How to Make Money from an Online Blog

While there are a lot of different ways to make money online, one of the best ways is to create your own blog.

What do you need to know in order to learn how to make money from an online blog?

Well, believe it or not, it’s a lot simpler than you may have ever imagined.

Below, you can see just a few different ways that you can turn a regular blog into a moneymaking passive income machine.

Affiliate Marketing

One of the greatest ways to make money with an online blog can be found in the form of affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Simply put, affiliate marketing is when you as a blogger recommend other people’s products, services, and educational courses and make a commission when your readers click over to the links of the product creator’s websites that you recommend.

One such example of affiliate marketing is the Amazon Associates program.

I’m sure that you have personally used numerous different things that people can buy from Amazon.com.

If you take the time to apply for the Amazon Associates program, and are accepted, then you can recommend products that are available to buy on Amazon.

Once you know how to successfully run your blog, your visitors will read the posts in which you recommend a product over at Amazon, and then click to visit Amazon..

If your visitors then decide to make a purchase from Amazon, you will earn a commission typically 1-6% for sending your web traffic over to their site.

If you decide that you do not want to sell physical products, there are other great affiliate networks that you can partner with such as Clickbank, JVZoo, and many other digital product publishers which have their own affiliate programs such as Wealthy Affiliate.

The key thing that you need to do in order to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign is to learn exactly how to manage and track your clicks, visitors, read your analytics, and track your conversions, just to name a few.

You can do this by taking the time to study a successful affiliate marketing training program.

Selling your own physical products on eBay

As mentioned here I have been successful with ebay and as a seller on ebay a great way to get traffic to my listings is to write reviews and blog posts on my products where readers are given a link back to my eBay store where they can then make a purchase.

With eBay your items are competing with other sellers on eBay as well as around the internet and it may not always be easy to have a competitive price.

However, if you write a decent review on your product and can throw in an extra incentive like, buy here and get a further 10% discount or buy 5 and pay for 4 you will encourage your readers to buy when they get to the store without doing further shopping on price.

Readers and buyers are fairly lazy and if they get a decent review on a product will more often than not click the purchase button if they like what they have read without going any further.

Writing converting reviews is an art in itself and needs to be done correctly to get the maximum conversions.

The beauty with this method is whereas you may get 1-6% with Amazon you can get a lot more profit from eBay. I typically get anywhere from 10-30% profit on my listings which means I only need one sale for every 2-5 sales on Amazon.

There is a benefit to this method but you first need physical stock to sell on eBay and if you are only starting out you may not be there yet.

Google AdSense 

Another great way to monetize your blog comes to you in the form of Google AdSense.

What is Google AdSense?

I’m sure that at some point in time you have been on a website and seen advertisements on the sidebar or in banners somewhere on the site.

Or perhaps you have been searching for information and noticed at the top of the search results are things that say “featured results.”

These areas of advertisement are known as Google AdWords.

People have paid money in order to feature advertisements in those areas of the search results and on websites.

As a blogger, Google will pay you to feature advertisements on your own blog.

Every time someone clicks on an ad that is shown at your blog, you are paid a percentage of the amount that the person or company who purchased the advertisement has paid to Google.

Google AdSense used to be an amazing way to earn a full-time income from your blog.

Now, many bloggers report that they simply do not earn nearly as much as they use to buy running Google AdSense.

While it is still a great way to get started with making money from your blog, many publishers will tell you that you need to eventually shift to another publisher or to affiliate marketing, or to our final recommendation of how to make money from an online blog.

Creating Your Own Product or Membership Area

Regardless of what niche you have decided to pursue with your online blog, there are always people out there who will value your opinions, your knowledge, and your expertise.

With that said, many people have found that one of the best ways to make money from their online blog is to create their own product of some type.

The two typical forms of products that many bloggers create is to either create a digital product such as an e-book or video series, or create a special members-only area that is available to readers for a small monthly subscription or flat rate purchase for a lifetime membership.

Typically, you will not want to create your own product or membership area until you have quite a bit of blogging experience under your belt.

Why is this? Honestly, it can be quite difficult to manage your own products and even more so to manage a membership area.

If you have decided to create your own products, you will need to make certain that you have in place a payment processor, support desk, and refund policy prior to creating your first product.

If you have decided to go with a membership area within your blog, then you are going to want to make certain that you are capable of delivering unique content on a regular basis so that your subscribers feel you are providing them with superior value.

For membership areas, you also need to make certain that you can provide the support, payment processing, and refund policy just like a product release requires.

What You Must Always Remember

The most important thing to remember at any point in time, along your journey of making money with an online blog is to always consider the people who are viewing your blog and reading your content first.

The fastest way to lose your following is to recommend products that are not worth the money that they cost.

By ensuring that you only recommend the best products on the market, you will make certain to continue to gain your visitor’s trust, and ultimately turn them from visitors into buyers.

If you choose to recommend bad products, then you will ultimately only lose your following that you have worked so hard to obtain.

For this reason, you want to make certain that you try every product before recommending it to your online audience.

Always remember that your online blog is a continuing business and not just a way to try and make a quick buck on the Internet.

By following the tips above in order to monetize your blog and always remembering that your visitors come first, you can create an online business that is sure to deliver you with a very nice passive income for many years in the future.