If you own a blog with any amount of traffic you have surely thought about how you can begin to monetize that traffic. While there are many ways of doing this, today I am going to be breaking down the three best and most popular ways you can turn your blog in to a revenue stream month over month generating you passive income. If you don’t own a blog and want to learn how to create one; Read This! And come back when you’re done!

How to monetize your blog

1. Running ads
2. Affiliate marketing
3. Sponsorships

1. Running ads

Running ads on your site should be your first order of business as you don’t even need to make any content. This process is typically a plug and play experience. There are a few adverisor networks you can choose from and you can certainly use more than one.

1. Google Adsense
2. Amazon Associates
3. AdThrive

I would recommend starting with Amazon Associates or Google Adsense for the ease of use but the choice is yours.

Earning potential

The earning potential here is decent as for every 1000 views to your site you can expect $2 - $5 which doesn’t seem like a lot but when you consider that that is just views and you get paid more if someone converts through an ad on your page. It certainly won’t make you a millionaire overnight but if you are consistent about posting and create really engaging content this can most definitely be a formidable source of income.

2. Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing works as follows:

• You find a product or service to promote based on your niche
• You get a personalized link for said product
• Anytime someone buys said product through your link you make a commision.

You are essentially being paid by a company to aquire customers. You can find affiliate programs through places like ClickBank or just type in the name of a brand in your niche followed by affiliate to google to see if they have an affiliate program.

A lot of times these affiliate programs will have a vetting process so this is reserved for blogs with a mild amount of traffic although it is possible to slip by with a pretty new blog. The bottom line is that you need to be trustworthy and you need to be posting excellent content or you are going to be turned down by most affiliate networks unless you are somehow able to garner massive amounts of traffic, but this would kind of be an oxymoron.

Earning Potential

The earning potential for affiliate marketing will depend greatly on your niche. For example e-commerce and personal finance blogs will likely see a pretty nice payday per items sold while other niches may see less. Don’t let this determine your niche though as just like with ads; traffic and quality content is king. The high payout isn’t going to matter if no-one is buying the product you are selling.

3. Sponsored products

Getting sponsors shouldn’t be the first thing you try to do after launching your blog as you will almost certainly be turned down by everyone of them. A sponsorship can differ from affiliate marketing if the business is going to pay you just for you having talked about their product or service. This type of monetization is going to be reserved for blogs that are well established and have consistently high traffic. With that said these will likely be the highest paying as brands will pay thousands to get their products seen by so many people.

Earning Potential

The earning potential for sponsors depends on how you define the term. You could look at this almost like affiliate marketing at which point you can refer to the above but if you are working directly with brands and providing massive amounts of traffic and value to them. You could be earning 5 figures in just one month from a sponsor for merely an ad placement. In that way things differ from affiliate marketing. The potential to make money PURELY from the fact that so many eyes see your site is what makes this in my opinion the highest paying way of monetizing your site.

Conclusion

All in all there are a ton of ways to monetize your blog and these are just a few of the top ones. The bottom line is if you don’t have good traffic and quality content it doesn’t matter what you do to monetize your blog. So get out there and start putting all of these new-found income streams to use and build your passive income.