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Starting and monetizing a blog has never been easier than it is today.

Not too long ago, creating a website would’ve cost you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to set up and maintain. Monetizing a website was just as difficult. PayPal was in its infancy, Stripe didn’t exist and email marketing was nowhere near as flexible as it is now.

Today however you can start, maintain, and monetize a blog on WordPress with just a few hundred dollars (this can vary based on what you need to do). But just because it’s easier to make money with your blog today, doesn’t mean that most bloggers do.

According to ConvertKit’s 2017 state of blogging report, pro bloggers reported an average profit of $138,064 the past year, while amateur bloggers (who made up 86% of those surveyed) made only $9,497.

This is terrible, especially when you consider that most bloggers start a blog so they can be their own boss and quit their dull 8-to-5 job.

So how do you go from being an amateur blogger to one of the pros hitting six figures every year?

Well, you need a solid marketing plan, this includes content, a profitable niche, and a great monetization strategy.

You also need to need to do some quick math.

When Should You Start to Monetize Your Blog?

There’s no concrete number out there for how much traffic or how large an email listshould be to make money from your blog because that all depends on what you sell and how you sell it.

However, having two things straightened out first will help you a lot:

1. Get steady traffic: You don’t need tens of thousands of visitors but at least a thousand visitors a month means you’re doing something right.
2. Grow your email list: Again you don’t have to aim for anything crazy here. We’ll show you examples of people who had a small list but still used it to their advantage.

Now these two things matter, but primarily, monetizing your blog efficiently is all about the numbers.

For example, if you need to make $6,000 from your blog:

• You can sell a $200 product (say a course) to 30 people.
• Or sell a $600 course to 10 people.
• And even by charging $6,000 for consulting with a client.

Monetization is math, not magic.

This doesn’t mean that the key to monetization is simply increasing the prices of what you sell. Rather it means that you should choose a monetization strategy that aligns with where your blog is right now or where you want it to be in the future.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can monetize a blog and make money online whether you get thousands of page views a month or you’re just starting out.

We’re going to show some solid strategies other bloggers have used to generate revenue from their own blogs in diverse niches and teach you how to do the same with your own blog.

1. Become a Freelance Blogger in Your Niche
2. Sell Ebooks to Your Audience
3. Create and Sell Online Courses
4. Start a Coaching/Consulting Business
5. Offer a Paid Membership Plan
6. Make Money With Display Advertising (Banner Ads)
7. Become an Affiliate Marketer
8. Generate Revenue With Sponsored Posts/Reviews
9. Sell Physical Products to Your Audience
10. Sell Digital Products to Your Audience
11. Launch a Virtual Summit in Your Niche
12. Accept Donations on Your Blog
13. Start a Podcast

1. Become a Freelance Blogger in Your Niche

One of the easiest ways to make money from your blog is to become a freelance writer for more prominent blogs in your niche.

Think about it, you probably started your blog because you have experience/knowledge in that area, so why not use that to your advantage?

Businesses are looking for people that can create content to fuel their marketing so who better to create that content than someone that has knowledge in that niche.

Freelance blogger Bamidele Onibalusi used his blog, Writers in Charge, to show his content marketing chops while also growing his audience. He now makes a full-time income blogging for other businesses.

According to data from Glassdoor, the average freelancer in the United States makes about $40k a year. Keep in mind that this figure is influenced by your experience level and the niche you write in.

Here’s a breakdown of how much you can earn in different niches according to the Editorial Freelance Association:

You might not be able to charge these rates when you begin, but as you gain more experience and credibility your rates go up. Be careful not to charge too low in the beginning though.

Charging $10 for an article might seem like an easy way to start getting clients, but in truth it can chase quality clients aways as your skills are called into question, not to mention charging so little can drain your motivation to continue.

Since we’re on the subject of pricing, it’s better to charge your clients on a per project basis rather than on an hourly rate since it can be hard to determine how long it’ll take you to complete a task, especially when you’re just starting out as a freelancer.

Charging a fee based on the project itself means you get rewarded for finishing quicker and your clients know how much they’ll pay from the onset.

According to WriteWorldwide, here’s how much you can charge per project in your first year as a freelance writer, without accounting for your niche or previous writing experience.

The best part about freelance writing is that you don’t need a lot of traffic on your blog to start making money, all businesses really care about it that you can write great content.

Jorden Roper, for example, made $5,000 in her fourth month of being a freelance writer and Jennifer Gregory pulls in about six figures a year from her freelance writing business.

As a freelance blogger, your job is to create written content that attracts visitors to a business’s website so some of these visitors can convert into customers for the business.

According to Content marketing institute’s 2019 report, marketers are set to spend more money on content creation and 50% of the marketers surveyed expect their content marketing budget to increase in 2019.

If there are businesses making money in your niche and so as long as these businesses are creating content then you can bet they need writers.

Notice that I mentioned that the business has to be making money. One of the worst mistakes you can make as a freelance blogger is picking a niche where businesses can’t afford to pay you.

For example, writing about art might be your idea of fun and you might have extensive knowledge of it, but how many blogs can pay you regularly to write about that?

