How to Make Money Blogging

You’re following your passion by turning it into a blog — you’re already halfway there to becoming successful in the moneymaking department.

So, how can you monetize your blog?

This section will teach you everything you need to know to turn your blog posts into cash.

Advertising with Google AdSense

Google AdSense lets you place Google advertisements on your blog, which earns money for each click by site visitors.

You make money when people click on an ad, and you don’t have to do anything but host the ad on your site.

You do need to recognize that the money you make from ads is merely supplemental income of an unknown amount, which you are trading off for hosting advertisements on your site or blog.

In other words, you probably won’t be able to buy that Lamborghini just by hosting ads on your blog.

☞ Fast Fact:
If your click through rate (CTR) is 1%, and your cost per click (CPC) is 25 cents, then you need 100,000 visitors a day to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense (Mohan 2016).

Google puts relevant CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads through the same auction and lets them compete against one another.

The auction for the advertisement takes place instantaneously, and Google AdSense subsequently displays a text or image ad(s) that will generate the maximum revenue for you.

Becoming an AdSense publisher is very simple. You can fill out a brief application form online at www.google.com/AdSense, which requires your website to be reviewed before your application is approved.

Once approved, Google will email you HTML code to place on your Web pages.

Once the HTML code is saved onto your Web page, it activates, and targeted ads will be displayed on your website.

You can also make money by putting a Google search box on your website, which literally pays you for search results. This service may help keep traffic on your site longer since site visitors can search directly from your site.

This is free for you to do, and it’s super simple — why not?

Google says that their “ad review process ensures that the ads you serve are not only family-friendly but also comply with our strict editorial guidelines. We combine sensitive language filters, your input, and a team of linguists with good hard common sense to automatically filter out ads that may be inappropriate for your content.”

You don’t have to worry about inappropriate content on your blog is basically what that means.

You can customize the appearance of your ads, choosing from a wide range of colors and templates.

This is also the case with Google’s search results page.

To track how much money you make, Google has a ton of tools you can use.

Setting Up Your Campaign

Once you fill out the application form, it’s pretty important that you at least browse through the terms of service.

In particular, you must agree that you won’t tamper with the ads on your page.

In other words, you can’t click on your ads, have others click on your ads, or place text on your website asking anyone to click on your ads.

The reason for this is simple — Google doesn’t want you to generate revenue by clicking on your own ads (it’s like stealing).

Screenshots © Google Inc. and are reproduced with permission.

When your website is reviewed and your account is approved, you will receive a confirmation email.

To quickly set up your account, follow these steps:

Step 1) Log in to your account.

Step 2) Create and apply your AdSense code. This can sound confusing, but we promise it isn’t. Click on the “AdSense Setup” tab and follow the guided steps to create your code. Then, copy that code and paste it into the HTML source of your site.

If you don’t know how to add the HTML code to your blog, visit https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/181947?hl=en&ref_topic=28893&rd=1.

If you don’t want to type out that long address, you can just as easily do a Web search with keywords like “How to Implement Google AdSense Code.”

Step 3) Watch the money flow in! After your ads start, you can see how much you’ve made at any time by checking the “Reports” tab in your account.

☞ Fast Fact:
Some of the top-paying AdSense niches are finance, internet marketing, technology, web hosting, internet & computers, software, and health. Some of the lowest-paying AdSense niches are entertainment, arts, movies, celebrity gossips, news blogs, jokes, wallpapers, quotes, recipes, and photo blogs (Mohan 2016).

Reviewing for Money

This is a very controversial subject, but it has definitely gained some popularity.

In short, companies will pay you (the blogger) to do what you do best—blog.

The catch is that you must write about whatever product, service, website, or company that you’re asked to blog about in a very nice way.

You’re basically getting paid to give a positive review.

Do your blog posts truly reflect your “real” opinions?

In this type of setup, they may or may not.

Often times, a company will have you sign a contract saying that you’ll leave a positive review before they even send you the product in the first place.

Respected bloggers can lose credibility when they blog for cash.

The true purpose of blogging is open communication and opinions; these too are often lost in the quest for cash.

To be fair, most pay-for-blogging services state that you pick what you want to blog on and are free to post whatever you want about the topic (within the terms of service), and some require disclosure.

