Monetizing your blog (part 1)

Just writing a blog post every day does not pay the bills. For some bloggers, the ultimate goal for their blog is to be able to make a living out of it. But in what ways can you actually make money with your blog? In this post, we’ll talk you through a few ways of monetizing your blog. We’ll give some practical tips and discuss the up- and downsides of these different strategies!

Monetizing your blog (part 1)

1.Selling your own products

Of course, you could make money with your blog by selling your own products. The moment you start selling your own products, your blog will also become a shop. Selling products doesn’t necessarily mean selling physical products. You could also sell digital products like eBooks or apps.

Read more: ‘Things to consider for your online shop’ »

For lots of (larger) companies, the blog is a section on their website, mostly used as a marketing tool. A company blog could be a really powerful tool to get some indirect sales. If you blog regularly about relevant topics, you show your audience your expertise and involvement. Also for people who offer consulting, or give workshops for instance, a blog can be the way to present yourself to the world. The exposure to your blog will, in the end, result in more sales for your company.

2. Advertising

You can set up an area on your blog’s home page dedicated to running advertisements. You’ll get paid based on the number of clicks on the banner, or on the number of times the ad is shown to your audience. Google Adsense has a relatively easy pay-per-click model you can set up in just a few steps. Google Adsense will then decide which ads will be shown on your webpage.

Advertising is simple to set up, but it won’t make you rich unless you have a lot of visitors. Also, ads can make your site much slower and potentially annoy your readers if you place too many. Above that, ad blocking has become more and more prevalent. A growing group of people uses software that will hide all advertisements. This trend is making advertising with Google Adsense somewhat more difficult. It’s hard to predict how ad blocking will develop from here.

Of course, if you’ve got a blog with a large audience, perhaps there are companies who want to put an ad on your website directly. You’ll have to reach out to them and communicate a bit more in that case. Major advantage of communicating directly with the companies that place ads on your website, is that you’ll have complete control over the types of advertisements shown on your blog. That way you can make sure that the ads fit your weblog and that you agree with the content of the ads. Advertising in such a way won’t make your site much slower and ad blockers won’t hide these advertisements from your audience.

In the early days of Yoast, we had a great experience using BuySellAds.com. They sell ad space on your site but you can approve each ad individually. Especially when there are advertisers in your space you’d rather not have on your site, this is a very good idea. These ads can also be paid by the time period they’re showing on your site, irrespective of the number of page views or clicks.

More ways of monetizing your blog

Selling your own products, or selling space on your website for advertisements are just two ways of making money with your blog. In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss some other ways of making money with your blog: by writing promoted posts and by affiliating.

Keep reading: ‘10 tips for an awesome and SEO friendly blog post’ »