Winning with a Money-Making Blog

Image source The Blue Diamond Gallery

When it comes to rocking your finances, one thing stands out: having more than one source of revenue. And if those sources of revenue can be passive, that’s even better. One way to create relatively passive income that requires only a small amount of work on a weekly basis is to monetize a blog.

Of course, the first thing you need to do is purchase a domain name, set up hosting, and start blogging. Once you do that, you can set some goals for monetization.

Getting Content

Of course, for that to work, your blog needs to gain traffic, and for it to do that, you need content. You can create content, but you can also have guest authors write content for you. The good thing about this is that if you can build up your site metrics, people will even pay you to post their content for them.

This means you not only get content, often for free, from writers who are trying to build their brand, but you can get paid by SEO companies and other businesses looking for backlinking opportunities.

Ad Revenue

Once you have enough content and are getting enough visitors per day, you will start to generate ad revenue. There are a number of places this can come from. Google AdWords, Amazon, and others offer both shopping and native ads.

Other more salacious ads are offered by companies like Outbrain, who offer ads that show clickbait articles with eye catching titles. Visitors often click on these ads, and that is exactly how you make money. Advertisers Pay Per Click to advertise, and you get paid a percentage of what they pay every time a user clicks on them from your site.

This is a simple way to make money, and although it might start out small, it will grow as your traffic grows.

Affiliate Links

Another common way to make money from a website is to utilize affiliate links. These work in a similar way to Pay Per Click links, accept that you do not get paid every time someone clicks on them. Instead you bet paid a certain percentage of any purchases made on the target site after a user has clicked through from your link.

This means that even if the purchaser does not buy the item in the ad, provided they stay logged in to the site (like Amazon) before buying anything else, you can get a percentage of that purchase as well.

This of course depends on the coding of the affiliate link and the landing page it directs the reader to, but often if your content is good and affiliate links are well placed, you can make a decent amount from them.

Finding a Sponsor

Of course, one of the best ways to make money with your website is if you can find a sponsor. This is easier said than done, but depending on the niche of your site, often a sponsor will find you.

The key to this is of course is organic web traffic, previous ad revenue, and an audience that is looking for what your sponsor has to offer. Ideally of course, your sponsor will still allow you to collect other ad revenue as long as it does not include their competitors. If not, make sure the sponsorship is high enough that it covers the loss of those sources.

Having a primary sponsor is one way to really rock monetizing your site. Typically, it is the most lucrative single method, but it does come with its downside. Were your sponsor to pull out, you could lose the majority of the revenue you are getting from your site.

You can prevent this by signing sponsor contracts that will guarantee you income for a certain number of months as long as you keep up your end of maintaining a certain level of traffic and web visitors.

Amazon?

Amazon offers a couple of different ways for you to earn revenue from them. As mentioned above, Amazon offers native ads similar to those offered by Google and other advertisers. Amazon also offers affiliate links. These can both be very lucrative.

You can also set up an Amazon store on your website. Not only is this store filled with affiliate links, but it can also be tailored to contain products that will appeal specifically to the readers of your blog.

Of course, there is a risk. Amazon native ads and even affiliate links within a post can be taken as pretty normal, but an Amazon store often will turn off users who are not fans of the internet giant. You can do some beta testing to determine how these stores will affect your audience.

Either way, Amazon can be a viable option for another stream of website monetization.

Rocking It

Once you have your site up and running, and you have built good traffic because of acquiring content through guest posting and other means, your website will be more of a source of nearly passive income. It’s one way to rock your finances.