How to monetise your blog

You can earn money by displaying adverts on your blog which are relevant to your target audience. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) adverts allow you to get paid if someone clicks on the adverts displayed on your blog while Pay-Per-Impression advertising pays for the number of times an advert is shown.

Many website and blog owners use Google AdSense, an advertising placement service where advertisers bid for your space to display their material. Setting up is relatively straightforward by inserting HTML code where you’d like the ads to appear, such as in your website header or throughout blog pages. Google will guide you through the process and your website platform should be able to help with any coding.

Another popular platform is BuySellAds where advertisers choose from listed publishers and buy advertisement spots.

When considering placing advertising on your blog platform, it’s important to think about your target audience to ensure the adverts they’re shown are relevant. Consider the volume of traffic to your blog to help decide whether advertising is a profitable option for you.

Affiliate marketing is a way of making money by referring visitors to other relevant websites where they may buy items. Some examples you may be familiar with include online selling platforms such as eBay or Amazon and price comparison websites.

For bloggers, a company may choose to place a link, button or banner to their website or product within one of your posts, where you’ll be rewarded for sending customers their way. For example, if you blog about exercise to a targeted running audience, you could tempt them with an advert for running shoes.

You don’t have to do anything but host the adverts, and if you wanted you could write a few honest reviews to warm up your readership and heat up the sales you generate.

If you want an easy way to add affiliate links take a look at the  Amazon Associates programme, it’s simple to set up and you can earn up to 12% from qualifying purchases.

If you build up a substantial following on your blog or social media that directs a large volume of traffic to your website, you could get paid to promote other brand’s products and services.

For example, fashion influencers (those that are leaders on social media and blogs in the fashion industry) can earn money from fashion brands by promoting their products through reviews, pictures or blog posts.

If you have an engaged audience for your content, why not package it up as a book? Depending on the amount of content on your blog, you can compile and expand your most popular posts into a book to give your audience all of your content in one comprehensive narrative or you can expand on popular posts and themes to create something new.

You can then sell this as an eBook from your website and also take advantage of the reach from platforms like Amazon Kindle, where you could earn up to 70% royalty with particular programmes and incentives.

There are many plugins available that allow you to select content from your blog and combine it into a single document leaving you time to expand the content, tidy up the chapters and add an introduction and conclusion.

Take Zoe Sugg (Zoella) as an example who started a beauty blog in 2009 (www.zoella.co.uk), and has since become one of the most influential lifestyle bloggers. The release of her book, Girl Online, in 2014 broke records with over 78,000 copies selling in the first week.

Once you have established an engaged audience and following you can create specialist content that is only accessible to those who pay for it, for example, expansions of existing content, combinations of existing and new content or exclusive video articles and vlogs.

By creating a membership area on your blog, you can offer premium and exclusive content for a monthly fee bringing in long-term revenue, as well as building your community and better engaging with them. Your members are likely to be loyal and highly engaged with your blog content making them more likely to share your links which can increase traffic and number of subscriptions.

Similarly to influencer marketing, you can get paid to publish a post written by an external company or more commonly write a post mentioning a business, often containing a link to their website or products within the content. If you build up your following, you could get paid to contribute content to other sites as a thought-leader or expert in your industry.

Ultimately companies with a similar target audience to your blog readership will pay for you to write about them or for them, directing traffic to their website and raising awareness and brand visibility.

Companies may approach you asking for rates or you could approach businesses in similar industries to offer this service. There are also companies that act as the middleman between yourself and companies looking for sponsored content.

If you have a main business, remember your blog can be used as a tool to help sell your products or services if relevant. Or your blog might even spark an idea for a new business venture that you could create alongside your blogging platform.

Whether you sell handmade crafts or freelance skills, by offering useful and helpful content you’ll build a loyal following who would be more likely to convert to paying customers on an ecommerce site.

There are many different ways you can monetise a blog, some of which we’ve explored in this article. Whether you’d like to start investigating creating some sponsored blogs or looking into exclusive content for your followers, there are different options to try. One of the most important things to remember is to keep your readers front of mind, creating high-quality content should always be key.