You might be looking for a couple of different ways to make some cash on the side. There’s a lot of ways you can do this, though some of them might have more of an initial investment than simply starting a blog. With a blog, all you need is a couple bucks for hosting and the domain, and then you can start creating content that you can make money with.
How do you make money off of a blog, you say? There’s actually a lot of ways, and with a little persistence and determination, running a blog can be extremely successful. Follow along below, and we’ll show you the five best ways for profiting off of a blog.
Advertising
One of the first ways that you can make money off of a blog is through advertising. Putting advertisements on your site might drag down the quality of your appearance, but unfortunately, ads are one of the primary streams for making money. You need to get paid for the hard work that you put in, and advertisements are one way of doing that. It doesn’t cost any money to sign up for an advertisement service. In fact, you can sign-up for Google Adsense for free, which is what most people use to put advertisements on their site. Adsense is one of the primary methods of making moneys with ads, and almost everybody uses it. You can sign up for free here.
Another advertising method you can use is Google AdWords. AdWords is another method of advertisement, where Google will allow advertisers to place their advertisements within the words in sentences and paragraphs. You can sign up for free here.
Affiliate Marketing
You might also want to consider affiliate marketing. For example, the Amazon affiliate marketing program is a great way to make some extra cash. If you already have a strong readership that trusts and looks for your opinion on a product, you can easily attach your Amazon Affiliate code to the Amazon product they’re interested in, and if they buy it, you get a piece of the pie for helping make that sale. You could create SEO-based posts with your Amazon Affiliate link as well, increasing the chances that you get a larger volume of people buying product with your code.
Sponsorship
If your blog gets large enough, you can consider and entertain sponsorship opportunities around the Web as well. You generally need to have a large, returning viewership for this, but if you can get well visited SEO posts, that works as well. Sponsorship opportunities aren’t generally something you seek out personally — usually a company will come to you looking to get their product or service in front of more eyes.
That said, the best thing you can do is create a page on your blog dedicated to sponsorships, giving potential sponsors some brief information as well as some contact info where they can reach you.
Selling
You might want to consider selling product or services online, too. With a decent trusted viewership, a good landing page, and/or an established newsletter base, you can easily sell product and services online. You could create courses to help teach other people a skill online, such as being a virtual assistant or writing content for websites. Everyone wants to make money online, and by teaching people a skill that will enable them to do that, you can make a little money, too. You might also consider selling your own products as well, possibly your own merchandise or maybe a physical book that you’ve published.
Create Useful Content
Last, above anything else, you want to make sure that you’re creating useful content. By creating useful content, you create a trust with your returning viewership, as well as anybody coming to your website. Creating useful content adds value to people’s lives, which is what potential customers and people in general want.
If you’re truly creating content that adds value to people’s lives, you can make some really good money online. However, when you’re first starting out, you’re not going to make anything — and that’s largely because you don’t have a reputation or place in the World Wide Web immediately. You have to build trust, and by doing that, your first and primary goal has to be adding value to people. If you do that, the money will come.
Verdict
These are five easy ways that you can make money blogging online. Keep in mind that it’s not instantaneous, and it takes a lot of hard work and dedication. Stick with it, and you might find that you can even replace your day job with your side hustle!