If you’re overwhelmed and have no idea how to make money blogging, well you’ve come to the right place. 
I’ve been blogging since summer of 2016 and all I have to say is starting a blog was one of the best decisions of my life.
My biggest mistake was treating it like “a hobby” for the longest time instead of treating it like a business.
Everyone else out there preaching on how to make money blogging says to “follow your passions” and the money will come eventually.
I tried that for the first 2 years and failed miserably.
So what changed?
Learning how to monetize my blog without the stress, tech confusion, or overwhelm when it comes to finding ways to make money online.
Here are the 7 ways that I make money online now.
How to Make Money with Your Blog
Before we begin, if you haven’t yet, make sure you sign up for bluehost right here so you can build your very own website or blog in under 5 minutes for only a couple of dollars per day.
After you visit the link I recommend you go through the full in depth tutorial on how to start a blog and make money before going through the rest of this guide.
Now when it comes to blogging, there’s an easy way and a hard way when it comes to making money with your blog. I have tried them all. I have wasted years of my life crying on my keyboard praying to the blogging gods to turn my pathetic little blog into a money making online machine. But no matter how many blog posts I’ve read, I just couldn’t help but feel disempowered thinking that I could never succeed.
That’s when I realized that everyone teaching people how to make money blogging are giving outdated advice. Most of which make money by just recommending hosting which requires a huge audience to make money. I did not have the luxury of that when starting off so I had to get created. Here was exactly what I did.
1. Make Money With Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing
I am horrible when it comes to low ticket affiliate marketing. This is what every “blogger guru” out there will tell you to focus your time and attention on and I am telling you straight up that it is a waste of time especially when starting off.
If you check out my dashboard on the amazon associates platform. I’ve only made a total of $.04 for the entire month.
This was one of my biggest frustrations when I first got started because I was told that this was what I should be focused on. What was a big shift for me was when I pivoted to high ticket affiliate marketing by partnering with expert product creators to do the selling for me.
2. Make Money With High Ticket Affiliate Marketing
(Source: My Affiliate Dashboard on Thrive Cart)
I stumbled onto this by accident. I was blogging for years before I ever tried high ticket affiliate marketing. Because of the way I was raised, I had this belief that success comes from hard work. Seeing my parents work 16 hours per day to make ends meet just to make sure my sister and I could have a better future than they did when they were children, I had this belief that for me to make more money I had to work extremely hard and trade my time for it.
These traits carried over to my blog. When I first got started I thought that I had to do all the hard work..
For me to make money blogging I had to spend years building an audience, and another year or so to sell those audiences courses that I created.
But I had this fear of failure and imposter syndrome that made me believe that no one would actually ever buy from me.
That’s when I accidentally stumbled onto high ticket affiliate marketing.
Here’s exactly how I was able to do it.
Step 1. Build an audience
While trying to make low ticket affiliate marketing work, I accidentally built up a decent size audience on my blog, Pinterest, and YouTube channel.
But even though the numbers were going higher my income was still not existent.
One way of building an audience fast is by interviewing influential people. The product that we began partnering with was because a podcast accidentally started going viral on my YouTube channel of one of my mentors that makes $1m per month profit.
Step 2. Ask the audience what they want
As more and more people came in, instead of me trying to create a product to sell, I surveyed the people coming in on my email list exactly what was their biggest problems and challenges.
Understanding the 4 C’s of marketing in this regard was key. I had to get clear on who my customers really were and what they wanted.
Step 3. Find the solution
Once they told me their biggest pain points, I decided that I did not have what it takes to solve their challenges. But I didn’t just give up and left them hanging. Instead I reached out to people online to see if they could solve their problem.
This was the birth of my podcast which was my way of documenting reaching out to experts to see who could help solve my audience’s problem.
Step 4. Sell their solution not yours
I am horrible at selling. I was last place in the boy scouts when we had to sell popcorn to my uncles and aunts. But because I leveraged someone else’s expertise, they were the ones that did all the hard work. Which leads me to the next way of how I make money.
3. Make Money With Webinars
(Source: My Dashboard on WebinarJam)
Here’s a run down behind my webinar software analytics on how we sold high ticket affiliate marketing. As you can see this is where the sales came from on the screenshot above. This was the sales from the live webinar room. The remainder transactions came from the email marketing sequence and the upsells.
How this worked was I found the perfect expert to sell the product for me. I invited my audience to a free webinar. They attended. The expert did all the selling for me.
This is where the majority of my income came from on my blog.
And it is something I wish I had done sooner.
Here is the webinar that we drive YouTube and Facebook ads to that retargets everyone that hits this blog from all traffic sources.
4. Make Money Selling Courses
(Source: foundertips.com)
I used to sell my own courses on teachable but they were a pain to manage. I had to constantly go back in and update things and it was taking away my time from actually growing my blog as a business. So for that reason I have for the time being stopped selling my own courses because leveraging experts to do the high ticket selling for me has been so much easier.
What I am doing instead is finding expert course creators and creating strategic partnerships with them instead.
This way I don’t have to actually create my own course, and instead I can take a pick on the top courses out there that I could sell without having to do any of the customer service or product updates.
If you’re new and just getting started, I would stay clear in trying to sell your own course unless you have the guidance or the mentorship to make sure you create an excellent product that creates transformation in people.
5. Make Money Selling Books
(Source: Amazon Direct Publishing)
One of the ideas I had to make money online was selling ebooks and physical copies on Amazon.com.
I went through a little experiment where I would see if I could make money with a book that I wrote because I saw other people were making money with ebooks so I thought why not.
This is not recommended for beginners.
After intensely writing the book and got it published, I was surprised to see that the sales did not just come pouring in. I had to do so much promotion for it and the max amount of money I have ever made in a given month selling books was only $500.
