Legit Blog Monetization Strategies to Make Money from Home

by | Sep 9, 2021 | High Quality Targeted Traffic | 0 comments

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Making Money Online: Is it really possible?

The question most people ask is: Is it really possible to make money online? And the answer is a big YES. The truth is that it isn’t as difficult as some people think. A word of warning though; don’t fall for the trap of “easy ways to make money online,” because all “online get-rich-quick” schemes are not true businesses.

Thanks to the internet, there is now a wide assortment of ways to make your dream of making money online a reality. In today’s world wherein technology keeps advancing, more and more jobs are available online. And accordingly, this trend is expected to continue well into the future.

There are countless online entrepreneurs who became very successful; most of them did not even earn a college degree. Yet, they have proven that online marketing does work and anyone can succeed if they would just put in enough time and effort.

So, what are the ways by which you can also earn a living online and become successful? While most work-from-home jobs require you to work for someone else, you can actually start your own business that you can run from the comfort of your home, and you may even be able to make a full-time income from it.

So… You want to know how to monetize a blog ?

You’re in the right place…

Your blog is one of the most powerful ways to create an online income, but only if you monetize it right.

In this post, you’re going to discover the best legit, powerful, proven and predictable ways of monetizing your blog, starting today.

How Do I Monetize My Blog?

Just like starting your blog requires some thought, monetizing your blog all starts with making a plan, committing to it, and executing on that plan…

  • Who are you serving?
  • What problems do they have?
  • How can you best provide a solution to that problem?…

There are a ton of ways of monetizing your blog, which you’ll discover in this post, but it’s all about understanding which ones best suit your audience and your business.

In almost every case, the trick to make money blogging means creating a ton of awesome content, not boring pieces of content that makes people fall asleep while reading it.

Learning how to brainstorm and produce amazing content that your audience loves to consume, share, consistently, making sure your content is providing solutions to your readers biggest problems is the quickest way for you to establish yourself as the expert in your marketplace.

Ways to Make Money Online from Home

Listed below are some of the many legit ways you can make a living without having to go through the trouble of reporting for work daily.

1. Affiliate Marketing and Links

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular tools for making extra cash online. With the number of affiliate programs available, it’s probably one of the easiest to do as well.

To start, you’ll need to know what category or type or product you want to promote. You can figure this out by understanding your website’s niche and your audience. Once you know who your audience is and what they’ll find most attractive, you can go out and find an affiliate program or product that fits.

For example, if you’re a sports blog with a mainly male audience between the ages of 20-45, then a sports gambling affiliate might work well.

If you’re just starting out and aren’t sure what type of audience you’ll be targeting (or don’t have an audience yet), don’t worry! Figure out what your niche is and do some research to find out what type of audience you’ll most likely be targeting with your content. Go out and find the affiliates that fit.

The way an affiliate program works is pretty simple: you sign up to the affiliate program (generally through an online software or portal on the company site), get your links, get your banners (if necessary), and input them into your site the most effective way possible.

Anytime someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and purchases the specified product through it, you’ll receive an affiliate commission! It’s as simple as that.

Commission for affiliate vary but are generally somewhere between 20% and 70% (on the high-end). So if you were using an affiliate with a split of 50% and your link led to a sale of a $100 product, you’d receive $50.

If you’re wondering, “Okay this is great, but what if I don’t know my audience, sign up for the wrong affiliates and don’t make any sales?”. Don’t worry – this is bound to happen, especially if you’re just starting out.

If you’re not making any sales after a while, there could be a variety of things to assess the issue. It could be your content, your traffic, your links, etc. But if you find that your audience isn’t resonating with your links, then just do some trial and error! Find some other links, input them, and see how they perform. Do this as many times as you need to and find what works for your site.

Another important factor is making sure your links are organically placed in your site’s content. What do I mean by that?

Don’t make it sound like you’re trying to sell a product to your reader’s and instead make it seem like you are providing them with an easy and direct link to make the buying process that much easier for them.

For instance, if you have a blog where you write reviews on home and kitchen products, that would be a great and natural place to input affiliate links. You might write a blog post on the best blender to use for a smoothie, include 5 or 6 reviews on different smoothies your readers could buy online, and then include the links to each one – with your affiliate links serving as each of these links.

This way your readers can read your review, conveniently click on a direct link to any of the products they believe best suits their needs, purchase it, and you get the commission on it.

