How to generate passive income on your blog
Hey everyone, today we are going to talk about ways to generate revenue from your blog, these are the best ways to do it:
- Advertisement;
- Affiliate Links;
- Sell a product or a service;
- Ask for donations;
- Create paid content
- Sell a newsletter
- Create a job board
- Sell merch
Advertisement
Advertisements are the quickest way to start making some money from your blog. You need to integrate into your site a snippet from an AD network, usually pass for a simple review process and you are good to go, there are many AD networks, like Google AD Sense, Outbrain, and Carbon, but there are many more.
Advantages
- A quick way to start to earn some money
- Can be really profitable on high-traffic sites
Disadvantage
- Can bother your readers and reduce interest in your content
- Can draw readers’ attention away from other products on your site
- Not the best option for small, beginning blogs
Also, there are other ways of advertising, like:
- Sponsorships
- Sponsored content
Affiliate Marketing
The second way to earn passive income with your blog is through affiliate marketing. This is a kind of revenue in which a business rewards its affiliates for each visitor or customer they bring through their own marketing efforts. The deal here it’s really simple, you can register yourself in an affiliate program, like the Amazon one, and put some links to their products in your blog. The best way to do it is to try to do it in a way that can relate to the content that you are producing.
Let’s say that you read a book and want to do a review. You can mention the name of the book in some place in the article and put a link to that book on Amazon.com, but instead of just using the plain link, you are going to add your affiliate ID to it, so Amazon can know that the customer came to their site through your blog,
Advantages
- A quick way to start to earn some money;
- More profitable and less intrusive than general advertisement;
Disadvantage
- Also needs a lot of traffic to make a good earning from it;
- Need some care and thinking to find products that are related to your niche and content;
Also, it’s very important that you only recommend products and services that you would actually like and trust. Your audience will trust that stuff because of you, so if it offers a poor experience, it will reflect your brand.
Sell a product
A product can be a great way to generate income from your blog, given that it’s usually very related to what you are writing to your blog readers. Digital products could work great in this category, so you can explore options like:
- Ebooks;
- Video Course;
- Audio recording;
- Audiobooks;
- Software;
- Book.
A great advice here is to build an email list from the beginning, as it is crucial for blogging success. Use platforms like Mailchimp or Mailgun to create an email list, so it will be much easier to market it when it’s ready to be sold.
Remember, it's important to offer products that are relevant to your niche and valuable to your audience. Focus on producing high-quality content and consistently providing value to your readers.
Sell a service
The main difference from selling a product where you dedicate a huge amount of time and can earn every time that it’s sold, selling a service requires that you engage in some sort of work, where you usually are paid by your hour.
Here are some examples of how you can do it:
- Freelancing;
- Consulting;
- Mentoring or coaching;
- Speaking.
Advantages
- Don’t need a huge amount of traffic, only an audience that trusts you and can see you as an authority that can help them achieve their goals.
Disadvantages
- Is not passive income, you will need to actively engage with people to earn some money.
Taking donations
You already saw many blogs that can have that button like “give me a tip” or “buy me a coffee”, which basically contains a link to a payment service like PayPal, where visitors can become donors, giving a one-time donation or even a recurring donation.
This can be really effective and you can start doing it right away because different from advertisements, people don’t bother with donations given this is totally up to each person to donate or not. Besides that, people like to help other people, especially if they feel that they are contributing to something bigger, like funding a project or helping you to keep creating valuable content for them.
But instead of having these “buy me a beer” kind of buttons, you can use a way more effective to collect this donation which is through a crowdfunding site, like Patreon or Kickstarter. Patreon is one of the most famous these days, given it allows you to build some sort of paid community, giving rewards for the ones who want to donate, or even creating tiers between donations, with bigger rewards for the ones who want to donate more.
Besides Patreon, you can find many crowdfunding options like Indiegogo, AngelList, GoFundMe, and so on.
