, how you work and how things work backstage.
One of the most famous cases is that of 37signals, whose blog Signal Vs. Noise - in which they speak of their philosophy of work - was a key factor for the growth of the company and also served to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's how they did it:
1. They published posts with ideas quite different from traditional ones. These articles produced traffic, which they monetized thanks to the ads they had in the sidebar
2. They created a PDF book called Getting Real with the best posts on their software development philosophy and sold it for $ 19
3. They created the paper version of the book and put it on sale through Lulu.com for $ 25
4. With the content of Getting Real, they created a series of lectures. Each earned $ 50,000
In total, they made more than $ 750,000 from the blog!
The history of 37signals is incredible, but in my opinion the true potential of a blog can be seen when starting a company. In that case, creating a community around a blog can make things much easier and give you that initial push. When you have 2,000 faithful followers, it is much easier to carry out any project, because those people who trust you will be happy to do beta testers, give you feedback, promote your product and support your crowdfunding campaign. Let me give you an example.
David Bonilla has a mailing list with more than 2,700 subscribers where he writes every Sunday. A year ago, before opening its Galician empanadas shop to the general public, it offered 100 test empanadas at a special price only for blog subscribers. He sold 89 but, beyond sales, he got two much more important things:
Valuable feedback: that allowed you to fix errors before opening the public.
Free marketing. Most of its customers mentioned patties by Twitter, and there were even some who recorded a video unpacking the pie (unboxing)
All this, as you can imagine, translated into short-term profits but also long-term benefits.
And without the help of his followers, everything would have been a little more difficult for David.
The most important thing to remember when using a blog to promote other projects is that a community is not created in a day. Therefore, you must start building it before you need it, because when that time comes it will be too late.
8. Donations
Few people realize that the easiest way to make money with a blog is by asking your readers that, if your work has helped them in any way, they will enter what they consider convenient through PayPal. You know, sometimes you just have to ask!
This is something within reach of anyone and does not require programming skills of any kind, as PayPal provides you with the necessary HTML code and you just have to add it to your blog. You can get your donations button here.
If you want to be more original, you can also generate the code for a donation of a fixed amount and instead of the PayPal button use one that says "invite me to a coffee" or "invite me to a cane" 🙂
Example of people receiving donations through their blog:
Rafael Fernández is a self-publishing writer. He lives month after month with what he draws from his books, but he has sometimes experienced economic difficulties and has asked his readers to help him financially. Many of them - including myself - we send you a few euros to give you a hand. In my case, I did because I had been enjoying their free post since years ago and I felt indebted to him. In addition, he considered him a friend despite not knowing him personally, and admired his courage.
Steve Pavlina, the world's best personal development blogger, put a donate button on his blog as several readers wrote him asking him how he could pay for his posts. He now earns between $ 500 and $ 700 in donations, but a few years ago his earnings in this way were between $ 1,000 and $ 2,000.
9. Employment Opportunities
We live in a time when delivering a CV in Spain is equivalent to putting an advertising brochure on the windshield of a car: most likely to end up in the trash.
A college degree is no longer enough to find work. Now you are also required to prove that you know how to do something useful. And what better way to prove it than through a blog?
Frequent posting means exposing yourself, giving face. Yes, it is possible that both friends and anonymous readers laugh at you, but it is also possible that what you do like and attract someone's attention. And if that person has a company and is looking for someone with your profile, maybe you are the chosen one.
You do not believe me? Here are some tests:
Laura was contacted by Google through her blog. Too bad I did not have the level of English I needed to do the interviews ...
Marina Aisa does not have a blog, but she created Navhy, a YouTube channel with English videos subtitled in Spanish. The big success (more than 20 million hits) led to other entrepreneurs calling her for their projects and singer Tony Brown hire her to design the covers of 3 of her singles.
Miguel Ángel Riesgo, who has been working for Infojobs for 7 years, also thinks like me.
Having a blog means opening the door to all kinds of opportunities, not just work. Since you get a travel guide from Barcelona because a publisher has been happy with a post of yours until you find a boyfriend, anything is possible.
So ... what are you waiting for? Start your blog today!
Collaborate with Living to the Maximum
If you liked this article and decided to start a blog, I recommend that you hire your hosting with Webcompresa, which is where I have hosted all my webs, including Vivir al Máximo.
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Thank you very much!
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I hope that with this article you have become clear that today you earn money with a blog if you have things clear. You just have to know how to do it and have patience because, except in very isolated cases, you will not have another that grow little by little.
What is your favorite method to make money with a blog?