The path to profitability as a freelance blogger is finding the right market to position yourself in.

A quick way to test whether there’s money to be made in your niche is to find at least ten writers that cover the niche you want to write in. You can do this by simply making a search on LinkedIn with the keywords for your niche.

For example, when I search for individuals with the exact title of “freelance personal finance writer” on LinkedIn I get about 42 results. You could also do it without quotes for a more broad search which will generate even more results.

This is an easy way to validate your niche.

We’ve already established that you don’t need a lot of traffic to make money as a freelance writer but that doesn’t mean people will just find your blog and hire you.

You have to go out and promote your service.

When you’ve created writing samples on your blog and maybe guest posts on other blogs, you can start reaching out to businesses you want to write for.

You can also use freelance marketplaces like Upwork, SEOclerks and Fiverr. But while there are a few freelance writers that make a lot of money, like Danny Marguiles who made over $100k a year on Upwork, the majority of freelancer writers on these platforms make very little money.

To avoid the race for the bottom that is freelance marketplaces, you’ll have to do most of the outreach yourself.

How to Find Blogs to Write For

The best way to find businesses or blogs in your niche to write for is to simply make a Google search for keywords related to that niche and see what comes up.

Because clearly, the blogs that show up in the first few pages of Google are investing a lot in content marketing.

For example, if I was looking for blogs to write for in the fitness niche, making a simple search term like “Fitness blog” shows me this:

You can also search for terms related to your niche specifically, for example, in the case of fitness something like “Workout plans”:

Now all you have to do is contact the blog owners and pitch them your freelance writing service.

Take Advantage of Your Own Site

Besides searching for new writing gigs, you should also take advantage of your own site, you’re a writer after all.

Use inbound marketing and SEO to drive people to your site where you can then offer them your writing and blogging services. 

Freelance writer, Maddy Osman does this on her freelancing site, The Blogsmith.

2. Sell Ebooks to Your Audience

Selling ebooks is one of the most popular ways bloggers choose to monetize their blogs. It’s perfect because it’s relatively easy to create and is usually priced adequately enough that most visitors can buy.

But ebooks do more than let bloggers monetize their blogs quickly. As a blogger selling an ebook can be the fastest way to test if people are interested in what you’re covering enough to pay for it.

Ebooks are also a low-risk way for your website visitors to judge the value you can bring before buying more expensive products.

Contrary to popular belief you don’t need a lot of traffic on your blog to make money with your books. For example, David Oudiette converted the knowledge he’d gained building landing pages into a 252 page $39 ebook.

He didn’t have a lot of traffic on his blog as all he did at the time was consulting, but David was able to generate over $13,000 in revenue from his ebook.

Here’s what David had to do to sell that many books:

• He asked his blog subscribers about their landing page, gave them free tips and then pointed them to his book.
• He answered questions and gave feedback about landing pages on Quora and Reddit, then pitched his book as an additional source of information.
• David also added the book on Product Hunt.
• Even more impressively, David cold emailed businesses and gave them free feedback on their landing page, he then answered replies and linked to his book.

So David didn’t have a lot of traffic but he did do a lot of work.

There’s also Taylor Pearson who sold over 5,000 books in four weeks and in 2015 had made over $60k from just that book. Taylor had just 700 email subscribers at the time.

Taylor credits the success of his book to a few things:

• Getting fans of his blog to become beta readers during the writing stage.
• Creating a Facebook group to communicate his book’s progress with core readers.
• Sending the book to everyone on the Facebook group so they could leave an honest review on Amazon.
• Keeping everyone on his list informed about the book’s progress which makes them more involved and likely to buy later on.
• Synchronizing social media messages during and after launch.
• Sending a personalized email about his book to every one of his Gmail contacts.
• Doing a giveaway to promote the book.

The book ended up a bestseller on the Amazon small business section and the rest is history.

What’s great about both of these examples is that they show that with the right marketing and a good book, you don’t need that many subscribers and you certainly don’t have to be an expert writer.

None of these authors published and hoped, instead, they did a lot of work for their books to take off.

Where to Sell Your Ebook

You can then choose to sell your ebook directly on your blog or through platforms like Gumroad or Podia.

Selling your ebook on your own site can be advantageous, as you get to keep 100% of the profits. For example, Harsh Agrawal of ShoutMeLoud has an entire section of his site dedicated entirely towards his different ebooks.

ou can easily create something like this with the Easy Digital DownloadsWordPress plugin.

If you choose to publish your ebook as an Amazon Kindle then you can only keep 70% of the profits but it comes with the added advantage that the more books you sell the more exposure you can get which leads to even more sales.

Selling ebooks aren’t restricted to a particular niche either. There are ebooks on blogging, photography, fitness and anything you can think of.

For example, if you had a blog that taught gardening you can sell an ebook that taught your audience in more detail how to grow their own gardens or a particular plant.

You can even repurpose some of the content you’ve already written on your blog and then add more detail and context.

How to Make the Book

If you don’t have the time or skill to write a book yourself you can hire ghostwriters to do it for you.

