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Whenever someone is first introduced to the world of blogging, invariably the first question is “How do bloggers get paid?”
They want to know how writing articles and posting them on a webpage can turn into cash. It is a fair question for sure. After all, if you are not familiar with the concept at all, then you wonder if it is a legitimate way to earn an online income.
Before I dive into the types of income streams that bloggers can create, it can be extremely beneficial to think through the goals, passions and struggles of your ideal audience. Once you understand the audience you want to serve, you’ll have a better idea which of the following income streams work best.
How Do Bloggers Get Paid?
The 2 Types of Blogging Income
1. Low Maintenance Passive Income – This is really the most ideal type of income because it can provide you and your family with freedom. This is most often recurring passive income streams that you can enjoy. This type of money happens without your personal involvement. It is scale-able.
Meaning that you can earn money without exchanging time for money in the moment. Some examples would include Google Adsense (or any paid for clicks campaign), membership sites, selling advertisement space, affiliate marketing sales, and even ebook sales.
If you can get paid for something while you are sleeping and it does not require you to exchange future time for money, then you have a low maintenance passive income stream.
The individual transactions are smaller but they happen more often and don’t require your time. Every morning when I wake up I can log into my Google Adsense account and see that I made money while I was sleeping.
2. Personal Involvement High Income – The idea with this strategy is that if something involves your personal time, it should cost more. After all, your time should be valuable to you, right?
If you offer personal consulting for your niche you should charge what your personal time is worth to you. It also matters the type of reach that you are able to get as well.
For example, you do not have to charge as much for a webinar with 100 participants as you might with a personal consultation. You would charge even more for live speaking events as well.
The ideal strategy would be to set up low maintenance passive income streams that meet your household budget so that you can spend your time in higher income events that require personal involvement. To be honest each has their benefits.
Passive income streams allow you to enjoy the freedom to use your time how you choose. Personal involvement income ideas allow you to interact with others and make a difference in other people.
14 Ways to Replace Your Day Job Income with Blogging
Here are some ways that bloggers make money. I won’t be able to go into great detail on how each of these work, nor have I used every one of these to make money.
Some bloggers only focus on how to do 2 or 3 of these really well, while others try to add as many of these as possible to their income buckets. I like to try and master one and then move to the next once I get a handle on one. Also, check out our post if you need an overall online business plan.
Our goal is to make this page the ultimate resource for bloggers who want to earn income.
1. Pay Per Click Ads
How does this work? Anytime someone clicks on your ads, you earn money. The most popular is Google Adsense. On average clicks earn between .15-.50 cents per click, but I have personally seen as much as $5.00 for a click.
2. Affiliate Marketing
- Amazon’s Affiliate program
- Commission Junction
- LinkShare
- Shareasale
- LinkConnector
- FlexOffers
- Clickbank
- E-Junkie
- Ebay
- Viglink
3. CPM Advertising Networks
- ContextWeb
- AdClickMedia
- Adbrite
- Adify
- BuzzLogic
- Casale Media.
- Tribal Fusion
- Burst Media
- ValueClick
- Adtegrity
- Technorati
4. Job Boards
5. Kindle Book Publishing
It’s never been easier for you to write and publish a book. Amazon makes this process extremely easy. You don’t have to wait for permission. You don’t have to submit a book proposal and wait for acceptance. You simply write your passion and publish it for the world to see and buy. We teach a 30-day process for publishing your kindle book called Kindle Your Passion.
6. Self-Published Print Book
While there are certain advantages to going with a traditional publisher, you can self-publish a great looking physical book. With a service like CreateSpace, you can convert your Amazon Kindle book into a physical book. Amazon will even sell your physical book for you without you having to carry the inventory yourself.
7. Audio Book
It is also very easy today to take a book you’ve written and convert it into an audiobook. With a service like Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) you can either hire a voice talent to read your audio book or you can do it yourself. Once completed, your audiobook can be for sale right next to your book on Amazon.
8. Online Course
Compiling your knowledge into an online course is a smart strategy most bloggers are not taking advantage of today. After creating over ten online courses to date, it’s my number one strategy for passive, recurring income. We have a complete online course that shows you how to create and sell your first online course. It’s called Teach Your Passion.
9. Membership Site
When done correctly, membership sites can be a great source of recurring income. It can bring financial stability to your online business as customers pay you monthly. You’ll need to think through a content creation strategy as most members of a membership site expect new content monthly. But once you have a realistic plan, you’ll be glad you created a membership site.
10. Coaching/Mentoring
If you are new to blogging or building a platform, opening up mentoring spots is incredibly easy. Your audience would love to be able to learn from you directly. You will need to keep in mind that you are trading time for dollars. To be effective with this income stream, you will need to charge what you’re worth. To see an example of how to set one up, check out my blog mentoring page for ideas.
11. Physical Products
With a service like Kunaki, you can easily convert any digital product into a physical product, like a CD or DVD. They will even drop ship your product directly to your customer so you do not need to worry about carrying physical inventory yourself. It’s as simple as uploading your artwork cover along with your audio or video file. You can then tie it into your website and allow your audience to purchase physical products from you.
12. Paid Webinar Series
While free webinars are an important strategy for me, when done right paid webinars can be a great source of income as well. This allows you to receive up-front payment before you create the content. You’ll then jump into an online teaching environment with your students and teach them. It’s similar to hosting a live workshop without the required travel.
13. Keynote Speaker
Another great source of revenue is speaking before live audiences. As a blogger, you have plenty of helpful blog posts, podcasts, and webinars that can be easily converted into keynote talks.
All you need to do to get started is to create a speaking page on your blog and have a way for event planners to reach out to you. If you’ll go through the process of creating a framework that I’ll share with you later, you’ll have plenty of great talks that will lead to many ancillary sales.
14. Workshop leader
Why should I waste my effort in planning in-person events if I can do most of this stuff online? That used to be my thinking for a long time, but my mind is changing. You will find that there will always be a segment of your audience that is “event goers.”
Instead of buying online courses or even paid webinars, they much more value learning from you in-person along with the added bonus of connecting with others and the chance to just get away.
Let me be clear. You don’t have to do all fourteen of the above strategies to be successful. In fact, I’ve made the majority of my income in the past with just online courses. However, if you want to scale your business to reach more people, you’ll need to repurpose your message into many different formats.
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