How To Make Money Blogging: The Beginner's Guide

Want to learn how to make money blogging? We’ve got you covered.

In this post, we’ll be sharing 16 strategies you can use to make money from your blog this year, and showing you how to get started with each of them.

We’ve included both tried-and-tested monetization methods and lesser-known strategies that you might not have considered.

No matter what your blogging niche is, you should be able to find something that works for your audience in the list below.

Note: Haven’t started your blog yet? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. Head over to our tutorial on how to start a blog to get a complete walk-through of the process.

1. Sell digital products

Hands-down the best way to make money from your blog is to use it to promote and sell digital products.

By digital products, I’m talking about things like ebooks, tutorials and guides, printables, apps, software, music, photography, graphics/digital art… anything that you can upload to your website and deliver as a downloadable file.

The reason selling digital products is such a great way to monetize is simple: It can earn you a ton of money.

Generally, you’ll earn a lot more selling directly to your audience than you would running ads or promoting affiliates.

And digital products are the easiest thing to sell, because you don’t need to purchase any stock or worry about things like shipping and inventory management.

Plus, the profit margins on digital products are sky-high. They cost almost nothing to make (other than your time) and can be sold an infinite number of times, so it’s pretty much 100% profit.

Now, let’s do some quick math here. Let’s say you create an ebook that resonates with your blog audience, and you start selling copies for five bucks each.

Next, let’s assume your blog gets 50,000 monthly visitors, and you promote your ebook to all those visitors through popups and ads in your sidebar, etc.

If just 1% of those visitors decide to buy the book, that’s 500 x $5. So you’d already be earning $2,500 a month in passive income. Crazy, right?

How to get started

Rather than selling your digital products on the same website you publish your blog posts on, I’d recommend setting up a completely separate ecommerce site.

Then, you can promote your ecommerce store on your blog to funnel traffic to it.

To build your site, it’s best to use an ecommerce platform designed for selling digital products.

We’d recommend Sellfy as it’s easy to use, affordable, and doesn’t charge any transaction fees.

Podia is another good option, particularly if you also want to sell memberships (more on this later).

Bonus tip: Not sure what to sell? Check out our roundup of the 12 best digital products to sell online for some ideas.

Related reading:

2. Sell online courses

Selling online courses to your readers is another really good way to make money from your blog.

In some ways, it’s even better than selling digital products, because online courses have a higher perceived value than downloadable files, so you can charge more per sale.

According to data from Podia, the average online course price is $137. At those prices, you’d only need to make 8 sales to be earning over $1,000 per month. And if you’re getting thousands of visitors to your blog every month, that should be a cinch.

The key is to create a course that fits in with your blogging niche and is guaranteed to appeal to your audience. For example:

Health/fitness bloggers could create a course that teaches the basics of nutrition.
Digital marketing bloggers could create a course that teaches you how to do on-page SEO effectively
Music bloggers could create a course that teaches you how to read music, produce beats, or play guitar

These are all fairly generic examples, but you get the idea. Think about who your blog readers are and what they might be interested in learning, and then go from there.

How to get started

Creating an online course isn’t as hard as you’d think.

The first step is to sign up for an online course platform. We’d recommend Thinkific as it has everything you need and more.

Once you’ve signed up, you can choose a course template and use the drag-and-drop course builder to start putting together your lessons and units.

Thinkific lets you add different types of media to your lessons, like text, video, downloadable files, etc. You can create quizzes and assessments, reward students with completion certificates, offer live lessons and coaching, and more.

Once you’ve created your course content, decide how you want to price it.

For example, you might choose to sell immediate access to all your lessons and units for a single one-time payment.

Alternatively, you could sell subscription memberships and drip out lessons week by week to your subscribers. This latter option is great as it gives you a recurring revenue stream.

After you’ve published your course with Thinkific, you can start promoting it on your own blog to drive traffic and sales.

3. Start affiliate marketing

Don’t want the hassle of selling your own products? Sell somebody else’s!

That’s the basic idea behind affiliate marketing: You promote another business’s products/services. And in return, you get paid a small commission on each sale you generate.

This also happens to be the method that the vast majority of bloggers use to earn the bulk of their income.

The most popular way to go about it is to create a niche affiliate site, publish blog posts around topics related to your chosen affiliate products (think product reviews, roundups, comparisons, buying guides, etc.), and insert your affiliate links inside those posts.

If readers click the link in one of your posts and buy the product (within the relevant cookie window), you’ll get paid for referring them.

The most successful affiliate blogs can make tens of thousands of dollars a month in affiliate income alone. It’s one of the easiest and most effective monetization strategies, and it works really well if you get it right.