You can find ghostwriters on LinkedIn, Scripted, Upwork and even Fiverr. Keep in mind that, like anything, you get what you pay for. More experience ghostwriters will charge you more than beginners.

You can also create your book cover yourself with tools like Canva, Photoshop, and Snappa or you can pay for a service like 99designs and let a professional do it for you.

3. Create and Sell Online Courses

Another way to monetize your blog is by selling online courses. What holds most bloggers back from creating their own course is that they think you need to be some sort of expert to teach a course.

But this isn’t true, all you need to really teach a course is to know more than the people you’re teaching and to be able to present this information in a way that people will get value from.

Ramit Sethi of IWT makes millions from the courses he creates not because he’s a certified financial planner but because he helps people eliminate problems in their lives.

You don’t need to be a certified chef to create a course that teaches people how to cook. If you can cook better than most people and create your course material in a way that can truly teach people how to cook then there’s nothing holding you back from creating your course.

More people are taking online courses than ever before, the e-learning industry is expected to grow to about $325 billion by 2025.

You also don’t need to be an influencer like Ramit Sethi to make a decent income from your courses.

There are people like Joseph Michael who made $40k as a newbie teaching writers how to use the popular writing software Scrivener.

Joseph didn’t have thousands of visitors or a gigantic email list. He sold his course by reaching out to influencers and promoting his course on webinars he spoke on.

How to Come up with Course Ideas

If you already have an audience then you simply need to identify a problem that a lot of them share that you can solve.

Ways to Identify Pain Points Your Audience Needs Solved:

• Send a survey: The fastest way to know what problems people in your audience have is to ask them. You can do this by sending a simple survey through email.

Here’s an example of Ramit Sethi doing just this in one of his emails just before the New year:

• Read blog comments: Your comment section can be a treasure trove of ideas if you pay attention to them. And if you don’t have that many comments on your blog you can read comments from other blogs in your niche.

If you don’t have an audience, however, then you can come up with course ideas by brainstorming a list of things you do better than most people.

Here are a few questions to help you figure this out:

• What do your friends compliment you on?
• What do people come to you for advice for?
• What does everyone around you complain about, but you seem to have no problem with?
• What have you learned from your past job?
• What can you do better than most people you know?

For Joseph, he knew how to use Scrivener which most people found to be too complex. In your case, it may be playing an instrument or dressing. As long as you can do it better than most people you can teach it to them.

Hosting Your Courses

You can choose to host your courses on WordPress in which case you’d keep most of the profit from your course but you’d have to set up everything on your own or hire a developer to help you with it.

There are also third-party platforms you can host your courses on. These platforms either charge a monthly fee or a percentage of sales and in exchange, you get a more professional platform to host your course on.

WordPress Extension for Your Courses

• WP Courseware
• LearnDash
• LifterLMS
• LearnPress

Third Party Platforms to Host Your Courses On

• Podia
• Teachable
• Kajabi

4. Start a Coaching/Consulting Business

Sometimes people want more detailed and personalized instructions than a book or course can provide them and so they turn to one on one coaching (or consulting depending on the type of services you offer).

Coaching or consulting is a monetization strategy that most blog owners who’ve found success in selling books and courses turn to when they want to create an additional revenue stream.

It’s not just for established bloggers however, consulting can also be your monetization strategy from the start.

Coaching like most of the monetization strategy we’ve already covered banks on you being able to use your skills and experience to help people solve problems in their lives.

Brennan Dunn for example, helps businesses sell more with marketing automation and charges about $9k for a consultation and Nagina Abdullah makes over 100k a year coaching with clients that want to lose weight.

Here’s a snapshot of Nagina’s earning throughout the year:

If you’re already generating revenue with books and courses, consider offering one on one consultations to people in your audience.

And if you’re just getting started, the low volume nature of consulting means that you can start to generate revenue without much traffic.

With consulting it’s not just about how much traffic you generate, it’s more about getting the right kind of traffic, i.e people that need your services and can afford to pay you.

That means writing targeted blog posts on topics your type of clients care about, it means speaking on podcast your audience listens to and going to events where they gather so they know about you.

5. Offer a Paid Membership Plan

Businesses with subscription models are becoming increasingly popular, so much so that some people have started calling it the Subscription economy.

Everything from Netflix, web hosting providers and membership sites are part of the subscription economy.

A membership site is a gated section of your online business where members subscribe either monthly or annually to receive exclusive benefits.

The people in your community share a common interest and the benefits they pay for can include exclusive articles, advice, reports, webinars, in-person meetups and just being around like-minded people.

Membership sites not only allow you to reach more people, but it also gives everyone a sense of community and belonging.

One thing I love about membership sites is that everyone’s part of a group whether they realize it or not.

That means that if you have an interest in something the world is so big and the internet so connected that you can find other people just like you.

For example, Ryan Levesque loved Orchids and knew how to grow them so he created Orchids made easy where he offers his members exclusive content and provides them a platform where they can meet and learn from other Orchid lovers.

Ryan’s members pay $9.95 every month and since he has 1,800 members that put his revenue at a cool $18k a month.