Create a Membership content site
Very similar to having a Patreon, you can create a paid community where you will deliver premium content. This can be done in some ways:
- Closed site: an online courses website where you pay a monthly subscription and can have access to many courses about Laravel;
- Premium content: you can have some of the posts of your blog exclusive for the paid community
Advantages
- Don’t need a huge traffic to earn some good money;
- It can be combined with other strategies;
- Recurring revenue.
Disadvantages
- You need to continuously prospect for new members, giving people will not stick in your community forever. Expect each person to participate in your community for a period between 3 and 6 months;
- You need to continuously engage with community to keep them loyal;
Sell a newsletter
A newsletter is a periodic publication that is sent to a list of subscribers who have opted in to receive it usually through email. This newsletter can be paid and works great in the financial area or in any other area where fresh strategies or information is valuable to readers who need to be constantly updated about it
Advantages
- Another way to quickly get some money without having large traffic to your site;
- Scales well, given the amount of work to create a newsletter for one person is the same as creating it for 1 million;
- You can use newsletter to sell other products;
Disadvantages
- You need to update this newsletter at a defined pace, given users that who are not receiving it periodically will unsubscribe from it.
- Need to find the amount of information that is optimal for your public, too much and they will feel overwhelmed, too little and they will not see great value in it.
Creating a job board
Let’s say that you already have a good reader base on your blog, and you are offering courses or content for a given skill, like web development. If you are providing good content for your readers, chances are that they are having success in developing their skills, and doing that they can apply to job positions in companies that need those skills, so you can work as an intermediate between readers of your blog and these companies.
You can charge it in many ways, for a flat listing fee to these companies or maybe a commission for every professional hired.
Advantages
- You can earn some good money connecting people to these companies;
- Can bring extra traffic to your blog, since new readers already heard that can be hired through your site.
Disadvantages
- Works better if you have a very specific subject, like web development with .NET Core, or Java.
- Need to actively engage with companies to prospect job positions
Selling Merch
Once you have a well-established brand a fanbase, you can produce products with your blog’s brand on it. It can be done in many products, like T-shirts, stickers, mugs, and so on.
To sell merch on your blog, you can follow these steps:
- Design your merch;
- Find a printing and fulfillment service;
- Set up an online store;
- Promote your merch;
- Handle customer support and fulfillment.
Advantages
- You can gain on the scale, given if the more sales you have cheaper will be to produce this content;
- On top of earning some money with that, you are also gaining free marketing with these products.
Disadvantages
- Need to build a loyal fan base, otherwise will not have a great return;
- You need to take care of product quality and logistics, or at least outsource it for a platform or service for a fee.
Remember, building a loyal fan base and consistently producing high-quality content will help drive interest in your merchandise. Continuously engage with your audience and seek feedback to improve your products and grow your merch sales.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to earn some money from a blog, you can combine and experiment with many of them and see what can generate the best results. You can also keep in mind that you don’t need to generate huge amounts of money, maybe a couple of extra bucks to pay server costs or buy anything from you can be something that will give you an extra reward for your work.
Also before you go, I would like to give you three tips to earn money from your blog:
Be consistent:
If you want to have success with your blog, the best way to do it is to be committed and consistent with it. That way, you will be able to build something in the long run, remember, success takes time, don’t expect to be the millions of readers over a couple of months.
Be patient and celebrate small wins:
Most likely a blog will not be your primary source of income, so take it lightly, celebrate the first comment, and be excited when you gain your first dollar from it, for sure it will not completely change your life, but for sure it will give you a sense of success, a sense of building something meaningful. Also, always be critical about what you write and what you are doing, that way you will be able to find what works most and improve over time
Focus on high-quality content:
I know, everybody wants to make more money, but let this happen naturally and instead focus on how your content can be helpful to your readers. You certainly heard this already, that isn’t worth producing content carelessly, especially in this AI content-generated era, Don’t fall into the trap of generating anything just for the sack to have more content. Produce stuff that you will be pride to show to your mom