While monetization isn’t the end all be all for all bloggers, a good portion of us wouldn’t mind some dollar bills to float our way. Today we are going to discuss some of the many ways that you can monetize your niche blog so you can justify those hours spent staring at a cursor on your computer screen.

Ad Placement

One of the oldest monetization streams for bloggers is the advertisement. There are a couple of ways that you can go about getting ads:

● Working Directly With A Business: You may know a small business in your state or one across the country who creates amazing products that you know your audience would die for. You can connect with them to offer a space on your site as a magazine would. You may want to place this in your sidebar, in a blog post, or even in a newsletter.

● Working With A Site Like Google AdSense: Google AdSense helps you collaborate with a TON of different companies to showcase their products on your site. With sites like Google Adsense you don’t have as much control over who advertises on your site, but it is also a lot easier to find advertisers since you are using Google and other sites as your middleman to finding sponsors.

Advertisements can be an excellent way to make money as a blogger, but the downside to using ad placement as a revenue stream is that you have to have a ton of traffic to your site. Above all other monetization methods, advertisements place the most weight on blog traffic. After all, if an ad is placed on a blog, but no one is around to click it, is it even an ad?

Ads also rely heavily on people clicking the ad or purchasing from it. You get some money from traffic alone, but big money comes into play when people interact with and purchase from an ad on your site. So, traffic is significant, because with more traffic comes a higher likelihood that someone will click an ad on your site.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another way to monetize your niche blog. How does affiliate marketing work? You work with a company that you love, showcase their products, and then for every customer, you refer you get a part of the proceeds of their sale. Some companies even have a pay per lead system in place which means you get a small amount of money for referring a potential customer to them.

With affiliate marketing, the portion of the sale you get can vary. For physical products like clothes  and shoes, it tends to hover around 5%-10% of the final sale. Affiliate marketing with digital products tends to have a commission in the 30%-50% range.

If possible, you want to be able to become an affiliate for a variety of products at different price points so you can make more money from affiliate sales.

Affiliate marketing depends on traffic, but even more so, it depends on trust. You won’t get an affiliate income for traffic alone like you get with advertisements. You get an affiliate revenue for leads (which usually entails someone signing up for the site or a newsletter before it’s considered a lead) or a sale. That means you get paid for making your audience take action, which takes trust.

I don’t know about you, but if I don’t trust someone, it’s going to be hard for me to take the action that they want me to take.

On the other hand, you usually have a while to convince someone when it comes to affiliate sales. When a reader clicks on an affiliate link, a cookie is placed on their computer (not the yummy kind), and that cookie usually stays there for 30 days or more. That means that even sales that happen 30 days from the time they checked out your website will count as a sale for you.

Sponsored Content

Another way to create income for your blog is through sponsored content. Sponsored posts are a great way to work with brands and create some extra income from your blog by integrating products you love into your site through product reviews and lifestyle pieces.

Sponsored content is not just an advertisement; it takes more skill than that. You have an audience that you have influence over, and you are directing your readers to think about a brand when making purchasing decisions. Your goal shouldn’t be to slap a product on your website randomly but to create a story around how that fits into your lifestyle and the lifestyle of your readers.

There are many ways to go about finding sponsored content. You can find sponsored posts through sites like:

• Social Fabric
• IzeaTap
• Influence
• Acorn Influence
• Find Your Influence

Sponsored content networks are great, but they often lead to a smaller compensation on your end. If you want to make all the money, you deserve you can also consider pitching companies so thatyou can take control of the sponsored post opportunity and pitch the content you think will be the best fit for your audience.

Brand work takes lots of dedication, amazing photography skills, influence over your audience (no matter how small), and the ability to convey your worth to brands.

Depending on the brand, they may be extremely results focused (aka, these sponsored posts better make us more sales) or they could be more relationships oriented (aka, this could make us more sales, but we just want to be known to more people.)

Either way, you don’t want to sell your audience out for a quick dollar. Instead, you want to create a partnership that is beneficial for them as well.

Digital Products & Services

Last, but certainly not least, creating your digital products and services is an awesome way to make money from your niche blog.

Creating digital products is great because you don’t have to depend on as many other people to create the income you want. You aren’t getting only a portion of sales; you don’t have to deal with network executives, all you have to do is cater to your target audience (which you should already be doing.)

There are so many different types of digital products you could create as a blogger. You may want to create an ebook, a course, or even offer services like coaching and freelancing. The possibilities are endless when it comes to digital product creation.

With digital products, you can set your price and make the bulk of that amount back because no intermediaries are taking a cut of your payment (except for maybe Paypal fees.)
When creating a digital product or creating the services that your brand offers, you want to think about what your audience needs.

For example, if you are a fashion blogger for women after pregnancy, what might they want? Perhaps they want advice on how to choose the best clothes to hide their post-pregnancy tummies so you might offer fashion consulting as a service to clients or an e-book on post-pregnancy clothing hacks for all of your followers to consume.

When it comes to digital products and services you can go all out and the best part is you are contributing to and building up your brand so all the love on your blog can stay in-house.

How To Pick The Monetization Method That’s Best For You

After reading all of this information, you may have a world of questions about which method is actually the best. That’s a complicated question. At the end of the day creating your own digital products and offering your own services will more than likely make your more money because of the focus on building your own target audience.

Creating digital products takes a lot of time and effort, though, so while you are building up your audience and creating products you should feel free to use other monetization methods like affiliate marketing and brand work.

When bills are due you can’t offer an I.O.U for when you are done creating your digital products so creating brand partnerships and taking ad revenue is a great thing to do to create income for your blog until you can create digital products and offer services.

Making money, even with a niche blog, doesn’t have to be difficult. There are many ways to make money with your blog, and hopefully, this list will give you some great ideas to consider when you go to monetize your blog in the future. With so many monetization paths, it’s time to pick a few and get to work creating a better future for you and your blog!

Are you currently monetizing your blog?

We want to hear from you! Let us know which method(s) your using by dropping a comment below.

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