So where can you find products to promote? Here’s some of the top affiliate programs on the market today:

2. Sell Ad Space On Your Site

If you have a website with a lot of traffic coming to it and you know the type of traffic is high quality, then you will benefit greatly from selling banner ads on your site. It’s also an easy way to make money in your spare time.

There’s a number of ways to earn by selling ad space on your site. For instance, incorporating Google’s Adsense on your website is one way to make money from online advertisements. Another way is to sell ad space directly to companies, advertisers or anyone looking to promote something.

Based on how good your traffic is, you can determine your own price for different ad space on your site. Determining your price based on traffic can be tricky so starting off low and working your way up depending on how the ads perform is the best strategy.

You’ll know how good your traffic is based on the amount of monthly visitors and how engaging they are with the current content of your site. Once you get banner ads on your site, you’ll have a much better idea by examining the impressions, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

How much you get paid for ad space will depend on your visitors as well as the type of rate you sell the ad space for (which we’ll get into below).

The upside about selling ad space is that if your site gets a lot of monthly traffic from different sources, your banner pricing can earn you a ton of cash every month! And if your site is hyper-focused on a specific niche and only receives traffic from a highly-targeted audience, then that’s good too! Find out who your demographic is and sell your ad space to companies in that niche. Advertisers and marketers love when traffic is targeted – generally ads convert much better on these types of sites.

3. Join a PPC Ad Network 

What is PPC advertising? Pay-per click ads are a pretty simple concept and one of the safest and surest ways to monetize your site. You place banner ads on your site, when they receive clicks, you get paid in your spare time.

These are very beneficial to the publisher (site hosting the ads), however are a larger risk to the advertiser, as they are assuming each click will lead to a conversion and/or sale for them.

You can set up pay-per click advertising yourself directly with companies and advertisers, however using an ad network is much easier.

One of the most popular networks to use on your blog or website is Google Adsense. Google lets you display banner ads for other companies on your pages and posts.

It’s essentially a plug and play network – go to Google Adsense, set up an account, choose your preferences, Google will then give you a code to copy/paste into any space on your site, and you’re ready to go! Everytime someone clicks on the ads, you make money!

4. Join a CPM Ad Network

What are CPM ads? CPM (or cost per thousand impressions) advertisements pay you according to the amount of impressions received on an ad. That means that as long as your readers are viewing the ads on your site, you’re getting paid.

CPM ads work best for blog sites that receive high volumes of traffic. Here are a few CPM ad networks:

There are a variety of ad formats that you can use with CPM advertising, so make sure to know your audience and use a format that is attractive to them. To take full advantage of CPM advertising, make sure you have a mobile-friendly site so you can set up banners via mobile as well.

5. Use CPA Advertising

CPA or Cost-per-Action ads go beyond a view or a click. They also require the user to take a specific action when they arrive to the advertiser’s page. Whether that be subscribing to a list, downloading a software, or purchasing a product.

Here, the advertiser will only pay you when the action takes place, however CPA networks generally pay better than CPM or CPC ads due to higher conversions.

These are our top 10 best CPA ad networks:

If you have a site with smaller traffic volume but a dedicated audience, then CPA advertising will be profitable for you. All the tracking and activities are managed by the CPA ad networks so running CPA ads is generally effortless on your end.

6. Display Pop-up Advertisements

Pop-up ads are a great format for display advertising and help increase your impression count and the potential for clicks.

A pop-up ad appears on top of the current browser page. They used to appear in a separate window/tab, however they’re now typically run as part of the page your visitor is browsing to avoid being blocked by ad blockers.

Pop-up ads can be triggered in a few ways.

You can have a time-driven pop-up, which appears after a user has been on you site for a set amount of time (set by you).

A behaviour-driven pop-up, which appears once a condition is met. For example, a pop-up appears after a visitor has scrolled halfway down a blog post on your site.

Finally, there are exit pop-ups. These are triggered when a visitor attempts to exit the site, and is a great opportunity to extend a special/limited time offer before your visitor leaves.

Here’s our top WordPress plugin pop-up tools:

7. Display Pop-Under Advertisements

A pop-under ad is similar to a pop-up, but just appears in a different place. A pop-under appears in a new window underneath the page the visitor is currently browsing.

These are generally less-intrusive and obstructive to the visitor, however the downside is that they can easily be blocked with modern-day ad blockers (which most users have).

