Want to learn how to optimize your blog for monetization? Unfortunately, some bloggers — and you may be one of them — still think that their income lies within the text that they write. However, that is sadly not the case. To monetize your blog, you’ll soon find out that there’s more to it than just creating kick-ass content.
So, if you’re not sure if you’re exhausting all the income-generating capabilities of your site, you’re in the right place. We’re going to cover the many ways to monetize a blog, provide actionable tips, talk about our favorite success cases and provide insights into the latest trends. Let’s get you all set up for a record-breaking year!
Learn How to Monetize a Blog in 2024: The 9 Best Ways
Just to be clear, there’s no single best way to monetize a blog. What will work best for you will depend on various factors, like your niche, existing skills and level of investment. So, in the following subsections, we will teach you all the best ways to monetize a blog. You can succeed with just one method. However, as your site grows, we hope you consider expanding upon your monetization with other strategies. Our opinion? Anyone with a blog should at the very least try affiliate marketing (the first one on the list!). Other options are encouraged but optional.
Get Into Affiliate Marketing
If you’re thinking about how to start a blog and monetize it with affiliate marketing, you’re already on the right track! This is one of the easiest and most profitable ways to earn money from your blog. All you need to do is set up your affiliate links, and with that simple step, you can begin to earn from them forever! Blog monetization requirements may exist depending on the affiliate program, but applying is free, so you may as well try it. Just keep these tips in mind as you explore how to monetize a blog through affiliate marketing:
- Find out what the commission rates and cookie durations are;
- Consider the reputation of the affiliate company;
- Assess if the offer is a fit for the audience.
Create Membership Subscriptions
Are you looking for ways to monetize a blog consistently? Selling membership subscriptions to your audience is one option! The beauty here is that they grant you a consistent income flow while giving you a better sense of how your blog is performing financially. However, when learning how to monetize a blog this way, look beyond simply providing subscription access to the website itself. The subscription could also offer other things that are not necessarily consumed in blog form, like access to an exclusive newsletter or group coaching calls. As you explore how to monetize a blog through subscriptions, these tips may be useful:
- Give discounts for yearly payments;
- Clearly define the value that they’d get by subscribing;
- Provide fresh content regularly.
Dive into Native Advertising
If you’re looking into blog monetization but don’t want to rely on traditional ads, native advertising may be for you. Native advertising allows you to display ad materials on your blog that are relevant to the page content. That way, you don’t interrupt their browsing experience. Additionally, it is good for consistent monetization, as advertisers tend to spend more on native advertising. With MGID, you don’t need to learn how to master native ads to monetize your blog because our technology does most of the work for you! We offer a variety of native widgets — Smart, Under-article, In-article, Sidebar and more — to perfectly fit into the style and context of your blog. We also provide you with complete control of your audience, which helps you achieve inventory potential, enhance audience connection and attract new users.
And while you're deciding whether this is right for you, here are a few tips to remember when selecting a native ad platform:
- Assess their tech;
- Examine supported ad formats;
- Research their success stories.
Sell Online Courses or Workshops
There is a lot of money to be made in selling online courses. Mainly, this is because it isn’t labor intensive: you only have to create the content from scratch once. The same goes for workshops. With the general structure in place, you now only have to focus on running the workshop itself. Tweak your material as required! If you want to create and sell a course, these tips should help you:
- Expand ways on how to monetize a blog with upsells and downsells;
- Make it clear what value users will get by taking the course;
- Divide it into bite-sized, more consumable content;
- Consider offering payment plans;
- Encourage immediate action with bonuses.
Engage in Sponsored Content Partnerships
If you’re wanting to take a break from writing or content creation, content partnerships are a great way to monetize your blog. With this, you get paid to publish content written by other parties on your site. However, as you learn more about sponsored content partnerships, you’ll see that the work here mostly comes from pre-publishing. You have to communicate with content partners to set expectations and agreements. Consider these tips when utilizing sponsored content:
- If you have the energy, propose writing the content for a fee;
- Agree on the topic before they start writing;
- Send guidelines for writing content on your site.
Create Digital Products
Are you looking for ways to monetize a blog for the long run? Our answer is digital products! The beauty of this type of product is that the overhead is pretty low. But what can you offer, apart from an eBook? Learning how to monetize a blog with a digital product means assessing what your audience may be interested in. For example, if you mostly talk about easy ways to make money online, then perhaps you could sell detailed guides. You’ll also love that your obligation to the buyer ends with delivering the product. From the creation to the distribution process, successfully learning how to monetize a blog through digital products becomes easier if you:
- Conduct market research;
- Run ads;
- Partner with bloggers.
