How to start making money blogging (making money blogging series)

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I know from going through my analytics on Pinterest that one of my most popular boards. Is the one  called making money blogging. I realized I had never actually written a post that could fit into that board. Although I have been blogging for 3.5 years and have made some money through my blog. So over the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking about what information I could share about making money with your blog that would be helpful. I think about the topic of being a blogger and an entrepreneur a lot. So over the next few weeks I have a making money blogging series for you where I will share what I know about how to make money.

I make money on a monthly basis now from my blog. It’s not very much and I’d hardly even consider it a part time income. I think it’s important to share what I know, though. My hope is that what I have to share about and making money will be useful and you will get value out of reading it. That’s really my hope for all my posts but especially my blogging ones,

Why I don’t feel qualified to talk to you about this

It might seem like I would’ve written a post on this topic before since I have a lot of posts on blogging. To be honest I just didn’t feel qualified to talk about money making and in some ways still don’t.

Even though I have tried many of the ways I’m going to discuss in this post and have the experience to write about this topic. I guess it comes from the fact that I follow all these Successful bloggers. People I admire and look up to. They seem to have done so much right and I guess I feel like only they should be talking about making money and not someone like me.

I have heard from a lot of people though that they like learning how bloggers start making money and even if I’m not making 6 figures I might still have things I could share that would be good to know. I had to realize that I just need to get past my insecurities.

Of not feeling like I’ve made it far enough as a blogger in the last three years. Of not having an income report to show you of thousands of dollars. That even though I’m not to that point in my blogging career yet it doesn’t mean that I won’t still get there. I’m working very hard to figure out what works and the right path for me. It’s been a lot of trial and error. Some successes and plenty of things that haven’t worked and lots of lessons learned along the way.

Ways you can be making money blogging

There are so many ways you can start making money with your blog. I know quite a few of them but I’m sure there are more  that I don’t know. It also makes a difference in what type of blog that you run so there are ways I don’t know about because they work for blogs that are very different than mine.

I want to share the ways that I have tried and also other ways that I do know about and that work. I just want to make it clear that this post doesn’t include everything I’m sure. You will have to keep doing research and find out what works for your blog and niche if making money with your blog is your goal.

Ads

I think this is where most bloggers start out when they want to start making money blogging. By putting ads on their blogs. You can either do ads through something like Google Adsense  or you can have other bloggers/businesses purchase as space on your blog.

What I think: I’ve done both Adsense and selling ad space. I have made a little having Google Adsense. It’s really simple to set up and I haven’t had any issues with it. I don’t make very much with it but some months my blog traffic is good and it’s nice to get a little extra money.

I sold ads in my sidebar for awhile when I was first blogging. This use to be more popular but fewer bloggers use sidebar ads anymore. It was never worth how much time I put into having sidebar sponsors for the amount of income I made from it plus it really cluttered up my blog which I don’t like.

Sponsored Posts

I’ve done quite a few sponsored posts on my blog. You can get sponsored post opportunities by signing up with websites that will match you to programs you are a good fit for. The ones I’ve worked with are Linquia, Social Fabric, Sits Girls and Blogher. There are many more out there though that you can work with these are just the ones I’ve worked with personally.

You can also reach out to companies directly to work out a sponsored post. You can contact them by finding an email address on their websites. Or by contacting them through social media on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes companies will like to do an exchange of their products for posts or social media mentions instead of paying you for the post.

What I think: I think that you can definitely make a decent amount of money through sponsored posts. Though to make a lot of money you have to do a lot of sponsored posts. You don’t want all your posts being sponsored because it can start to feel kind of spammy for your readers. I want to make my posts feel like they fit in my blog even if they are sponsored. So that they aren’t really sticking out and awkward.

So at most I will do one sponsored post in a week and usually only a couple  in a month. That is pretty rare, though. Usually, it is a month or so between sponsored posts. I also only will do posts on products that I would actually use and that I feel are worth using. I don’t want to share things I think are junk with my readers.

I also make sure that my sponsored posts aren’t just a big post advertising the product. I try to make the post full of useful information. An example of this would be if I was doing a post on a cleaning product I would make a post often cleaning tips and include how you can use that product in one of the tips.

That way you can still give your readers good quality posts. You don’t want to turn off readers by making all these posts just trying to get them to use products from sponsors. Try to make your sponsored posts just like a typical post you would write for your blog. With a bit of sponsored post content.

Affiliate programs

Here is another way that you can start making money blogging. It is through using affiliate programs on your blog. How that works is that you can link to products on your blog and if your readers click on the links. Then go to the product and end up purchasing it you will get a small percentage of the sale.

The nice thing about affiliate programs is that you can be an affiliate for so many different things. Especially if you are an Amazon affiliate you can link to any product that they sell on Amazon which is basically everything. Then if they go to Amazon through your link it will count whatever they purchase to your affiliate account. That means that even if you link to a $5 desk item and they go to Amazon and buy a $800 TV. That TV counts because they bought it by going to Amazon through your link.

Also, you can join affiliate for lots of different things. I’ve been an affiliate for quite a few blogging books or books by bloggers that I know. I really try to be very selective on the programs that I choose to join and what I link to on my blog. I only link to products I really like on Amazon. I am only an affiliate for a handful of other things.

What I think:  Being an affiliate can be a very easy way to earn some money on your blog. I’ve never made a lot of money through my affiliate programs. I do know that the more I really love that product and share how great it is the more likely people will be to want to buy it from your link.

I recommended a blogging book in  this post because it really helped me with growing and improving my blog. I wrote one post about that book and have it in the sidebar of my blog. I don’t recommend a lot of blogging books or products so I think it gives an impression of how valuable that book is to me. I think that is why I have made a decent amount of money through that program.

If you want to start being an affiliate I think you should just join programs that you really trust and think they have great products. Or if you want to join something like Amazon with many products that you only use it  in a natural way, talking about products you use or that would work for your post.

You also want to make sure that if you use affiliate links or with sponsored posts you need to disclose this to your readers. There are rules about this and you will want to make sure that you are following the law with your blog for making money on your blog.  You can check out my disclosures page as an example.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series about making money blogging. Here it is with more ways to make money blogging  plus a Free Workbook to help you get started