Monetisation strategies for blogs can vary in complexity.
Some are easier to implement, like Strategy #6, which only takes minutes to set up.
This guide covers 13 effective monetisation opportunities that bloggers of all sizes can capitalise on, including low-barrier-to-entry options.
What is a monetisation strategy?
Monetisation strategies allow bloggers, website owners, and other online brands to generate revenue from their assets.
Bloggers, in particular, need to research effective monetisation strategies. They put vast amounts of work into content research, writing, optimisations, and promotions—without the guarantee of making money from their efforts.
Of course, there are hobby bloggers who don’t care about monetisation. Since writing is their passion, they’re even willing to haemorrhage money to keep their blogs online.
That’s not the case for everyone, of course.
According to statistics, the majority of bloggers start their journey with the goal of becoming self-employed. A huge portion of blogs are built by existing businesses to generate organic traffic.
13 Monetisation models to profit from your blog
If you want to turn blogging into a profitable career, here are 13 monetisation models you can use.
Idea 1: Earn commissions through affiliate marketing
Sign up for affiliate programs and earn commissions for every sale attributed to your blog.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based monetisation method that can help you generate passive income with your blog.
Let’s say you’re promoting a product that costs £69.99 per unit. With a 10% commission rate, you make £6.99 for every customer who uses your affiliate link to complete a purchase.
The more affiliate products you promote, the bigger your profit potential will be.
That’s why many bloggers rely on affiliate marketing as the main engine behind their online business model.
Start with affiliate networks like Amazon Associates, ClickBank, and CJ Affiliate to find viable affiliate programs.
These platforms feature a wide range of product categories—from dietary supplements to gadgets. Amazon, for instance, lets you promote the vast majority of products on its website.
To succeed with affiliate marketing, promoting products you’re truly familiar with and passionate about is important.
That’s why you shouldn’t constrain yourself to affiliate networks when looking for products to promote.
Use Google to see if your products have an affiliate program. Enter the product’s name followed by the keyword “affiliate program” or anything similar.
For example, if you’re an avid user of Canva, run the query below to see if they offer an affiliate program:
Idea 2: Create and publish sponsored posts
Publish sponsored posts on your blog to make money from brands that need help reaching their target audience.
Just like affiliate marketing, content sponsorship is a way to make boatloads of money through blogging.
A sponsored post can be any article promoting, reviewing, or mentioning the partner brand. Requests may vary depending on their marketing goals.
Before you can publish sponsored posts, you need two things: a decent reader or user base and a professional media kit.
Of course, growing your traffic is the tough part. The only sustainable way to do it is to develop an SEO strategy to generate a steady stream of recurring traffic.
Once you have the traffic, the next step is to build a media kit that showcases your blog’s performance and brand partnership opportunities. You should also include an email address specifically for business-related inquiries.
Your media kit can be a PDF or a simple web page with all the required information.
For your inspiration, here’s an example of a media kit from food blogger Coleen—AKA, The Redhead Baker:
Idea 3: Offer professional services
Use your blog as a platform to promote professional services.
Every proficient blogger possesses a profitable skill that other brands are willing to pay for.
In most cases, this skill is tied to the blogger’s niche. For example, you can promote social media consulting or management services if you're a social media marketing blogger.
As you're already well-versed in writing, you could also offer content writing as a professional service.
If your blog already has a sizable collection of content, you won’t need marketing wizardry to acquire users or promote your value proposition. The quality of your content and the organic traffic it brings will do the selling for you.
Idea 4: Create digital information products
Develop your own information products to cement your authority in your niche and make money at the same time.
For most bloggers, eBooks and online courses are the most accessible product ideas.
You can create eBooks with tools like Google Docs and Pages for macOS. To create eye-catching, visual-heavy eBooks, consider using tools like Canva.
Canva is a drag-and-drop graphic design and editing tool. It comes with customisable templates specifically structured for eBooks.
However, an online course could generate the most revenue in the long run, especially with subscription models.
With a subscription-based pricing strategy, you can maximise each customer's lifetime value without investing more in advertising or marketing.
Use platforms like Teachable for the tools to manage your students, build your course modules, plan your subscription model, and track sales. These platforms also provide the reach to help you penetrate the e-learning industry quicker and more effectively.
Idea 5: Sell access to premium content
Create premium content and lock it behind a paywall to profit from your most loyal readers.
Most bloggers, like me, offer their entire content library completely free. However, some decide to sell access to premium, “gated” content on a subscription basis.
Just like online courses, premium content lets you leverage your growing user base to generate recurring revenue. The key difference is premium content is much easier to create than a full-fledged online course.
If you run a WordPress-powered blog, use a plugin like Simple Membership to sell premium content easily.
The platform I use is called Ghost. It has built-in tools for bloggers to create and manage their audience, including the ability to sell access to their content to premium subscribers.
Idea 6: Ask for donations
Embed a donate button on your blog to monetise your traffic.
