Do you want to know how to make money from a blog? Many people enjoy blogging as a hobby, but it is also a great way to make money online.
You’ll also be glad to hear that making money from a blog is easier than ever.
So, you already have a blog and have been writing great posts for a while.
Time to make a change! But how do you do it?
This post will show 15 tried-and-true ways to monetize a blog and make money online.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
1. Start Affiliate Marketing
To make money from your blog, you should look into affiliate marketing.
The most popular method for earning money for bloggers is affiliate marketing. Through affiliate marketing, you promote the products of other businesses. You get a commission when someone uses one of your affiliate links to buy the product.
You get $5 for every sale. If 100 people click on your affiliate link and buy the product, you make $500.
Joining affiliate programs like: is the best way to find products to sell on your blog.
Sign up and look through these affiliate networks to find affiliate products you can sell. Almost every industry or niche has an affiliate program, including fashion, food and drink, education, health, and more.
It’s best to choose products that fit the niche of your blog. By selecting products related to your place, you can be sure that your audience will be interested in them and more likely to buy them.
For example, if your blog is about fitness, you should promote products related to fitness, such as athletic wear, exercise equipment, and so on.
Once you’ve set up your affiliate site and started getting traffic, you can use OptinMonster to get even more affiliate income.
2. Use Ad Networks to put ads on your blog
When most people think about how to make money with a blog, the first thing that comes to mind is advertising.
Putting ads on a blog is an easy way to make money with Google Adsense. Google Adsense is an ad network that shows ads on websites. Google runs it. When someone visits your website and clicks on one of your ads, you get paid.
The advertisements on your blog are specific to the audience and the website’s content.
Also, it’s straightforward to add Google Adsense to your blog. After you set it up, the ads will show up independently.
With a tool like MonsterInsights, you can also keep track of how many Adsense coins you’re making and which ads are doing the best.
3. Directly Sell Ad Space
Google Adsense is easy to set up, but you can only make a little money. So, think about selling ad space directly on your blog.
When you sell ad space directly, you can decide how much it will cost. You can charge a flat rate for a banner ad on your blog instead of getting paid a small amount each time someone clicks on an ad. By setting a flat rate, you can make more money, and it’s easier to keep track of than tracking clicks.
You can connect with businesses that want to buy ad space on your site by making a “Advertise Here” page or using a platform like BuySellAds.
Directly selling ad space is more complicated than using Google Adsense because you have to negotiate prices, develop terms and agreements, handle billing, and handle all the other details.
But if you use a tool like AdSanity, you can make the process easier. AdSanity makes it easier to manage ads on WordPress sites. You can easily track views and clicks, put ads on your site, and more.
4. Take Sponsorships for blog posts
A sponsored blog post is a common way for blogs to make money. In short, a company pays you to write blog posts about its products. They might even write the post themselves, so all you have to do is publish it.
It’s like how Instagram or YouTube influencers get paid to promote a product.
Many companies are willing to pay you a lot of money to write about their products or services on your blog if they look good, have good content, and are updated regularly.
You can connect with companies that pay by joining blogger networks like:
You can also contact brands to see if they want to work with you.
You can use a tool like Canva to put together a media kit. With Canvas ready-made templates, you can quickly create a beautiful media kit.
Your media kit should have information about the types of people who read your blog, how many people look at each page, how many people follow you on social media, and other numbers that interest advertisers. Then, send your media kit to companies you want to work with.
But keep in mind that bloggers in the US must follow the FTC’s Endorsement Guidelines by making it clear to readers that a post was paid for. So, start the post with something like, “This was paid for by ABC company.”
5. You can get paid to write reviews
Like accepting sponsored guest posts, getting paid to write reviews is a way to make money from writing.
With paid reviews, you can try a product, write about it on your blog, and then get paid.
Of course, you want to review products related to your blog’s niche and those who read it. Reviewing budgeting software and apps makes more sense than vacuum cleaners if you have a budgeting blog.
You can contact brands directly, like with sponsored posts, or use a site like PayPerPost to find companies that would pay you for a review.
6. Convert Your Blog into a Subscription Site
Because your content is so valuable to them, your most loyal fans will be likelier to pay to read more of it.
It’s similar to locking your content behind a door when you convert your blog into a membership site. It can only be accessed by those who have the key (a paid subscription).
Users can pay a one-time fee to get access or a monthly payment to make money from your blog repeatedly. As you can see, selling memberships also is one of the best ways to make money from a blog.
Using the best membership plugins, you can quickly convert your blog into a membership site.
An all-in-one membership plugin that we recommend is MemberPress.
MemberPress is easy to set up, has powerful access rules that let you decide precisely which pages or posts users can see, enables you to make beautiful pricing pages, and more.
7. Create a Private Forum
You don’t have to make your whole website a paid membership site. Instead, you can make a private forum to which people must pay.
A forum is a page on your site where people can talk about different things and ask you for help one-on-one.
Adding a forum to your blog is a great way to get more people interested and build a community around it. With paid subscriptions, you can also turn your blog into a source of income.
You can use a WordPress forum plugin; making a private forum on your website is easy.
