Wondering How To Make Money With A Blog For Beginners? We Were There, Too!
Are you a beginner blogger looking to make money with your blog? We were there, too. By now we have multiple different blogs in different niches and can say that we understand the blogging world quite a bit better than two years ago.
It seems like a top question these days: how to make money blogging? If only there was a simple answer because the truth is it’s not overly simple! You could head for YouTube, Quora, or Reddit – but you should probably just ask other bloggers and read about how others are doing it!
There are many types of blogs that make money – and many different blog ideas that make money. Different niches can perform quite differently and so making money with a lifestyle blog can be different than making money with
Blogging for beginners can be tricky starting out but once you understand your skills, your audience, your niche, and the ways that work well for you, you might be able to monetize your blog.
Remember: if anyone tells you that making money blogging is super easy then they might be trying to get you to buy their blogging course. So, let’s dive into a few ways that we have earned (and still earn) money from blogging!
A word of advice before we get started: While it is possible to make money with a blog – even as a beginner – you should NOT rely on the blogging income as your only source of income.
Look at it as a bonus that you can either reinvest into your blog to make it grow or use it to pay for non-essential items. This will take a lot of the stress away from having to make money which can be beneficial in the long term.
Instead of having to create content that will make you a bit of money in the short term, you can focus on creating high-quality content that gives value to your readers and will ultimately help you grow your blog!
Affiliate Marketing
We are big fans of affiliate marketing since this allows you to not only make money but you can also provide value to your readers by recommending products that you actually LOVE!
Affiliate marketing works in the way that you will link to products or services that you like and use on your website. Readers will click the links and if they buy the product or sign up for the service, you get a cut of the commission from the sale. In theory, it’s pretty simple – but in practice, building content around affiliate links can be tough!
There are some great affiliate programs you can join to start making money as soon as possible. One of those is Amazon. You can sign up, get unique codes for products on
Over time, people will (hopefully) click the links, and then if they buy what you recommend you can make money. Generally, money made is a percentage of the sale – and there are different percentages for different types of products in different niches!
Our Tip: We highly recommend that you start doing affiliate marketing in combination with SEO – short for Search Engine Optimization. By attracting the right readers to your blog it will be a lot easier to generate affiliate sales. A great tool for SEO that we love and use every day is Keysearch!
Of course, there are other affiliate programs for many, many different companies out there. You can look into signing up for platforms like Commission Junction or ShareASale which have lots of different companies.
Remember, when it comes to affiliate marketing, it works best if you build content around links rather than just sprinkling links in stuff you already have written. You can have as many affiliate links in a post as you want – if people don’t click through, you aren’t going to earn anything!
That’s why we also highly recommend that you only use affiliate links for companies/ products that you actually like and would recommend to your friends. Otherwise, it is easy to come across as insincere which can harm you in the long run.
Read Next – 8 Fantastic Tools Newbie Bloggers Should Invest In
Advertising
Another way that bloggers can make money from blogging is through advertising. Now, there are few ways that this can happen. If you want to get ads on a younger website, you can sign up for Google AdWords.
However, we generally don’t recommend AdWords because it can take a while to set up if you want to optimize, can slow down your site, and has little return. At least, it is not enough if you are trying to generate serious income form your blog.
If you have over 10,000 monthly sessions, you can sign up for Ezoic. They are an ad management company that can help get ads on your site so you can start earning money. We know a few bloggers who are with Ezoic and they are quite happy with the service. However, we don’t have any personal experience with them.
If you have over 25,000 monthly sessions on your website, we’d recommend Mediavine. Mediavine is another ad management company. We actually have Mediavine on another website that we run and cannot say enough great things about Mediavine, honestly. It always seems like they genuinely care about their publishers (us bloggers) which is great!
Read More – How To Determine If Blogging Is Right For You
Freelancing
If you are super into writing (which we would hope that you are given the fact that blogging is basically ALL writing), then you can always freelance to make money while growing your blog.
For this to work, you can use your blog as more of a portfolio to get other writing gigs for companies in your niche/space. This is something that Bruce did. He used our other website as a portfolio when he applied for a freelance job with a travel company who had ongoing writing projects.
Sure enough, he got hired as a freelancer and saw steady work over the course of a year-long project. It was great experience in writing, the connections made are valuable, and of course, he made some money from it!
Depending on your skill level and topic/niche, there might be opportunities right in front of you. You can search Facebook groups for jobs, Upwork (although we don’t love finding work through that site), and even start-ups in your area that are looking for content.
Related – Valuable Tips For Becoming A Better Writer
Sponsored Posts
Another way to make money from your blog is to write sponsored posts. Depending on your niche/website focus/audience, you can make quite a bit of money this way. What this means is that companies will basically pay you to write about their products or services.
Now, sponsored posts aren’t something that we recommend that you do a whole lot. If you do them, ideally it’s about products that you are passionate about and that would resonate with your audience. Promoting products on your blog that
It’s also not always easy to secure sponsored posts. You might have to write to companies and pitch multiple times before you get into conversations about writing sponsored posts. Then you have to negotiate rates and post details, etc. Just remember to agree and sign to terms before you get started.
Related – Productivity Tools for Bloggers
Own Products (Wouldn’t Recommend Right Away)
Some people also recommend bloggers in the beginning stages to make money with their own products. We would personally not recommend it if you don’t have a background in marketing/sales funnels from your day job etc.
The learning curve for newbie bloggers is high already – adding own products to the mix is just too much. The creation of a product itself is not even
If you are a new blogger you might not know exactly who your target audience is yet or where you can find them. This can make creating a suitable product and then selling it to the right people more difficult than it needs to be.
Instead of creating and selling your own products right away, we would recommend that you grow your blog first (and learn the need-to-knows of blogging), get to know your readership and create trust with them. Then you can think about creating a product for them that they would buy.
And there you have it – a few ways that you can make money from your blog as a beginner. In the end, all of these options take effort and hard work – and not all of them will work the same for your website as they do for another website or blogger.
You just have to try and/or be strategic about how you run your blog. You might not get it right, right away – and that’s half the fun! Happy blogging!
As always, Stay Curious,
-B&L
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