7 Ways to Make Money Online with your Blog without Using Ads
In fact, many bloggers today become clueless if they cannot monetize their blogs via ad networks.
They either abandon the blog or flip it for profit, which is not a bad idea anyway. But my point is, you can monetize your blog site in many ways than just ads.
If you see your blog as a business, you'll start to think of ways to harness the total value of the business to make profit.
And that's the essence of this post. I'll be sharing a few ways on how to monetize your blog without the need to use ad networks.
The monetization method that works for you will depend on your niche and how willing you are in putting in some level of work apart from writing contents.
Let's get right to it.
Sell Digital Products
This is the number one way to make money from a blog. You have to create and sell digital products that you think your audience would like.
If you take a look at the ads served by popular ad networks, you'll realize that a lot of them are selling one digital product or another.
They leverage the traffic from different blogs to sell their digital products, so why not just do the same?
You can effectively cut out the middleman by selling digital products directly to your audience online. Since your audience already trusts you and wants to learn from you, they are likely to patronize you.
Examples of digital products includes:
- eBooks
- Downloadable media
- Subscriptions
- Graphics designs
- Software
- Mobile apps
- Online courses
- Etc
Offer your Skills as a Service
Apart from selling digital products online for passive income, another great way to monetize your blog is by offering your skills as a service.
I remember a popular Nigerian blogger who made good money by offering an obvious service to his audience.
Do you know that when people come to your blog, the first thing they are most likely to notice is the blog design. So, you can offer to provide this service as well.
This particular Nigerian blogger had a beautiful blog design and received a lot of compliments from his audience about how beautiful and fast his blog was.
This guy started offering to design blogs for his audience similar to his blog’s design and speed.
Then guess what? He received over 30 requests in just the first month. And the service was going for 20,000 Naira. That's 600k Naira income in just the first month. Just imagine that.
There are other allied services you could offer right from your blog, such as:
- Writing services
- Site speed optimization
- SEO
- Site errors
- Site migration
- Etc.
You just have to think out of the box to find digital services that will be most beneficial to your audience, and then try to sell that.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the laziest ways to make money online with your blog, apart from using ad networks.
I remember a particular tech blogger in Nigeria that made his first 1Million Naira per month blogging via affiliate marketing.
He was among the first bloggers to sign up for Konga affiliate marketing in the early days. He pulled off all the ads on his site and replaced them with affiliate marketing banners, and he made some very good money.
Instead of leaving ads on his site that advertised all kinds of products that pay pennies per click, he instead put banners of the exact products he was reviewing.
If he wrote a review blog on a mobile phone, he would add affiliate banners of mobile phones to that blog post, and that allowed him to enjoy high conversion rates.
This is a typical example showing that affiliate marketing can comfortably replace ads on your blog if you know what you're doing.
All you have to do is find the right affiliate marketing network that offers products that match your blog content and fills the needs of your audience.
Offer Direct Ad Space
If you're adamant on monetizing every ad space on your blog, then you could just offer direct ad space.
Instead of using ad networks to get ads for your blog and get paid per click, you find advertisers looking to advertise directly with you, and put their ads on your site.
Most direct advertisers would want to know your site traffic statistics before advertising with you because the ad rate for your site would depend on how many viewers you can pull on a monthly basis.
The more popular your blog site, the more money you can command for each ad space.
For example, a blog that has millions of viewers on a monthly basis would have a higher ad rate than a blog with a few thousand viewers.
The reason why most bloggers do not consider offering direct ad spaces is because the monetization method is inconsistent, and you'll have to work hard to find and convince new advertisers to advertise with you.
If you're a blogger who just wants to write and not bother about chasing after advertisers, this avenue might not be ideal.
Guest Posting
Popular blogs attract guest posting opportunities. In fact, it is considered a side income for many blogs with huge traffic.
Guest posters do this for many reasons such as acquiring backlinks and leveraging the huge traffic from host blogs.
If you have a popular blog, then you can easily monetize your traffic by offering guest posting opportunities.
Nowadays, most blogs no longer offer guest posting for link building due to the risk of linking out to poor or misleading content. However, there's a chance to leverage other blog’s traffic to either grow one’s blog viewership or sell products online.
But there's an argument that if you have a popular blog, you most likely would have ads on it, so guest posting would be a complementary monetization method at best.
Mentorship
Depending on the niche that you blog in, you could offer paid mentorship to your viewers who are looking to learn a skill or trade.
Not all blogs can offer this, but blogs with contents that are related to careers or business.
Some blog niches that can offer mentorship include:
- Education & Scholarship
- Tech Careers
- Business Startups
- Travel
- Motivation
- Photography
- Sales
- Jobs & Recruitment
- Etc.
A blog like this one I'm writing on, can offer mentorship as a revenue model, and have people willing to pay to become mentees.
In fact, the more I think of it, the more it becomes apparent that this blog can offer almost all the monetization methods listed in this article. This is why it is good to blog in a versatile niche where you are spoiled for choice in terms of revenue models.
Leverage your Audience to Build other Platforms
If in the rare case, you are not able to utilize all the other monetization methods listed in this article, then you could just leverage the traffic to build other platforms.
You could build an email list, a Facebook group, or even another blog with better revenue potential, by leveraging your current audience.
There is a saying that no audience is a wrong audience. So, if you cannot monetize an audience, you either sell it to someone who can or you pivot that audience into another platform that you can easily monetize.
My point is, no audience is useless. You can make money online as long as you have an audience viewing your content.
You just have to find better ways to turn those viewerships into money. And I'm quite sure that no matter what niche you are in, one of the ideas shared in this post can definitely work for your blog.
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