In this article, I shared my findings and personal experiences about generating income from a blog. I mentioned different monetization strategies and different useful tools that make your blogging journey easier.
Suppose you have no idea how to get income from blog. In that case, this article gives you a general understanding of monetization methods independent from the type of your blog.
If you have decided which platforms to use for your publishing, it is time to create remarkable content and generate income from a blog.
If you didn't decide on the platform for your creative works, I suggest you to read The List of Best Blogging Platforms article.
The article will help you to decide on the platform for for your creative works.
The List of Best Blogging Platforms
The list of best blogging platforms for your creative works. The list includes free and paid platforms.
Part 1: Quality Content Creation
The value you realize from your published content depends on several variables, the most important of which is blog traffic. The more traffic your blog receives, the more value you realize. Consider it like having a billboard on a busy street.
It can be said that it will be a billboard in the desert when you publish your first post. Therefore, it is vital to promote your content through Twitter, Facebook groups, Reddit, Medium etc.
But… Even though promoting your content through social media is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one.
The most critical factor that determines your income is providing good value to your audiences. In the year 2023, content is still king.
In the long run, quality always beats quantity, and blogging is a long-run process.
But…
What does quality content mean?
Valuable, or quality content, is content that provides significant benefits to readers by addressing their needs, solving their problems, answering their questions, or entertaining them in a meaningful way.
Creating valuable content should be a priority for bloggers and content creators, as it helps build trust, credibility, and loyalty among readers, leading to increased engagement, social shares, and return visits.
It is a fact that all of these returns will eventually comprise your income.
To provide valuable content to your readers, consider the following tips:
A) Understand your audience
Research and identify your target audience's needs, preferences, and pain points
Create reader personas to help you better understand and address their needs through your content.
Contrary to average practice, Prioritize creating high-quality, well-researched, and in-depth content rather than churning out a large volume of superficial articles.
Although this strategy consumes more time, it will put you in front of thousands of bloggers in the long-run. This may grow the size of your loyal readers.
One of the best ways to understand your audience is by creating user personas.
What is a user persona?
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers. They give a clue about how they look, what they need, and what they want. A user persona is a combination of all the characteristics your audiences would possess.
For instance, you can clone this Notion template to see a very basic representation of a simple user persona.
In different words, It helps you to create empathy for the real people and help you to put yourself in the shoes of your readers.
You can use Answer The Public to know which questions your audience asks.
Be informative and educational and create easily consumable content
Sharing your knowledge and expertise in your niche topic is not an easy task. It can be improved with lots of practice.
Moreover, providing insights, tips, and actionable advice that helps your readers solve problems or improve their lives is the key point of a successful blog.
Use short paragraphs and concise sentences to make your content more readable and scannable. Include visuals such as images, infographics, and videos to break up text and enhance your content's appeal.
Offer step-by-step guides, tutorials, or case studies to illustrate your points.
Google Trends and Exploding Topics are useful for trendy topics. Analyze the competition of your keywords and their monthly search volume.
Research Rabbit is another useful tool for research papers if your niche is an academic topic.
You may also find useful browser extensions to create step-by-step guides like Tango
Best Content Research Tools
Content research tools are when creating content because the internet is vast, and there's hardly any limit to what you can find out about a subject matter. Let's see the best content creation tools for research.
Be original, authentic and create novel content
Create unique content that showcases your voice, perspective, and experiences. Avoiding grammatical errors is also critical for your users. Avoid rehashing or duplicating content found elsewhere.
Share personal stories and anecdotes to connect with your readers and make your content relatable.
If you are not a native English writer, using tools like LanguageTool could help a lot.
Promote your content through social media and optimize it for search engines
Hyperlinks are great. It navigates your audiences to where you want. Share a tweet and navigate your users to your money page.
Implementing search engine optimization best practices is crucial for successful bloggers. Organic search traffic is the most significant source of traffic for most blogs.
It brings users without marketing such as keyword research, proper use of title tags and meta descriptions, and internal and external linking, to make your content more discoverable and accessible to potential readers.
Google Ads has a very useful tool called Keywords Planner. Extensively use it for your keyword research. Buffer like tools allow you to publish your work to multiple channels.
If you are interested, you may check the list of content creation tools
Part 2: Generating Income from Blog
What are the ways of generating income from your blog?
- Ads
- Affiliations
- Subscriptions
- Donation
A) Income from Ads
Ad revenue depends on site traffic, and site traffic depends on making the blog visible. Numerous platforms are eager to show ads on your blog site if your site has a considerable amount of traffic. In other words, at the very beginning of your blogging days, it is difficult to be accepted as a publisher on those ad platforms.
Even though you get income for impressions, the real income comes with user interactions for ads you show. In other words, you mostly earn by the number of clicks your ads get.
The income by click depends on many factors such as purchasing power, a product that appears in ads etc… It is reasonable to get more when you show an ad to a U.S. citizen rather than a citizen of a country where its citizens have much lower income.
As a side note, if you have negative feelings about advert contents appearing on your site, you'll have complete control over adverts.
Here, the most popular ad platforms for your personal blogs can be listed as follows:
B) Affiliate Income
What is affiliate marketing?
One of the most used ways to get income from your content is affiliations. Basically, you review some products and link to those products.
The links have special fragments which detect new coming users that are acquired from your platform.
In this way, honest reviews will be rewarded as growing audiences. Growing audiences increase your visibility and so your income.
YouTube video reviews and other product reviews are examples of affiliation type of income. Those video links generally include Amazon affiliate links.
