We are slowly coming to an end of this blogging guide, and it’s time we give you some tips on how you can make money (besides) blogging:
Affiliate programs
Many brands nowadays offer affiliate programs to bloggers, hoping that bloggers can help their products reach the target audience. To become an affiliate, you’ll have to play by the brand’s “rules”, and in return, you’ll get paid for it.
Note: Affiliate programs can be very tricky. Once you become a successful blogger, dozens of brands will reach out to you, asking if you would be interested in becoming a part of their affiliate program. We wouldn’t suggest you work with just any brand that reaches out to you. Instead, we would encourage you to limit your participation in these programs, and partner up only with the brands whose products/services you use, truly trust or believe to be worth promoting. After all, you have to be careful when it comes to maintaining your credibility 一 if you collaborate with too many companies to get cash, your blog readers will stop trusting your opinion over time.
Custom ad space
Once your blog reaches several thousand followers, you can set your own ad space, and sell it to ad networks and digital media agencies.
If you want to sell custom ad space, be sure to make a media kit that shows your blog stats 一 who your visitors are, how many of them there are, how many minutes readers spend going through each page on your blog, what your bounce rate is, and other statistics. Don’t forget to make the media kit available for download.
Paid product review
If there is a product/brand you’ve been using for years and have been writing about, chances are the brand is going to reach out and offer you a deal 一 suggesting you write a (preferably honest!) review of their product and get cash in return.
Note: Again, if you want to keep your cred, before partnering up with a brand, make sure that the product(s) you are planning on writing about is the one you use frequently, and have been loving for ages. Also, when posting a paid product review, make it clear that the content is sponsored. Honesty is always the best policy.
Creating other digital assets
Since blogging is essentially writing, you could be writing in other forms of digital media. You could write and sell e-books, booklet guides, or even an e-courses and deliver them in special subscriber-only content in newsletters.
Selling your personal services
A “good blogger” can be almost universally interchanged with either “a good writer” or “an expert in the field”. And experts in their fields can often make some nice cash on the side consulting, speaking, and coaching engagements. It may take some time for these kinds of offers to start trickling in, but once they do, they tend to multiply. Just be patient.
Other writing opportunities
Copywriting is something many bloggers do on the side, especially for web media. Ghostwriting is also a common revenue stream, and is a great way if you want to do something other than blogging, like writing that book you’ve been meaning to write but got distracted by blogging!