Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.
Many of you were intrigued by my post yesterday, where I shared about making enough to cover your monthly groceries (and then some), by running and growing a blog like this one. One thing that I didn’t really make clear was where this money comes from. It all depends on your goals and your vision of your blog. Here’s some ways that the money comes in (and no, you don’t have to ask for money all the time!).
The money you earn blogging can come from many different avenues. Here’s several that are pretty common among bloggers:
1. Sidebar and Header Ads – You can use Google Adsense or many other ad networks that pay a cost per thousand (CPM) and/or a cost per click (CPC) basis. The money you earn from this increases as the traffic to your blog increases.
2. Sell your own digital products – I was hesitant to do this in the beginning, but after being told that it is a great way to add an income stream to my business and having several readers request it, I finally caved and turned my weekly Crockpot Freezer Meals menus into printables that were available for purchase. It was the best thing that I could’ve done! While that income fluctuates depending on the season, it has definitely been a stream of income that I don’t want to go away!
3. Sponsored Posts – Companies want their products in front of consumers. They are turning to bloggers more and more to share what they love about these company’s products. You can solicit your own sponsored posts or sign up with a company to do this for you. Either way, the more traffic your blog sees, the better the sponsored post will pay.
4. Social Media Management/Virtual Assistant Work – Some bloggers use their blog as a platform to gain other employment avenues online. They may get hired to run social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) for a company or to do other odd jobs that other bloggers need done. Bloggers who are making money are happy to hire experienced virtual assistants to help them keep on top of the tasks that they have at hand.
5. Affiliate income – When you link to another store (like Amazon) or another blogger’s product, you can make a percentage of income off of that person’s purchase. Sometimes it can literally be pennies, but other times, it can be $20 or more a pop. It all depends on the product you’re linking to and what exactly they’re buying. You can get creative on sharing about these products by sharing how you use them and how they help your family. It doesn’t have to be a weird salesy pitch, but just a natural event of sharing why you use the product and what you like about it in a natural story sort of way.
6. Facebook/Twitter Parties – You can work together with a company to promote them and charge them for it. You put together a party that showcases the business and all they have to offer. You charge them whatever you feel it’s worth.
7. Product Reviews – This falls closely to the Sponsored post, but I gave it it’s own category because sometimes, you don’t get paid to do a product review. Generally, you should always request to be paid for a sponsored post, but in some cases, you do a free review of the product in exchange for the product. This would be counted as income on your taxes and should only be done if it will save you a lot of money or if it’s something you would blog about anyway, regardless if they gave it to you or not.
8. Sell Physical Products – Some people use blogging to sell physical products from. They may be a distributor for a direct sales company or they may make their own products and/or have their own products manufactured to sell. I have recently tackled this venue. I am slowly beginning to develop my own kitchen line of products, marketed under the name, “The Sidetracked Kitchen”. Here’s a sneak peak at my first product:
I’ll tell you more about this product soon, but it was produced to be sold on Amazon as well as my blog.
9. Become an Author – Many, many bloggers have developed such an audience through the years that they are able to get a book deal from it. This is definitely on my bucket list of things to accomplish, but I am not in any hurry. I have 7 kids and I homeschool, so I don’t have as much time to focus on this as I will in the future. I just mention it because it has become a reality for many, many bloggers, and depending on the work you’re willing to put in, could become your reality as well.
Currently the majority of my income comes from ads, sponsored posts and digital product sales.
Yesterday, I put some feelers out to see if any of you were interested in a monthly subscription service to teach you how to start and grow a blog so that you, too can earn an income from it. I began by just trying to earn enough to buy our groceries and it’s steadily grown into more than that. Blogging is one of the topics I’m asked about the most (It’s a passion that I love!) and I would love the opportunity to teach this fun skill to you. Depending on the amount of interest we have, I will begin a beta class to teach subscribers how to grow their blog into something that can help them pay the bills as well. If you think you’d like to be a part of this, do me a favor and fill out this form to let me know. If you already did this yesterday, you don’t need to do it again.
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