In order to monetize your blog, you want your readers to buy products that you are affiliated with, through a link you have provided on your blog website.
When picking which products to affiliate yourself with, the most important thing to consider would be that the product is relevant to whatever you are blogging about.
That should be rather obvious because if your blog was about making your own furniture, having links to fishing products wouldn’t make sense. Your core audience probably doesn’t care one bit about fishing products.
Now if you had affiliate links to the latest and greatest wood working tools, your blog would probably quickly become a money maker for you.
Find A Good Affiliate Product
There are four good questions to ask yourself about possible affiliate products:
- Do I use the product? (or would I use it?)
- Would my blog followers benefit from the product?
- Is the purchasing process easy?
- Is the affiliate commission rate worthwhile? (a high rate is not always a good indicator, a low rate with high conversion can be more profitable)
If you can answer yes to those questions, it would probably be a good product to promote on your website.
As you think about products, don’t limit your thinking, because for whatever product you think about, you’ll find affiliate programs looking for you to help promote it. All you have to do is go to Google and type “product name affiliate programs” and you’ll be surprised.
Sell Products Directly
This is a little more complicated than affiliate marketing because you have to consider manufacturing, inventory, and shipping.
Many bloggers doing this use drop shipping or fulfillment companies, to alleviate the above concerns. You would basically be using your blog to process orders.
Become a Consultant or Coach
Based on your specific expertise, you can offer consulting/coaching sessions for groups or individuals.
The challenge is to develop a following willing to pay for your help. If you have true expertise, it wouldn’t be hard to do that with a good social media following.
Create Online Courses
It’s not very difficult to create and sell online courses these days. With the advent of third party platforms like Thinkific and Teachable, it is just a matter of organizing your knowledge and expertise.
After the initial work of creating the course, you continue to make money as long as you have new students buying in.
Create a Membership Site
Once you have a loyal following, offer an online membership option, where followers pay a set monthly fee for extra, advanced information on your blog content. This allows you to have a strong recurring revenue to count on.
Some bloggers admittedly use monthly fees to ensure they sustain high quality content for their followers. It does take time and effort to research high quality information on any subject.
DO SOMETHING!
Even if you’re a beginner, there are many things you can do to make money with your blog. Stay within your niche and point your followers to products within niche in whatever manner is most comfortable for you.
If you enjoy writing about your niche, you might as well make some passive income while doing just that. There really is not much more effort necessary to make money from doing what you already like, just add a little bit more effort and do something!
