How Do Beginner Bloggers Make Money?

If you are considering becoming a blogger, or you are just starting out as a blogger, you’re probably wondering how do beginner bloggers make money. The answer is pretty straight forward. They diversify with display ads, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, products and depending on their skill set sometimes they offer services.

While these are the starting points, as traffic grows, bloggers can increase their monthly revenue since their blog traffic is more valuable. If you want a step-by-step guide to grow your traffic quickly, download my Blog Secrets 101 tutorial.

In this post I am sharing the top 5 revenue streams for beginner bloggers. We will discuss what the streams are and how to get started with each one.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves promoting somebody else’s products or services in exchange for a commission. Payment is normally on a CPA (Cost Per Action) model, which means you are paid when a customer takes action, normally this is making a purchase.

Most beginners start with Amazon affiliate products since it is easy to get into the program. Once approved, they simply use their affiliate links to direct readers to products that fit with their blog post topics.

Some affiliate networks have strict requirements that exclude newer blogs from joining their programs. Be sure to check the payout schedule and commission rates for any affiliate network you plan to join.

While Amazon is easy to get into, they have reduced affiliate commissions disgracefully over the years. Occasionally they will have special commission increase periods, but overall you might be able to find higher paying options. You can also visit the websites of your favorite brands to check if they have an affiliate program. Many big brands have in-house affiliate programs while others will direct you to the network they use for affiliate management.

If let’s say you are passionate about health, your health blog can recommend health supplements, or other products like indoor gardens or posture straps. Before starting your blog, decide on a topic or niche you will be able to write about regularly.

Popular affiliate networks include:

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Display Advertisements

Display advertisements are visual ads placed on your website in the form of images (often called banner ads), videos or text. When clicked, your readers are taken to the website of the product or service being advertised in the ad. Here is a breakdown of the types of display advertisements:

Traditional display ads: mostly formatted as squares, banners, or skyscrapers and usually have an image, text, and call-to-action (CTA)
Static ads: traditional ads in which text and images don’t move
Responsive display ads: The ad platform determines the most advantageous format in terms of placement, size, orientation, text, and images.
Interstitial ads: also called “pop up ads;” interactive, full-screen ads that cover the interface of the platform on which they appear.
Lightbox ads: these areinteractive ads that users can expand to full size; depending on the ad format, users can scroll text and images or watch videos.
Expandable ads: ads that expand larger when a user clicks or mouses over it.

Ad networks like Google Adsense offer a variety of display advertisements, so you will have a plethora of ads to feature on your site.

Other popular ad networks are:

https://www.media.net/

https://propellerads.com/

https://www.adthrive.com/

https://www.bidvertiser.com/

https://www.infolinks.com/

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Products

Selling products through your blog has its pros and cons. It all depends on your products and your audience. If you have an Etsy shop, directing your readers to your products would be ideal. If you have digital products, you can set up payment and delivery through third parties like DPD, Gumroad or eJunkie.

What’s nice about selling your own products, is that you don’t have to wait 30+ days to receive payments. You will know your product best, so you will be passionate about your promotion.

If you are selling tangible products, managing the sale and delivery process may be a bit more challenging. However, there is nothing like creating something that will benefit others, getting it out to the world and making sales.

Should you decide to sell products through your blog, give it a lot of thought to make sure you will be able to effectively market said products, and keep up with demand should your business really take off.

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Services

If your blog focusses on a specific activity that your readers are trying to accomplish, perhaps you can provide a service to them in exchange for a reasonable fee.

For example, are you blogging about excel spreadsheets? If you are an excel wiz, you can offer to create spreadsheets or solve issues for your readers. Or perhaps you’ve worked in HR and want to blog about job searches and resume writing. You can provide a resume writing service to help your readers land interviews and better jobs.

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Conclusion

Regardless of how you choose to monetize your blog, what is important, is that you get started. Test out a few different options and see which ones work best for your website and target audience. I promise you will smile from ear to ear when all your hard work is rewarded and the first payment hits your bank account.

For more ways to make money blogging, plus detailed strategies and techniques to get your blog posts crawled, indexed and ranked faster download my Blog Secrets 101 tutorial.

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