In this type of income, in other words, partnership, the affiliate (you) earns a commission for generating sales, leads, or other desired actions for the merchant through their unique referral link.
Let me draw a sample process for an affiliate marketing process.
How does affiliate marketing work?
- Affiliates sign up for an affiliate program: Affiliates join an affiliate network or an individual company's affiliate program that offers products or services relevant to their niche.
- Affiliates receive unique referral links: Once they've joined the program, affiliates receive unique referral links, which they can use to promote the merchant's products or services on their websites, blogs, social media platforms, or email campaigns.
- Affiliates promote the products or services: Affiliates create content, such as blog posts, reviews, tutorials, or social media posts, to promote the merchant's products or services using their referral links.
- Customers click on the referral links: When potential customers click on an affiliate's referral link and make a purchase or complete another desired action (e.g., signing up for a newsletter), the transaction is tracked and attributed to the affiliate.
- Affiliates earn a commission: Based on the agreed-upon commission structure, affiliates earn a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for each lead or action generated through their referral links.
Affiliate marketing benefits both the merchant and the affiliate. Merchants gain access to a wider audience and only pay for results, while affiliates can generate passive income by promoting products or services they believe in.
What are my options for affiliate marketing?
If there's a product that fits your niche and will benefit your readers, why not write a review for it? By doing that, your readers would benefit from your opinions.
There are numerous products that you can be affiliated with:
- Books
- Games
- Online Services and Digital Products
- Physical Products
What are the best affiliate marketing programs and platforms?
The most popular affiliate marketing program, affiliation platform, and curated lists are as follows:
- Amazon Associates: Amazon’s affiliate program that allows you to promote any product on their site and earn a commission for each sale made through your unique affiliate link.
- Commision Junction: Commission Junction: another popular affiliate network that offers a wide range of merchants to promote.
- eBay Partner Network: eBay's affiliate program that allows you to earn commissions on eBay items that are bought through your affiliate links.
- Partner Stack : A platform that connects you with software and SaaS companies that offer recurring commissions.
- Rakuten Marketing Affiliates: Rakuten Marketing Affiliates: a popular affiliate network that allows you to promote physical products from a wide range of categories.
- ShareASale: ShareASale: a large affiliate network that offers pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, and pay-per-click programs.
- Best Affiliate Programs: A list of the best affiliate programs for bloggers and content creators.
C) Income from Subscriptions (Charge for Premium Content)
We are living in a micro-creators era. If you believe that you have novel things to share, then subscription-based income would be a suitable option for generating income from your blog.
When you specialize in your niche, you'll have a laser-targeted audience. This not only allows you to earn by subscriptions, but also with targeted ads.
Furthermore, if you are writing on a profitable niche, then it means you'll have predictable income streams which is a must for full-time blogging.
Putting your content behind a paywall is getting more popular in these days.
Moreover, there are platforms to provide you with all the things you need, and they just cut a small portion of your monthly subscription income.
If you are planning to earn by this way, the content you create would generally be blog posts or email newsletters.
What are the best platforms for subscription-based income?
There are several platforms that can help you generate income from subscriptions.
Some of the best platforms for subscription based monetization for your blog include:
- Medium: You can generate income by writing on Medium. Medium is a platform that allows you to write and publish your content. It has a built-in paywall feature that allows you to charge your readers for access to your content.
- Ghost: Ghost is one of the best blogging platforms that allows you to create and publish your content. It has a built-in paywall feature that allows you to charge your readers for access to your content.
- Substack: Substack is a platform that allows you to create and publish your content. It has a built-in paywall feature that allows you to charge your readers for access to your content. It is free until you generate revenue. Then, it charges 10% of your revenue.
- ConvertKit: ConvertKit is an email marketing platform that allows you to create and send email newsletters. It has a built-in paywall feature that allows you to charge your readers for access to your content. It is free until you generate revenue. Then, it charges 5% of your revenue.
- Patreon: Patreon is a platform that enables creators to earn recurring income from their fans by offering exclusive content, merchandise, and other benefits.
- Kajabi: Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that allows you to create and sell online courses, membership sites, and coaching programs.
When you charge your audience with a relatively low price, it would be important to treat them well and provide them with unique and valuable content.
As a bonus, here is another tool to add a membership feature to your blog.
D) Income from Donation
The blogging service that you offer is something that people want or enjoy. However, if you cannot monetize it fully, then you can think of donations from your readers.
Moreover, you don't need to shy away from asking people who are so generously reading your content for free, to buy you a cup of coffee or some sweet potato fries in return for your efforts, to monetize a blog.
What are the best platforms for generating income with donations?
Here are some of the best platforms to monetize your blog with donations consider:
There are some cool services to do that like:
- Buy me a coffee: A popular platform that enables creators to receive one-time donations from their fans, with the option to offer exclusive content, memberships, or services in exchange.
- Ko-fi: Ko-fi is a simple platform for creators to receive small donations or "coffee" from their fans. It charges 5% of commission on donations, making it an attractive option for creators.
- PayPal Donate: A popular payment provider platform that allows you to receive donations directly from your website or blog.
- Donorbox: Donorbox is a donation platform for nonprofits, bloggers, and other creators. It offers customizable donation forms that you can embed on your website or blog to collect donations.
As I said before, generating revenue is a long-run process. It is better to improve it iteratively.
Typically, it is unclear that which action causes what due to the nature of abundance of factors. Thus, the iterative process makes you aware of your decisions.