Run Webinars and Events
Are you a separate brand from your blog? Running webinars may be a good way to monetize a blog while also putting yourself out there. Webinars allow you to hold virtual seminars using software where you can present your material. These remove location-based barriers, meaning you can host a webinar from your home base while having the entire world as your audience. If you want to go this route, you should be aware there’s definitely more work to be done here. So, if you want to find out how to monetize a blog this way, consider these tips:
- Practice before making the presentation;
- Create a deck that’s easy to understand;
- Engage the audience by asking questions.
Write Sponsored Reviews or Product Placements
No matter what your niche is, you’ll always find a lot of options to make your dreams of blog monetization successfully come true. And if you prefer to stick with writing blog posts, creating sponsored posts is one of your better options. Since the content is the main driver here, stick to best practices for web writing to naturally introduce products without seeming like you’re going for a hard sell. It may not be a monetization blog, but the principles still apply:
- Make sure your content is unique;
- Optimize your text for SEO;
- Keep readers engaged;
- Structure your content;
- Tailor your writing to an audience.
Create Premium Content or eBooks
Want to monetize a blog using your expert knowledge? Create eBooks or premium content! The great thing about this strategy is that literally every free blog out there is helping you learn how to monetize a blog. Premium content helps with reaching an audience through organic search and establishing yourself as an authority in the field. Think of it as a non-pushy way to promote by figuring out how to monetize a website or a blog with ads. The best practices for web writing still apply, but you should also keep these tips in mind:
- Create an angle that makes sense for your audience;
- Introduce videos and images;
- Don’t violate any existing copyright or intellectual property rights.
Blog Monetization Strategies: 3 Successful Blog Monetization Cases
So, you already know how to monetize a blog, but is there a secret sauce? Let us be blunt: there is no single formula for successfully making money this way. As you consider all our best blog monetization tips, know that some of them will work better for you than others. For example, a travel blogger may find sponsored content to be more effective than creating a digital product.
How do bloggers make money? While there is no shortage of blog sites that have successfully generated an income from content, every case is different. However, these examples should give you some idea of how to approach your own blog’s monetization.
Ashton’s Online Story: How Diversification Helped Create a $26,310 per Month Income
Trying to find out how to monetize a blog? This blogger showed that all it takes is to try as many methods as possible. He’s used the following so far:
- Affiliate marketing;
- Google Adsense;
- YouTube ads;
- Digital products;
- Courses;
- 1:1 services.
If you’re looking for a guide to blog monetization methods, you can build a roadmap of sorts on how you can generate income. All these channels worked for him because he positioned himself as an expert at Pinterest SEO. However, just as he provides advice on how to monetize a blog, focus on one thing at a time and build from there.
Another thing to take note of is how this is the product of a three-year journey. There are no time-based blog monetization rules or limits, and success never comes overnight.
The Gentleman Racer: Expansion from Automotive to Related Niches
The Gentleman Racer is an early player in the game, having started blogging in the early 2000s. And if you ask them how to monetize a blog, they’ll probably advise going for brand endorsements. This may be how they were able to keep the lights on in the beginning, but it wasn’t how they sustained their blog over two decades. What they did right was expand to topics that automobile enthusiasts were also interested in, like alcohol and watches. Like many blog owners, they have branched out from using their best blog platform for monetization to using video content. This just goes to show how knowing your audience and where they get their information can be valuable.
Simple Programmer: Solving a Problem to Make Money
Like the founder of the Simple Programmer, use your blog to tell people about an easy way out. That’s how he can generate $500k per year. When first figuring out how to monetize a blog, he decided that being an Amazon affiliate was the way to go. However, today, he categorizes the blog’s income into four sections: ads, affiliate income, product sales and licensing. This is a good lesson to take for people interested in how to monetize a blog with affiliate marketing: grow your blog with valuable content. With a big enough following, you can introduce other income-generating options.
Anticipated Trends in Blog Monetization Strategy Formulation
Having a solid foundation of what works is not enough to survive in this cut-throat industry. Everything on the internet will continue to evolve, so the best ways to monetize a blog may also change. To ensure the continued success of your website, you should understand the direction that the industry is taking. Apart from knowing how to monetize a blog, we will tackle what strategic changes you may want to implement. In any form of marketing, information is power AND money! The information in the following subsections will detail the trends that you can use to learn how to start a blog that makes money.
Increased Focus on Subscription Models
Gone are the days when a one-time purchase would grant you lifetime access to a product. This shift means needing to learn different ways to monetize a blog. In today’s day and age, there’s a lot more money to make now by becoming an affiliate partner! However, we recommend that you:
- Consider the quality of the offer as you explore how to monetize a blog;
- Look at commission limits;
- Check how long they credit you with your commission;
- See if the offer is a good fit for your audience;
- Examine if it’s worth the customer acquisition cost.