Disclosure simply means that your blog posts will reveal to others that you are getting paid for the blog post — “this company sponsored this post.”

Here are four of the top pay-for-blogging sites:

PayPerPost (PPP): This is a site that helps connect you with advertisers that want to sponsor specific content. In a nutshell, you search through a list of “Opportunities,” you make a post, you get your content approved, and you get paid. It’s as easy as that. You can earn as much as $20 for a blog post, and PayPerPost does require disclosure.

Blogvertise: Blogvertise pretty much does the same thing as PPP. This site wants you to talk about specific websites, products, or services on your blog. In exchange, you get paid through PayPal. The advertisers on this site actually get to choose from a pool of bloggers, and then you are told which products or services you’re supposed to write about. You can make between $4-$25 per post. Your blog is required to be at least 60 to 100 words, and it must contain a minimum of three or more links. Endorsing the website product or service is not a requirement.

ReviewMe: Reviewme.com is almost a combination of the previous two services. This lets advertisers create campaigns that bloggers may choose to review. These advertisers also have the option to choose which blogger reviews their campaign, but it costs more. You can make between $20-$200 for each review. You must submit an application and get accepted to be eligible as a participating blogger.

CREAMaid: You create a CREAMaid conversation widget and insert it into your blog post. Your post is now eligible to be “selected.” Once selected, it is syndicated to all participating posts throughout the network and you receive a payment. In essence, advertisers will create a “conversation widget.” The conversation widget tells you what topic to write about. You must accept it and write about the topic in a post. If the advertiser selects your post, it’s incorporated in participating blogs across the network.

One key factor with making this kind of money is that you must qualify.

While qualification terms vary, most require you to have a well-established, quality blog with significant posts (i.e., you need to be a very established and reputable blogger for your opinion to be of value).

Do some research, and you will find that there are dozens of other pay-for-blogging websites, all with differing terms and conditions.

Become an Affiliate

Another way to make money through your blog is to become an affiliate.

What this means is that you promote a certain product, and if someone buys it, you get a certain percentage of it.

There are several companies that do this kind of thing.

Amazon Associates

This program allows you to choose from millions of products to advertise them to your subscribers.

They have various methods of linking — you can link directly to your blog, you can share the link on social media, you can link to a specific product and build customized text links, you can create a banner, or you can create an online store.

For example, I’ve seen many health and fitness bloggers create their own Amazon store within their blog.

They’ll have a recipe with some hard-to-find ingredients, and they’ll have a “Buy these ingredients here” link.

That will take you to their Amazon store. If you end up buying any of the products, they get a small commission from Amazon.

Amazon pays you different amounts depending on what it is that you’re advertising. It’s generally a pretty small percentage, but every little bit helps, right?

Here are some examples:

Grocery products get you 4%
DVDs get you 4%
Game downloads get you 10%
Electronics get you 4%
Headphones get you 6%

It doesn’t require too much effort from you to make some money off of this program — all you have to do is sign up. Here’s where you can do it: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com.

LinkShare

When you visit the site (the name bounces between LinkShare and Rakuten Affiliate Network — they are the same thing), you are asked if you want to be a publisher (this would be you, the blogger wanting to make money) or an advertiser (this would be the person wanting to promote their product).

The site was voted the #1 Affiliate Marketing Network for five years in a row.

It’s just like any other affiliate program in that you make commission directly from your blog.

However, the site does make it clear that they want someone with a “loyal following.”

The advertisers don’t want to pay commission to be on a blog with no subscribers — we don’t blame them.

The only not-cool part about that is that if you are just starting your blog, you can’t really make money from this program.

However, once you have a decent amount of posts and have been able to get some followers, you might be ready for this step.

If you decide to join, you have to sign up.

The site asks you for your company information, your contact and account information, your website information, and your payment threshold.

If you aren’t ready to sign up and just want to start a conversation, you can fill out their contact form, which asks you for your contact information, your business details like revenue and site visitors, and your overall interests.

Do so here: http://marketing.rakuten.com/lets-talk.

There’s no harm in applying — just remember that if you don’t have a daily following, you should wait or else the big brands won’t be interested in you as an affiliate.

