Best Ways to Monetize Your Blog in 2019

In this guide, I will share my experience with monetizing your blog.

This guide is constantly updated and new features are added, so bookmark it and regularly check 🙂

I tried to collect all possible ways to make money blogging in this one, big piece of content.

I will show steps from the very beginning to first $100 per month made blogging.

You can start without any experience whatsoever.

The main point of this guide is to prove, that it is possible and YOU CAN DO IT.

A lot of the new blogs will quickly cease to exist, simply because the owners of those blogs can’t seem to find a way to make money off the work that they are doing.

Here are the top ways to monetize your blog in 2019:

1. Sell Online Courses

Selling online courses is one of the best ways to monetize a blog because people are getting paid time and time again for work that they did once.

They key to this option is making sure that a person’s audience cannot get them same information through a quick Google search.

This means that the course needs to be unique and address the needs that people currently have!  As soon as a person decides to create an online course, they can utilize options like Udemy or Teachable, to set it all up and then list it as being ready for sale.

If a person spends twenty hours creating their online course and sells it for ten dollars to five thousand readers, they will have made fifty thousand dollars for their time.  That’s equivalent to earning two thousand five hundred dollars per working hour!

2. Write and Sell Ebooks

Ebooks are quite popular at the moment and a person can use the same idea as creating and selling online courses for this monetizing option.

Any ebook should be on a topic that a person is knowledgeable and passionate about, and again it shouldn’t contain tons of information that people can find with a quick internet search.

The most successful ebooks also have lots of graphics, as it is more appealing to the reader’s eye.

A person might not earn as much with their ebook, as they would with an online course, but they can get their name out as an expert in their field and future ebooks will instantly become bestsellers.

3. Utilize Affiliate Marketing

There are millions of products for sale, and businesses are always trying to find ways to boost their sales of those products.  Bloggers can easily take advantage of that fact by becoming an affiliate marketer and sharing some of those items on their website.

In return, the blogger will receive money every time one of their readers purchases those items after clicking on the affiliate link.

Bloggers will not want to affiliate themselves with every business and item for sale, but they will benefit from those who fit the niche of their website.

Amazon is one of the largest affiliate businesses that bloggers love to partner with, as there are a wide variety of items that can be shared within posts.

Bloggers will find that they can earn hundreds or thousands of dollars each year with this type of monetization.

4. Create a Sponsorship

Some savvy bloggers have discovered that they can may quite a bit of money when they create a sponsorship with larger businesses.

Bloggers can receive a product to review, as well as money, to write a post sharing their thoughts and experiences with the product.

Banner ads, guest posts, and email blasts are also good ways to monetize a blog using sponsorships.

5. Become a Consultant

Those who blog are stating that they are an expert in their niche, and this becomes evidently apparent when readers begin to ask the blogger for help doing things.

Once this happens, bloggers can immediately turn into consultants and charge a fee for the assistance that they provide to their readers.

Bloggers can provide these personal services via Skype, or another video messaging app or service.  This is an excellent way for people to earn more money and expand their business and blog.

6. Sell Merch

It can take some time to create merchandise to sell, but if a person sees an increase in blog traffic, this may be the perfect solution.

Many blogger personalities have found success, and money, selling items like journals, coffee cups, t-shirts, and more on their website.

This requires a larger following to make it worthwhile, due to the time it takes to create and then order the items to have in stock.

Of course, a blogger will also need to be prepared to spend time shipping these items out to their readers or finding a third party to do it for them.

These are the best ways for bloggers to monetize their blogs and websites, but it should be noted that no one will get rich overnight with any of these ideas.

It takes time to create content, gain readership, and earn money with a blog of any kind.

Some bloggers will find that it will take two to three years before they can finally reap the rewards of all their writing.

Here are some additional thoughts on blog monetization.

A lot depends on niche

Most bloggers will tell you, that some niches are more profitable than other – e.g. finance and accounting, medicine has higher CPC in AdSense than e.g. blog about toys.

Choose whatever you want, but just be sure about one thing – you LOVE your niche. The main secret of making a successful blog and then selling a product – it’s making sure you LOVE YOUR PRODUCT. Doesn’t matter – virtual product (e.g. e-book, courses, etc.) or a real product (e.g. fitness food) you will be able to sell it only, if you like it yourself.

Same with niche, maybe you are already a world class expert in yoga mats – that’s cool. But, if you are just starting – it’s ok, main thing – if you love what you do, in time you will be able to advance and go really deep into your topic and ultimately become successful.

Brand…?

Some bloggers and companies can spend months in figuring out your brand and domain name. It is a common opinion among most marketers, that branding is more important than ever these times. Google, Instagram, Youtube – all have powerful brand as a vital part of their algorithms.

So, it is important.

BUT.

As a starting blogger it would be a HUGE MISTAKE to spend weeks and even months to figure out your domain name. And then even worse is spending thousands of dollars to buy a fancy domain name with .com extension.

There are tons of successful blogs, which make huge revenue, but host their websites on much cheaper options .co .io .org .info and don’t have domain like: success.com or growth.com

Don’t focus on wrong things. Most important part is, whether people can get some value from your blog or not. Everything else is secondary.

Returning to George, obviously he would like something like yogaforyou.com These days, these kind of domains are premium – either already reserved or cost a lot of money. So, yogaforyou.info or yogaforyou.co – would work as well. These options are available and are much cheaper.

Second thing you will want to do is creating social media profiles and reserving your username.

Ideally, George would have something like @yogaforyou at Instagram, Twitter, Facebook page. But, oops seems like it’s not available. By the way, you can use something like: Namechk – to check availability of usernames and domain names.

Again, it’s not that big of a deal! Don’t concentrate on it. Try @yogaforyouhq or @yogaforyouofficial or even @yogaforyou1

You can tweak your brand name a few times, but it’s not a good idea to do a complete rebranding, just because Twitter username is not available.

Later, when your blog is growing, maybe you will be able to afford and change/buy these usernames and expensive domains.

But, when you are just starting/testing your project – there is no point in buying a brand, which doesn’t exist yet.

By the way, when you finally have chosen your username, you can easily register it on all social media with service like Knowem.

CMS matters a lot?

Next step is CMS.

In my experience, 2 simplest and effective options would be: WordPress or Hubspot.

There are pros and cons to each.

In short, WordPress has more advanced customization/design options. So, if you are just starting out (e.g. creating an affiliate site) – it’s a good choice.

Hubspot is much more limited in customization, but it has one major advantage – you can very easily track your sources and sales. Probably, if you run an agency or sell a lot – Hubspot would be a better choice, because you can nurture each lead better.

WordPress is a standard option – it will be automatically installed with Bluehost or GoDaddy.

Your content

Now, when you figured out your niche, you need to focus, which channel you will focus on. Maybe, it’s even a more important part.

Generally, there are 4 main channels, how you can share your message and collect an audience: text, audio, video and image. Let’s imagine George who wants to run a yoga blog.

– Text content – a content blog about yoga mats – yogaforyou.com – then you need to become SEO expert;

– Audio – run a podcast – on Audible, Soundcloud Yogaforyou Podcast;

– Video, obviously Youtube – create a channel “Yoga with George”;

– Image – Instagram – boost personal Instagram account and sell through Instagram.

Of course, you can (and should!) combine all of these mediums. But, I think first of all you need to figure out, which channel you are really good at and focus all your efforts on it.

Future seems to go in direction of video, visuals and voice. But, don’t always go with hype. All these channels can work and generate revenue. It just depends on which one you are good at. E.g. Neil Patel is stronger in text, while Gary Vaynerchuk has bigger video audience – they both are doing well 🙂