Our biggest tip? Go beyond commission rates! Ensure that your audience is satisfied with what you’re promoting.
The Growth of Native Advertising
If you’re serious about learning how to monetize a blog, you can’t just rely on banner ads. Because of banner blindness, advertisers are gravitating towards native advertising, which is designed to align with the user’s browsing experience, not distract from it. So, anyone looking into how to start and monetize a blog website without ads must incorporate native advertising. Some forms of this type of advertising, such as sponsored posts, are highly compatible if your goal is to minimize the ad clutter on your site.
Monetization of blog assets can be as easy as staying true to why you started blogging in the first place. You can maximize your income-generating possibilities through MGID’s blog monetization platform.
Video Content Monetization
Today, video seems to be the preferred mode of content delivery because it’s easier to consume. However, if you’re just learning how to monetize a blog, don’t let this deter you! Just because you’re not mainly using videos, it doesn’t mean you’re out of the game. Creators make the most money on YouTube, so should you still learn how to monetize a blog? There’s always value in expanding your digital footprint beyond more than just one platform. And as they say, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Knowing how to monetize a blog can extend beyond that asset. For example, if you’re also making video content, linking videos with earning potential can be incorporated into your blog monetization strategy.
Emphasis on Diversification
As with any investment, it’s always good to diversify. That’s why advertisers are looking at how best to allocate their ad budget today. There are essentially three ways to explain how to monetize a blog:
- Expand the type of content covered to attract a larger advertising market;
- Go beyond trying to figure out how to monetize a blog by exploring other media;
- Explore multiple monetization possibilities.
How do we implement this? Let’s say that you mostly write about flowers. You can vastly improve your blog monetization capabilities by writing content about gardens as well. Or if you rely on affiliate marketing, why not consider sponsored posts, too?
Adoption of Innovative Technologies
To monetize a blog for the long haul, you must adopt innovative technologies! Many new innovations are elevating the expectations of site visitors to new heights! Therefore, you need to learn how to monetize a blog using new technology, like:
- Content personalization;
- Augmented reality;
- Virtual reality;
- Artificial intelligence;
- Cookieless tracking.
These can open up new ways by which to retain traffic on your site while improving the blog monetization model that you can use. For example, artificial intelligence processes data in real-time, allowing you to make changes to your strategy based on the latest insights.
How Long Does It Take to Monetize a Blog? These Factors May Play a Role
One thing that we’ve seen with founders and bloggers is that they give up too early. Even if you have the most solid plan on how to monetize a blog, don’t expect amazing results right away. It can take time to drive traffic to your blog and build a loyal following. However, even with identical methods on how to monetize a blog, the results can be vastly different. No two websites are the same, after all. The time it will take for you to see decent returns from your efforts on how to monetize a blog will vary based on these major factors.
Existing Digital Footprint
Using digital assets to drive traffic can have a synergistic effect on your financial success as you hone in on how to monetize a blog. More assets also mean more ways by which you can promote an existing offer on the site. If you’re not starting from scratch, it will definitely be easier to see your implemented efforts bear fruit. So, we recommend going beyond the website. See what social media platforms you can use as well.
Target Audience
Your target audience will determine your income potential. Let’s say you decide how to monetize a blog, but there’s little demand for the products you want to promote. Then, it will likely take a while to profit from blogging. If there’s a lot of competition for your target audience, you’ll need to fight hard to get their attention. Do their interests align with the content you’re producing? These considerations and more can affect how long it takes you to make money.
Selected Monetization Methods
Figuring out how to monetize a blog can be approached in different ways. How good a fit are the methods that you chose? Some options are better than others based on your (again) target audience and budget. For example, it doesn’t make sense to look into how to monetize a blog by creating webinars if your audience mostly goes to your site for reviews. Some methods normally generate quicker returns if done right. Sponsored content pays right away, while you need to wait for a click to see returns on affiliate marketing.
Learning How to Optimize Your Blog for Monetization? Look into the Present and Future!
There are future-proof ways by which you can make money from your website, and it’s important to incorporate them as you figure out strategies on how to monetize a blog. However, to maximize the impact that your efforts are going to have, look into today’s trends as well. These tell you the direction that the industry is going, ensuring that you’re adapting to the best monetization methods for blog owners.
As mentioned, native advertising is seen to have a positive impact on bloggers who want to make money online. Get the best team to help you find the best-fit advertisers and create an account on MGID. Learn how to start a blog and make money, and we’ll help you maximize your blog’s income potential.
