by:  Ernest Saco

Everyone is familiar with blogging nowadays.  Most people think of blogs as mini websites where anyone has the ability to put their thoughts, feelings, and opinions on the web for the world to see.  Now, if you’re familiar with blogging you’ve probably heard a story or two about bloggers that are making tons of money from their blog.  If you’re anything like me, you’ve wondered how some people can quit their jobs and make a great living off of their blog.  So I’m gonna tell you how it’s done.

1.  Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways that bloggers make money.  What is affiliate marketing?  It’s the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.  So when you visit those fashion blogs and they have links to the clothing that their wearing, or the accessories they have on; if you click on one of those links and end up buying something, the blogger gets a commission.  Amazon allows you to do this as well.  Some people may list their favorite items and have a link to Amazon where you can buy it, if you do buy it, or if you end up buying other things, the blogger profits.  For some of these blogs those commissions can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars per year.

2.  Paid Ads

The concept of paid advertisers is pretty straightforward.  I get a bunch of traffic on my blog, businesses want exposure to my traffic, they pay me a weekly, monthly, or annual fee for me to put one of their banners on my site.  Typically the blogger is either contacting these businesses to arrange the relationship.  Or the business may have heard of the blog and will reach out to the blogger to get an ad up.  If the blog is a “travel blog,” for example, you may see ads from travel companies (i.e. hotels, airlines, luggage companies, etc.).  Who reads the blog and how many visitors the blog gets per month dictates who wants to advertise and how much they’re willing to pay for the banners.

3.  Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts is similar to paid ads, except rather than a banner or an ad sold, the blogger will write a blog post about a product or mention the product in the post.  Same concept, if you get X number of readers per month and the sponsor wants that traffic, they’ll pay you to write a post or they’ll write the post for you to post on your blog.  Which in turn would help them drive traffic to their site where purchases can be made.

4.  Google Adsense

Google Adsense isn’t as common with bloggers as some of the other techniques.  However, it is definitely worth talking about.  Google Adsense allows the blogger to ad some code to their website.  Then, when people land on that website, Google will advertise to them based on their recent Google Searches.  The blogger will make money when people view, click, and/or buy the product being advertised.  This can be lucrative if a blog gets a ton of traffic, especially in a niche market that people are spending a bunch of money in (for example, fashion, outdoors equipment, etc.). You can see an example of this directly below.

5.  Selling Products/Services

Not too much to explain about this one.  If you have a blog and your readers are interested in a specific industry, you can then create a product or sell someone else’s product that meets the needs of that audience.  For example, if you have a baby blog and you notice a lot of your readers are writing you or leaving comments asking about a specific type of product or service; you can either produce that product yourself and sell it to that audience.  Or you can find someone that already sells that product, contact them to form a relationship, and sell that product on your site on their behalf.

There are several ways bloggers make money and what we’ve talked about in this article cover most of them.  If you’re a blogger that wants to monetize, hopefully this article has helped provide some insight into that.  If you have any questions, please comment below!  🙂