8. Write an eBook
Selling ebooks is another common way to make money from a blog, and it’s a great way to make money while you sleep.
Passive income is money that comes in with little or no work on your part. If you want to write an ebook, you only need to do it once. Then you can sell that ebook to your readers over and over again.
But your ebook needs to be good if you want to sell it.
The most important thing is that the topic of your ebook should be interesting to the people you want to read it. Sarah Mae, a blogger, wrote an ebook based on a question about forgiveness that her readers often ask her.
But you can also turn one of your most popular blog posts into an ebook and make a great ebook that your audience will love.
For example, if you have a popular blog post about SEO, turn it into a more extended eBook for your readers.
9. Sell other electronic products
You can also make money from your blog by selling digital products like templates, printables, WordPress themes, video tutorials, audio recordings like music or podcast episodes, etc. If you have a skill and a digital product your audience will find helpful, sell it!
Here’s how ScrapGirls does it: they sell templates and printables for scrapbooking that their readers will love.
You can use Easy Digital Downloads to sell digital goods on your site.
The Easy Digital Downloads plugin makes it easy to sell digital products. It has things like a shopping cart, a way to keep track of customers, discount codes, and more.
10. Offer Online Courses
You can convert your knowledge into online courses that others can buy if you have something worthwhile to share with your audience.
To teach an online course, you don’t even have to be an “expert.” You can sell online courses on your blog if you know something about the subject and can share it with your readers.
For example, if you have a blog about cooking, you can sell your reader’s video cooking lessons.
Cole’s Classroom is an excellent example of a photography blog that made money by selling courses:
To make a course, you can use a learning management system (LMS) plugin or a downloadable PDF bundle.
Create your online course using MemberPress, which we strongly recommend. The best WordPress subscription plugin is MemberPress, as we’ve already said. Moreover, MemberPress has tools that make designing, managing, and selling online courses simple.
You can help people, become a leader in your field, and make money by taking an online course.
11. Host a webinar for money
One excerpt strategy to promote your content is hosting a webinar, showing off your expertise, and selling your products. Many bloggers and marketers use this method because it works.
A webinar is like a live video training session or online course that ends with a time for questions and answers. So it’s also an excellent way to talk to your audience.
If you already have a way to make money from your blog, you can use free webinars to promote your products or services. Or, if you have valuable information to share, you can sell tickets to the webinar.
Create a landing page to spread the word about your webinar and get more people to sign up. SeedProd, the best drag-and-drop landing page builder for WordPress, makes it easy to create one.
SeedProd has several landing page templates for webinars to help you get started, and they are easy to change.
12. Get paid for coaching
Do you have valuable skills and the ability to show others how to use them?
Then it would be best to start a coaching service to make money from your blog.
Coaching is about giving advice and tips to people who pay for it one-on-one. For example, a blogging coach can tell their clients how to get more traffic to their blog or build their email list faster.
The kind of coaching you can do will depend on the topic of your blog. If you have a blog about fashion, you could offer coaching and consultations to help your readers find their style.
People can be coached by instant messaging, mobile phone, email or video chat.
13. Start working for yourself to make money
Another popular way to make money online is to use your blog for marketing yourself as a freelancer.
You don’t have to spend time or money making a product to sell before you start freelancing. You have to offer your services.
Do you think you need something to offer your audience? You need to be right!
As a blogger, you’re already a good writer so you can offer businesses your services as a freelance writer. Many freelance writers get their start by writing for blogs.
Are you good at making graphics? Start-ups that need logo design or infographics can hire you as a freelancer.
You can also work as a freelancer to manage social media, market content, keep books, make websites, and do much more.
Freelancing platforms like Upwork can help you find work you can do on your own time. But many people are trying to get jobs on Upwork, and they take a cut of what you make.
Use your website to inform people about your freelancing services. First, put a contact form on your website so potential customers can contact you. With WPForms, it’s easy to make one.
With WPForms, adding a contact form to your site only takes a few minutes. Also, freelance clients can pay and sign right on your form.
You can also send potential clients a cold email or find them on LinkedIn. This way, your online business will stand out more, and you’ll have more control over it.
14. Make money with swag
When you go to a concert, there’s usually a table right in front where you can buy t-shirts from the band. But did you know that merch is another way to make money from a blog?
Many successful bloggers sell t-shirts, hats, phone cases, and other items with their blog logos or slogans printed on them.
For instance, Evie Chapman, who writes a blog about coffee, sells fun items that are related to coffee:
Your biggest blog fans would love to show their support by wearing your swag.
It can be hard to sell things, but with these options, you don’t have to keep track of inventory or ship the items yourself.
15. Take money from people
If people like what you write, they might give you money if you ask.
When you give people free content they enjoy and find functional; there’s nothing wrong with asking for donations. Even well-known sites like Wikipedia ask their users for donations.
You can add a PayPal donate button to your blog so that people can give you money.
All done! If you’ve been wondering how to build your blog from the ground up, these tried-and-true ways to make money will help.
So, now that you know how to make money with a blog, choose one or two of these methods and start making money immediately.
And if you work hard, what starts as a side job could become your full-time job!