Commission Junction (CJ) Affiliate

You can be an advertiser or publisher on this site, as well. CJ Affiliate helps you make commissions, but what sets them apart is that they have the most well-known brands.

They boast about having more Internet Retailer Top 500 advertisers than any other network, and they also say that they pay the best.

Their site is very sophisticated with easy-to-use tools like a Publisher Toolbox, a Deep Link Generator, Widgets, and Tracking tools.

They make the whole process extremely painless.

The site has some recommendations for you in order to make sure advertisers accept your application.

Here are some of them:

Be committed
- Optimize your site
- Have quality content
- Have a great design
- Have time to commit
Have a game plan
- Maintain and update your site regularly
- Build traffic
- Be unique
- Have engaging content
Be different
- Have a professional site
- Get quality subscribers
- Complete an action
- Commit to the future

Long story short, CJ wants to make sure that your blog is solid before jumping in.

If it isn’t, you could end up with some fees — if your blog doesn’t generate any “commissionable” transactions for a period of six months, your account will be deactivated, and a non-refundable $10 fee will be handed to you.

If you think you’re ready for this big step, sign up here: www.cj.com/publisher-sign.

EBay Partner Network

Last, but certainly not least (there are tons of affiliate programs on the Web), is the eBay Partner Network.

The site explains that eBay has everything — whatever you’re looking to promote, you’ll be able to find it.

They also have user-friendly tools as well as an active community that can help you if you get stuck.

Like Amazon, eBay gives you a small percentage of the item, and that percentage varies depending on the category.

EBay has a list of the percentages you earn, but remember that it’s based off of the revenue that eBay makes — not the cost of the item itself.

Here are some examples:

Fashion gets you 65% of the profit
Electronics get you 55% of the profit
Vehicles get you 50% of the profit
Parts and Accessories get you 70% of the profit

They also pay you every month, so you can expect a steady payment.

When you first sign up, they give you a commission bonus for the first three months, which pretty much triples the percentages you see above.

You can sign up here: https://partnernetwork.ebay.com.

They do mention that you should have a successful platform.

They explain it by saying you might be “a person with a popular Twitter feed, a blogger with a growing following or an owner of a successful website.”

So, like most of the other options, you should wait to start making money through affiliate programs until you actually have people to market the products to.

4 Affilliate Marketing Myths (Forbes 2014)
These programs are quick and easy to useYou must work in a very popular nicheAffiliate marketing is an outdated strategyThe more sites you’re on, the better

Use Your Blog as a Platform

In the end, you might not make a ton of money off of traditional advertising techniques, reviewing, or affiliate marketing.

The bottom line is: if you don’t have a big subscriber base, you won’t be able to make that much money.

The thing about blogging is that you now have an online platform that you can use to do bigger and better things (like writing books, selling products or services, or creating courses).

In other words, you can use your blog as a springboard to sell things. Here are some examples:

Leo Babauta, creator of the website Zen Habits

He used his platform to write and sell several books, to teach mindfulness courses, to develop an app, and to create a habit mastery program.

Visit his site here: http://zenhabits.net.

He explains how he makes money from his website, and he actually has a “no copyright” policy, which means that you can share and use his work anywhere without legal trouble.

Here’s a very helpful article from his site — he has some really valuable things to say about making money on the Internet, so read up.

Gretchen Rubin,
creator of the blog Gretchen Rubin

Yeah, that title is kind of lame, but her blog is called Gretchen Rubin (www.gretchenrubin.com).

She focuses on creating happiness and developing good habits.

That’s what she writes about, and that’s how she makes her living.

Through her blog, she was able to write several books that have landed on the New York Times Bestseller list: “Better Than Before,” “The Happiness Project,” and “Happier at Home.”

She also has a weekly podcast that hit #6 on iTunes the first day it launched. It ranks in the top 1% of podcasts and was named in iTunes’s and Vulture’s lists of “Best Podcasts of 2015.”

Her mission is to change lives by helping people move toward happiness and better habits.

People flock to her, and she’s been able to make a really great living by using her site as a way to promote herself.

Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha Founder

Lori is the founder of Tiny Buddha (http://tinybuddha.com), which actually started on Twitter as a “quote of the day” account. Now, her Twitter account has almost 500,000 followers, and her blog has about one million monthly readers.