How to get started

The first step is to find a good affiliate program.

And the best way to do that is to browse the listings on affiliate networks to see what’s available.

AWIN is a good place to start. It’s one of the biggest affiliate platforms in the world and houses programs from over 30,000 merchants. So no matter what niche your blog is in, you should be able to find some offers worth promoting.

Most affiliate programs offer modest commission rates of 5%-20%. But it’s possible to find some that offer much higher rates than that (as much as 50%+ in rare cases).

If you already have a blog that gets traffic, make sure you pick an affiliate offer that your existing audience is likely to be interested in and insert your affiliate links in relevant posts that you’ve already published.

Then, start writing and publishing new blog posts optimized around keywords that likely buyers will be searching for. A review of the product you’re promoting is an easy win, so start there.

Bonus tip: SaaS companies tend to offer some of the best affiliate programs with the highest commission rates as they invest heavily in marketing.

4. Offer paid webinars & live streams

If you have a successful authority blog, your audience will probably see you as an expert in whatever niche you write about.

You can capitalize on that by regularly hosting pay-to-attend webinars or live streams.

For this one to work, you’ll need to share advice that’s extremely valuable to your readers in your paid webinars—something that’s worth paying for. The higher the registration cost, the more value you’ll need to offer.

An easy way to increase the value of your webinars is to promise to fit in a Q&A session at the end.

There’s a good chance a lot of your blog readers will have questions about particular topics that they’d love to ask you, and a live Q&A session gives them the opportunity to do that.

How to get started

First, you’ll need to sign up for a webinar platform. You’ll use the platform’s software to host your streams and collect & manage registrations.

If you’re not sure which platform to choose, head over to our post on webinar platforms to find something suitable to your needs.

Most platforms offer a landing page builder to create your webinar registration page (with payment processing integration so you can take payments at the point of registration).

Then, promote your webinar on your blog to drive traffic to those pages.

5. Start an ecommerce store

If you want to start making the big bucks, and you’re willing to put in a bit more effort, then you might want to branch out into ecommerce.

Building an ecommerce store and selling physical products is a lot more work than selling digital products, courses, and webinars.

However, it’s very scalable and the earning potential is much higher. If your store takes off and becomes super successful, you could be earning as much as seven figures a year (or more).

Initially, you can use your blog to drive inbound leads to your store.

Plus, blogging will also help you to build topical authority in your niche and accrue backlinks that’ll improve SEO and give your store and product pages a better chance of ranking in Google Search.

But once you’ve built up that customer base, you should be able to take a step back on the blog and expand out into other marketing channels like PPC, social media, etc.

How to get started

You have two options here:

Add ecommerce functionality to your existing blog (for example, if your blog’s built on WordPress, you could do this by installing an ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce)
Create a brand new ecommerce store from scratch and start blogging to drive traffic to it.

We’d recommend the latter.

You’ll need an ecommerce platform to build your store.

Shopify is the leading ecommerce platform and a good choice for most users. However, Sellfy is much easier to use and the best choice if you’re looking for simplicity.

Once you’ve built your store, the next step is to start filling out your product catalog. Obviously, you’ll want to focus on products that make sense for your target blog audience. But you’ll also need to think about things like market demand, competition, profit margins, etc.

6. Sell print-on-demand merchandise

An easier way to monetize your blog through ecommerce is to sell print-on-demand (POD) merchandise.

Examples of POD merch include branded t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, mugs, tote bags, or phone cases.

If you go down this route, you’ll still be selling physical products to your blog audience, but you don’t have to worry about anything like manufacturing, shipping, or inventory management.

The print-on-demand company you work with handles all that stuff, so it’s much more hands-off.

Plus, you don’t have to buy any stock upfront either, which makes it pretty much risk-free.

Products are printed and shipped on demand by the company you partner with, and you only pay them after the customer has already paid you.

How to get started

The first step is to sign up for a print-on-demand site.

There are lots of options to choose from, but we’d recommend Gelato. It has a great product catalog, good prices, and excellent printing quality.

Next, you’ll need to connect Gelato (or whatever other POD provider you chose) to your blog/online store.

After that, browse their product catalog and pick out some items to sell.

Then, customize those products by uploading designs to them (for example, you could add your blog logo to create a branded t-shirt).

Finally, import the products you’ve created to your website, set your prices, and start selling them through your blog.

When a customer purchases one of your products, the order is automatically sent to the print on demand company. They print it at the nearest production center to the customer and then ship it out to them. Afterward, they bill you for the base product and fulfillment cost.

The difference between the amount your customer pays you and the amount you pay your POD provider is your profit margin.

7. Start a dropshipping business

Dropshipping is another sub-ty