Our recommendations for pop-up and pop-under ads:

  • Place them on your product landing pages and lead-gen pages to catch the attention of interested readers (if they’re reading your blog, they’re probably interested in what you have to say/offer).
  • Use different pop-ups and pop-unders for each of your pages. For example, your landing page might have a pop-under that comes up right away with a certain offer, but then also have an exit pop-up with an even better offer.
  • Don’t spam your site visitors every time they visit your site.

8. Set Up RSS Feed Ads

If you choose to include ads in your RSS feeds, your options are mainly limited to pay-per-click ads, similar to Google AdSense. Here are a list of some of the companies that can help monetize your RSS feed:

A few things to consider before setting up RSS feed ads:

  • Are your ads relevant to your site’s content? The ads should fit naturally in with your content so as not to be off-putting to your audience.
  • How many ads will appear within the RSS feed? In other words, don’t bury your content between ads and piss off your readers – remember, they’re their for your content, not the ads.
  • Make sure your ads are clearly marked so readers don’t confuse them with your site content.

9. Display Audio Ads

Audio creates a more personal experience for the user compared to other formats – there’s personality, tone and messaging and can’t be replicated via text. According to Adobe’s State of Voice 2019, almost 40% of consumers find voice ads on smart speakers to be more engaging and less intrusive than online, print, TV, and social media ads.

With the popularity of audio ads growing, using it as a tool to monetize your site isn’t a bad idea.

Setting up audio ads is similar to the other ad formats I mentioned: you’ll need to integrate your website to a designed ad server and dynamically insert ads via Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI). By providing a more engaging and personalized listening experience you’ll be able to naturally improve the ROI of your site.

Here’s my top audio ad networks for your website:

10. Using Native Advertising

Native ads work within the same pricing format as any other ads (CPM, PPC, CPA, etc), with the main difference being that they are designed to fit neatly and organically within the content.

Native ads are meant to match the look and feel of your site and look “native” to the site’s content, providing a better overall experience to your visitors.

Visitor’s will still recognize them as advertisements, but won’t feel as intrusive.

There are a few ways to monetize through native ads: you can code them in yourself with whatever content management system you’re using. If you want a bit more control, you can use an ad servicer to manage and run the ads through, such as Revive Adserver. However this is a much more in-depth and expensive option. Finally, you can join any one of the major ad networks that I mentioned above.

11. Offer Coupons (with affiliate links)

With coupon affiliate marketing, you can partner up with affiliate networks that distribute promo codes to large coupon sites. Setting up coupons on your site is just as simple as setting up affiliate links … it just offers an alternate way of doing it.

To monetize this option even further, you can include coupon offers on your newsletters, email blasts, etc. The benefit with coupons is your audience will feel like they are getting a deal by visiting your site – this will lead to more recurring visitors and a high conversion rate on the affiliate coupons.

The affiliate coupon industry is large and because of that, it will attract spammy and illegitimate affiliate programs. To save you the effort, I’ve listed some of the best ones below:

  • Coupon marketplace sites are generally the best and work with some of the largest and highest paying advertisers in the industry. Check out Offers.com and savings.com.
  • Curated coupon sites will list by category and brand, focusing on specific niches, which helps you pick and choose the best coupons for your site. Examples are DealsPlus and TechBargains.
  • Cash-back coupon programs, such as Ebates and CouponCabin, have very loyal user bases due to the cash-back feature. These generally perform very well.
  • Coupon apps and extensions like Honey and Ibotta are great if you have a lot of traffic via mobile users.

12. Sell Your Own Digital Product

If your website has a lot of traffic coming to it and your user base is committed to your content, then creating a digital product to sell is one of the best and easiest ways to make extra cash on your site!

There are a variety of options in terms of what you want your digital product to be. This will be largely based on who your audience is and what they find attractive about your content.

For example, if your site offers a lot of content around lead generation efforts, you might want to offer a paid course on how to become an expert in lead gen for B2B marketing.

You can sell digital products in two ways: through your own site or through a third party platform. While selling through a platform removes some of the effort for you, there are a number of benefits to using your own site: you’ll keep your own profits (third party platforms either charge a fee or take a percentage of your sales); better customer relationship management (more functionality and customizability); and flexibility and independence.

13. Sell an Ebook

One of the best ways to monetize your site while doing something you love and sharing your passion with others is to sell an Ebook.