6. Make Money With Strategic Partnerships
(Source: Providential Marketing)
This is the part of my blog that I am most excited about. When it comes to making money blogging you have to realize that even though many people start off blogging as a hobby, that it should be treated like an actual business.
When I started viewing my blog as a business that is when everything changed.
I realized that I cannot and SHOULD not be doing everything.
I have to choose all the things that I enjoy doing and that I am good at, and all the things that I hate doing and am horrible at. I should partner up with other people.
This is my approach with courses. I realized I am not the best course creator out there. It takes up too much of my time, and I am severely impatient. But what I AM good at is creating content and networking.
So much of my time now while running my blog is spent networking with people that have complementary skill sets to me.
Where my strengths cover their weaknesses, and where their strengths cover my weaknesses.
This is a significant part of blogging that I hear no one else talk about.
But here’s the thing..
What if making money with your blog didn’t have to be so difficult?
What if there was an easy way to do things?
I’m here to tell you that there is. And that is by finding what is known as your “zone of genius.”
Once you figure that out, you should spend all of your time and energy to cultivate and grow your zone of genius. All of the other complicated stuff, let other people who enjoy figuring that out handle it.
7. Make Money By Selling Consulting
(Source: FlexJobs)
This is an area that I am transitioning into. I see that there is a big gap in the market place when it comes to businesses taking their products and services online. And if you’re someone with digital marketing skills like running paid advertising, building websites, email marketing, or managing social media, there are businesses out there that are willing to pay you big money to manage or consult on these areas.
My sister for example is only 22. She was supposed to be a nurse. Now she gets paid $125 an hour to consult with big health and wellness companies how to improve their online marketing strategy.
How do beginner bloggers make money?
Most beginner bloggers make money from affiliate marketing and selling their own courses. This in my opinion is not only the amateur way to make money with a blog, but it is extremely difficult to get traction. Most beginner bloggers spend years trying to make their blog make an extra $500 per month.
What I would recommend instead is realizing that a blog is much bigger than just talking about “your passions.” It can be your foot in the door to make some big deals when you deal with businesses on the B2B level. Instead of making $2 of your ebook, you can make $2000 for your services doing the EXACT same things you normally would with your passion blog.
How much money can you make from a blog?
If you treat your blog like a hobby, you won’t make much. If you treat it like a business, then well the sky’s the limit.
There are people that are able to make an extra $1000 on the side of their full time job. There are also people like me who scale to over $30,000 per month. Then you have rare individuals like Making Sense out of cents and Pat Flynn who were able to take their blogs to over $100,000 per month.
The amount of money you make from your blog depends on how strategic you are with your partnerships, traffic sources, and offers.
All you need to make money blogging is:
- An audience with a specific pain point that you can gain from YouTube, Pinterest, or Google
- A way to get in front of them by ranking for a specific keyword related to their pain point
- An offer that solves their pain point (affiliate marketing)
What type of blogs make the most money?
Blogs that make the most money are the ones catered to solving business owners problems. If you spend all of your time writing cook books because it’s your passion, you will need millions of visitors to your blog to make even a considerable amount of income.
I’m no Rachel Ray, so I had to be more creative.
That’s why my blog is more positioned in the finance and business space where people are already inclined to want to increase their finances by growing their businesses with softwares like webinars and paid traffic.
One client from there can easily pay you $2000 for a simple service, and when you recommend a software to them that’s more expensive for the mainstream consumer. Not only can they afford higher priced solutions over $500, but some of the payouts with these affiliate programs can be $100+ per transaction.
Are blogs still profitable?
Long gone are the days where you can just write a bunch of words and luckily get ranked first page of google. To be a profitable blog you need to have a strategy.
My strategy to not only maintain profitability but to grow it month after month is by pinpointing the highest level business owner, finding out their pain points, and creating the content that bridges the gap from their pain point to a solution. That solution would either be high ticket software or consulting.
How long did it take you to make a living from your blog?
It took a long time. But that is because I treated it like a hobby. The moment I went back to my blog with a different lens and saw it as a business instead was the moment things started picking up.
It took me years to make a full time living from my blog. But that was because I was lazy and I was making money in other side hustles and online businesses.
But when I revisited the blog back in 2019, I realized there was a huge untapped potential. And from the blog alone I was able to make a full time living within 90 days after treating it like a business.
How long does it take to make $500 per month blogging?
When I started treating my blog seriously again in mid 2019. It took me less than 90 days to make $500 per month blogging.
This is exactly how I did it:
- I found a high ticket offer (something that I can get high commissions for $100+)
- I asked myself, “Who are the people that are ALREADY looking for this solution but have no idea this solution exists?”
- “How can I create content that puts this offer in front of those people?”
If you ask yourself these questions with your niche or blog idea, you can accelerate your growth to hitting your income goals.
How To Make Money Blogging Summary
Well there you have it. Here are all the 7 ways to make money blogging. As you can see, some ways are far more profitable than others. So what you can do now is not waste any more time and focus on the 20% of things that will pull in 80% of the results.
What are those things you asked?
Simple.
- Create your blog in the next 5 minutes or less (it cost less than $4 per month when you sign up for bluehost here)
- Make a long list of 100 people you can partner with that are experts at what they do (you can check out how I did it with my podcast)
- Have them do the selling to the audience that you build
Wala there it is. The secret to make money blogging. If you don’t procrastinate and really start asking yourself these questions, the world you’ll be able to open up for yourself on the other side of starting your blog would be life changing. Start your blog today.
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NOTE: This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info. This adds no cost to you but it helps me focus on giving as much value as possible in every single post by being compensated for recommending products that I love using.