Her site is all about providing inspiration for people, and she was able to turn that online presence into a book, called “Tiny Buddha, Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions .” She now has several books, products, and courses, and her online presence is only growing.

In the end, it can be difficult to make money if you don’t have a lot of page views. If you want to get serious about blogging, you’re going to have to take a step into the world of blog promoting. The next chapter will break it down and make it easy for you to get your name out there. But, first! Here’s a quick tip and some advice from an expert.

☞ Quick Tip:
Check out Amy Lynn Andrew’s blog post about how to make money from your blog — she has a lot of interesting and unique ideas: https://amylynnandrews.com/how-to-make-money-blogging.

HOW I CONDUCT MY BUSINESS
By Leo Babauta
Through trial and error, I learned some principles that work for me. I don’t share them here to show that I’m superior to anyone, but to show an example of what might work for you. To show that doing things that feel right can make a business succeed. Here’s how I conduct my business. Readers first. This is my No. 1 rule, and it has served me extremely well. When I have a question (“should I promote X or not?”) the answer is always, “What would my readers want? What would help them most?” When the choice is between making some extra money or my readers’ interest, the choice is obvious. There is no choice. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve passed up being part of a mega-sale or affiliate marketing campaign that would have earned me $50K (and sometimes much more) in a day or two if I’d decided to participate. I’ve walked away from at least $1M because it would have put profits before my readers. And I think my readers trust me more because of this (see next item).
Trust is everything. The most valuable assets I have are my readers’ trust and attention. And the attention will go really fast if they stop trusting me. Everything else in this list is based around these first two principles. When you start doing affiliate marketing, even if you think it would help the reader, if it would make them question your motives (is he trying to help me or make some money here?), it erodes their trust, a little at a time. That’s not worth the money.
Make money by helping. I put out products and courses that I think will really help people, and that’s how I make money. This works really well for me. People are happy because their lives are better, and I’m happy because the revenue I make is entirely coming from making people’s lives better. We both win, our lives are all enriched. This is not the case from advertising (see next item).
No ads, affiliate marketing. These are both the same, really. When you market someone else’s product as an affiliate, it’s just a hidden form of advertising. I should note that I had ads and did affiliate marketing for a couple years before giving it up. Why’d I give it up? Well, I realized (through experimentation) that the return on this kind of business model is very bad. You get very little revenue, and erode trust. That’s a bad formula for making money. When you sell an ad, what you’re really selling is your readers’ attention and trust — they trust you to put something important in front of their attention, and you capitalize on that. Of course, most readers learn not to trust the ads, and try to skip them, and put up with them because they want the good content (or service) you’re giving them. So they no longer trust you as much, but put up with your revenue tactics. This sucks. Who wants their customers to put up with anything? Why not delight them with how you make money? Why not enrich them? Now, can everyone do this? Possibly not, but I wouldn’t reject the idea without giving it a genuine shot.
Just the text – no social media buttons, popups, dropdowns, or anything else that annoys or distracts. This goes back to trust — people come to my site to read something that will add value to their lives. Not to be pushed to share something on social media, or like something, or subscribe to my email newsletter. Yes, I have a thing at the bottom to subscribe, but it’s not pushy, and I don’t promise any gimmicky downloads. When your site has a popup or dropdown that asks people to subscribe, it’s annoying. I’m sorry to be blunt but I’m speaking as a reader now — I will never go back to a site that does that. Which means I don’t read a lot of my friends’ sites because they do this. Give the readers what they want, and nothing else, and you won’t have to ask them to subscribe or share. They’ll do it on their own, and this is the kind of share and subscriber you want.
Uncopyright. My site has been uncopryrighted since January 2008 (there weren’t any other sites doing this at the time), and in the last 5+ years, uncopyright has not only not hurt my business, I strongly believe it’s helped tremendously. Why? Because it helps people share and spread my work much more easily. If someone wants to use an article of mine, they don’t have to go through the hassle of trying to contact me and ask permission — they just use it. This has caused people to use my work in books, magazines, blogs, newsletters, classroom materials, art, conferences and more. This is amazing. In addition, uncopyright promotes the idea of sharing, and when you share with people, they tend to trust you more. Sharing builds trust.