People are coming to your site because they enjoy your content and feel like you have something important to say – they respect and listen to your expertise. An Ebook allows you to extend that knowledge into a monetized version of content.

Creating an Ebook is simple:

  • Create the content for your Ebook – what does your audience find interesting?
  • Format your Ebook – make it a simple format so readers can easily access (PDF)
  • Proofreading – might be worth getting a professional to look it over
  • Create a cover that will sell – Hiring a freelancer through Upwork is an easy and cheap way to create a design
  • Convert your Ebook – Larger Ebook publishers like Amazon and Kindle use MOBI to format, but simply making it a downloadable PDF is easy and inexpensive
  • Add and promote it through your site and other channels

14. Resell Web Hosting

Reseller hosting is done by purchasing a reseller website hosting package and reselling it to your clients or site visitors as your own hosting company. The appeal being you can modify your features and pricing to resell to a specific niche of users that are looking for that service.

This option is very simple however I wouldn’t jump into it before doing your research on web hosting. You also have to make sure you have the right audience for this because it’s so specific.

Here’s our top web hosting reseller plans:

15. Sell WordPress Themes

If you’re reading this post, I’m going to assume you’re familiar with WordPress – and if you know WordPress, then you’ll know that there are thousands of themes you can use on your WordPress site.

Creating a WordPress theme isn’t for everyone, but if you’re a designer and/or developer, then this can be an easy and creative option to monetize yourself online. All you need to do is create the theme, get it on a marketplace, and get it into the hands of those hungry buyers.

Below are some of my favourite marketplaces to get your theme on. Remember: offering a Freemium (basic) version of your theme is a great way to get exposure and downloads:

16. Sell Graphics on your WordPress Site

Maybe creating WordPress themes isn’t your thing and you prefer to have more freedom when creating your designs. No problem! Take your graphic designs and sell them directly through your site.

If you have a niche audience coming to your site and know exactly what they want, then selling graphics through your site is a great idea. You know your audience best and forming the graphics content around them will be best done by you.

However, if you don’t have a large enough audience and don’t think the sales will come through on your site alone, you can also expand your sales through marketplaces such as Zazzle, Society6, or Redbubble.

17. Sell a Physical Product

While the trend seems to be towards digital, physical products can be an essential and profitable revenue stream depending on your target market. People love products they can hold in their hands and place in their homes.

Physical products are easier to build trust with, they have a higher perceived value compared to digital, and are more personal to the customer.

However, it’s important to have all the right systems in place for a physical product. Once you’ve made the sale you’ll need to get the product out to the customer – this is where having a third party shipping and fulfillment center is crucial. Selling physical products is also much harder to scale as your customer base grows. Just some things to keep in mind.

18. Reselling Your Content Offline

Offline content still does exist, despite the massive trend towards digital. Newspapers and magazines still sell and need content to generate those sales. Expanding your expertise and knowledge into the offline world can be a great way to increase your writing portfolio.

Here’s some ways to go beyond the web and expand yourself offline:

  • Free publicity through papers and magazines
  • Low-cost newspapers
  • Giveaways and cross promotions
  • Local endorsements
  • Networking
  • Vendor trade shows
  • Workshops
  • Coupons, flyers and handouts
  • Free products
  • Direct mail

19. Generate and Sell Leads

You don’t need to be a marketing wizard to operate a successful lead generation strategy. If you have a site with an audience, and you know what that audience is interested in, then you have your leads. Any site owner has a unique list of customers that are ready to be sold.

Here’s how to monetize those leads:

  • Understand your audience: who are your site visitors? What are they interested in?
  • Organize your lead offering: what will the product/service be?
  • Build a buyer network: reach out to retail buyers, wholesalers, etc.
  • Establish a lead distribution strategy: how will you sell your leads?

If you need help generating and selling your leads, you can check out services like Boberdoo

20. Sell Text-Link Ads

Text-link ads are a pretty simple concept: you simply turning certain words or phrases of your content into links (ads) in order to earn revenue.

Similar to display advertising, when a visitor clicks the link, they’re redirected to another site (generally an advertiser or company offering a service, software, etc), and then the publisher (you) is paid based on either PPC or some sort of flat fee. Sometimes, these can be affiliate-based as well.

Setting up a text-link ad is simple: sign up with an advertiser that offers text-link ads, install the code snippet to your blog and that’s it! The most popular in-text advertising programs are Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, LinkWorth, and Amobee.

 

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