More than 600 million blogs exist on the internet today. Six-hundred million! That is a mind-boggling number, one that is almost twice the size of the population of the United States! Many of those blogs are created out of love for writing content. Others exist with the sole purpose of making money, a steady revenue stream, or a second income. How do those blogs and websites make money? Is it easy to do?
There are three main ways to monetize your blog: affiliate deals, advertising, and collaboration with other bloggers and websites. This article talks about all three. Any website can make money, but you stand a chance of making more money if your website enjoys plentiful traffic and ranks highly in Google for the field you are writing about. The more traffic you have and the higher up the search engine results your website appears, the more likely it is that the following three monetization channels will yield positive results.
Become an Affiliate
Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time and has seen many changes, but the basics remain the same. Many companies pay you a commission for sending customers to their websites. You sign up as an affiliate of a company or brand, produce some content and insert a unique link somewhere in that content. You receive a payment if someone clicks that link and becomes a site’s customer. You can become an affiliate for almost anything these days, from the best bitcoin sportsbooks online to clothing and even referring people to specific products on Amazon.
A friend of mine keeps a blog where he discusses video games. He has an affiliate deal with several video game retailers, puts links to the games he plays and writes about in his blog posts, and earns a nice monthly income from people buying those games via his affiliate link. Going down the affiliate route is best if you have a large audience because the more people that see your content, the better the chances of someone clicking your links.
Advertising
Advertising is one of the easiest ways to monetize your blog or website, especially if you use Google AdSense, a free advertising program that you make money from via third-party Google advertisements.
Once you have signed up for a free account and chosen where you are happy to display adverts, you should start earning something almost immediately. What you make depends on the country your website’s searches come from, how much traffic you get, your niche, and many more. You get paid per click (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Obviously, the more traffic you receive and the better your website’s various rankings are, the higher your earning potential is.
Although not having to deal with individual advertisers is great (AdSense takes care of all that), you have little to no control over what adverts appear on your site. However, the adverts tend to fit in with your website’s content. Furthermore, some internet users do not like being faced with several advertisements when they visit a website. An increasing number of people use third-party tools to block unwanted adverts from appearing on their screens.
Collaboration With Other Companies and Websites
We mentioned earlier that there are more than 600 million blogs on the internet, which means there are more than 600 million potential blogs to collaborate with. You could review the products that another website is selling for a fee. Alternatively, you could accept guest posts from other websites in exchange for payment. Again, like all monetization methods, the quality of your website and the traffic it receives are the two overriding factors on whether you can make money from collaborating with other bloggers.