Asking for donations is the most straightforward strategy for monetising your blog. It’s also easy, especially using services like PayPal or Buy Me A Coffee.
The challenge is to show your audience that they’re getting enough value from your content to justify donations.
This is tricky, but it can surely be overcome with a dedication to content quality.
Below are quick tips to help you create high-performing content for your blog:
- Always have a ‘hook.’ A hook is a must-have element in blog content that motivates the audience to keep reading. The usual approach is to focus on the unique benefit they can get simply by reading your content.
- Align your points with proven facts. Use statistics, surveys, and other verifiable data to support your claims. This not only improves the trustworthiness and value of your content but also helps improve your SEO by citing and linking authoritative sites.
- Tell stories. Trigger high-arousal, urgent emotions by telling stories with proven results. Use relatable stories to get readers to care about the characters while positioning your brand as the “saviour” of people in similar situations.
Idea 7: Make money with display advertising
Show display ads on your blog and get paid to show adverts to your website visitors.
This involves working with ad networks like AdSense to serve ads on pre-defined spaces on your blog.
The catch is you need plenty of traffic to make display advertising profitable - a large audience equals more revenue.
Display advertising networks don’t pay a lot unless you get tens or hundreds of thousands of readers per month. They’re great for supplementing your blogging income, especially considering you don’t need to do much to show ads on your blog.
On average, website owners and bloggers only make less than $1 per click. Since the average Click-Through Rate (CTR) of display ad campaigns is less than 1%, that means you stand to earn less than $30 for every 10,000 views.
There’s also the user experience aspect to consider when monetising through display advertising.
40% of users dislike all forms of online advertising, targeted or not. Therefore, tread carefully and explore monetisation opportunities through display ads only if you have significant website traffic.
Many publishers attempt to maximise profits by overloading their pages with banner ads, hurting the customer experience (and SEO) in the process.
Idea 8: Sell advertising space
Rent ad space on your blog to earn a reasonable amount from businesses that would appreciate the value in your audience.
Selling ad space directly to advertisers is a good alternative to working with an ad network. Not only will you have the opportunity to handpick the brands you’ll promote, but you can also charge more per click—especially if you have great quality content and a healthy audience.
If you use WordPress, you can create ad spaces using a plugin like Ads Pro. It lets you designate and manage over 20 banner ad locations on your blog.
Idea 9: Create a job board
Use plugins like Simple Job Board and promote sponsored job listings from businesses in your industry.
A job board is a visual tool that lets users search for job opportunities in their fields of expertise. You don’t collect payments from them; you get paid by businesses looking to recruit talent.
Monetisation through a job board is only profitable in certain niches, like freelancing, graphic design, and various service industries. A job board is an easy and profitable monetisation strategy if the niche is right.
Idea 10: Sell custom device cases
Design custom cases for smartphones, laptops, and tablets and sell them on your blog for a profit.
You don’t need a manufacturing line or product managers to do this. Platforms like Casetify let bloggers focus on creating unique designs while they handle everything else—from production to shipping.
Selling custom device cases isn’t just a monetisation opportunity for artists and photographers. Regardless of your niche, you can sell branded cases for your visitors from around the world.
Idea 11: Charge money for guest posts
Charging guest posts is a lucrative business strategy if you have an SEO-healthy blog.
This monetisation strategy is simple: accept guest posts from contributors or brands and get paid.
Just be sure to enforce strict content publishing guidelines to avoid saturating your blog with poor-quality promotional content. If you can get another brand in front of thousands of your readers, they will gladly pay for it. As earlier, ensure that you use the rel=sponsored tag.
Idea 12: Build a paid business directory
Build a business directory on your blog and make money from businesses via paid listings.
This simple monetisation strategy requires a plugin like GeoDirectory, which offers features such as a user-friendly builder, templates, and detailed listings.
However, business directories are only profitable to certain blogs, particularly those that target a local audience. As a rule of thumb, check if any of your competitors promote a business directory before you follow suit.
Idea 13: Start dropshipping
Sell physical products internationally or locally and profit from your blog through dropshipping.
Dropshipping is an accessible way for bloggers to enter the eCommerce space. It allows you to skip technical aspects like inventory management, manufacturing, and shipping.
Best of all, dropshipping doesn’t require a lot of capital to get started. You need to set up a platform like WooCommerce or Shopify, which lets you drop ship products through a customised online store, marketplaces, social media, and your blog via a “buy button.”
Guiding principles for successfully monetising your blog
Before wrapping up this post, remember the following principles for making money with your blog:
- Use multiple revenue streams. Don’t put a cap on your revenue potential by sticking to one monetisation strategy.
- Mind your profit margins. It sounds obvious, but to make your blog sustainable, ensure you make more than you spend on monetisation strategies.
- Focus on value. Have a user-first approach to monetisation to guarantee reader and customer satisfaction.