No sales. I’ve seen many people do three-day sales of their products (or something similar), but I’ve never done one of these (that I can recall). Why not? Because it makes no sense to the reader (remember, readers first). Tell me the reader: why are you lowering the price of your product for three days? Why only those three days? If you can lower the price for those days, why not the other days? Is it to make more money from me (manipulate me into buying the book)? Is the price too high on the other days? What if I already bought the book at the higher price — was I ripped off? These are questions the reader has no answers to, and no matter how much you try to justify the reasons of the sale, it doesn’t make sense. Either set the price at the higher price point (because you think it’s worth it), or set it at the lower price point (because you want to get it into the hands of more people).
Admit mistakes. It might sound like I’m pretending to be perfect at what I do, but the truth is I’m winging it. I’m making it up as a I go along, in hopes that I won’t screw it up, and constant fear that I am badly messing up. I have more trust in this process (and in my readers) now that I’ve been doing it for seven years and nothing has fallen apart, but I have made many mistakes along the way. I’ve been overly promotional, I’ve done affiliate marketing (just a couple of times), I had advertising, I asked people to share my work, I asked for votes. Those were mistakes, but I learned from them and try my best not to repeat them. Recently, in my Sea Change Program, I removed old habit modules from 2013 (I felt they were outdated), and my members were upset. I fixed the mistake and put the modules back. People don’t expect you to be perfect — they do expect you to try your best to fix mistakes when you make them. I admit my mistakes, and try to rectify them and do better. People trust me more because of it, I think.
Don’t front. I don’t pretend I’m more than I am. I think there’s a tendency in the online world to overrepresent yourself — put yourself off as an expert or the world’s leading whateverthehell. But I’m not the world’s leading anything. I am just a guy who has a wife and six kids, who has changed his life by making small habit changes, one at a time. A guy who has simplified his life and focused on being mindful. I’ve learned a lot from these experiences, and share them as much as I can here on Zen Habits. That’s all I am, and I don’t try to be more. When you only try to be yourself, you can’t fail.
Forget about stats, focus on helping. In the early days, I was obsessed about site statistics. I would check my stats counter several times a day, look at where all the traffic was coming from, try to get my numbers up. Here’s the thing: you can’t do anything with those stats. If you’re getting traffic from Reddit or Twitter, you can’t do anything about that. All you can do, once you’ve seen the stats, is try to create great content. Try to help people. Try to add value. That’s what you’d do even if you had zero stats. The stats don’t change what you should do — though they might motivate you to do things you shouldn’t do to get the stats up, things that aren’t trustworthy. The stats just make you obsessive. About three years ago, I removed all stats trackers from my site, and now am freed from that worry. Now I focus on what really matters: helping people as best I can.
Do what feels right. This is vague and isn’t very helpful at first, because in the beginning, you’re never really sure what’s “right”. There are lots of choices to make and it always seems smart to just do what other people are doing, what the experts tell you to do. Unfortunately, that’s often wrong. Everyone else does what everyone else does because that seems safer, and so they act out of fear of doing the wrong thing. In fact, safer is not the right thing. Doing the right thing is going to be against the mainstream. For example, when I gave up copyright, or let go of ads or social media buttons or affiliate marketing, or comments, those were all very scary things for me. It was against what everyone else at the time was doing. But in the end, I knew they were the right thing, because it was what was best for my readers. And it made me feel good about what I was doing. This is the compass you need to develop, to build trust with your readers, and with yourself. Feel good about what you’re doing, don’t act out of fear.

How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising with Google AdSense

Setting Up Your Campaign

Reviewing for Money

Become an Affiliate

Amazon Associates

LinkShare

Commission Junction (CJ) Affiliate

EBay Partner Network

Use Your Blog as a Platform

Leo Babauta, creator of the website Zen Habits

Gretchen Rubin,
creator of the blog Gretchen Rubin

Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha Founder

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Advertising with Google AdSense

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Reviewing for Money

Become an Affiliate

Amazon Associates

LinkShare

Commission Junction (CJ) Affiliate

EBay Partner Network

Use Your Blog as a Platform

Leo Babauta, creator of the website Zen Habits

Gretchen Rubin,creator of the blog Gretchen Rubin

Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha Founder

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Gretchen Rubin,
creator of the blog Gretchen Rubin