We have been asked if you can still make money blogging a million times, our answer is yes you can. It’s not quite as easy as it used to be in the old days, just like making money off YouTube is not as easy as it used to be in the old days, but it is still completely possible. To have a successful blog you need to be able to write, which is sort of a prerequisite running a blog. If you can write you are halfway there. Another quarter of the way there is if you really love to write to the point where your emails to friends are considered novellas. The last quarter of the way there is that those novellas are interesting to read and your friends like your emails. Now once you’re a successful blogger, you need to start making money. Here are a few good ways to do it that will bring your blogging hobby into the full light of being a money-making job.

Bodies and eyeballs

First, you need to have a blog, and then get a lot of people reading it. The more people that you can get to your blog the more money you can potentially make. If you are just starting out you are going to have to spend a lot of time promoting your blog and writing. You will spend more time actually promoting your blog than you will actually writing it. Go into the communities that are of the theme of your blog and post things there as well with links back to your blog. How to promote a blog is a completely new article, so just know that you have to promote it. If you build it they will not necessarily come, you need to bring them. The more the better.

Advertising

Advertising is the first thing the generally people think about when they’re thinking about making money from blogging or a website. However, advertising is really not going to make you a fortune unless you have a tremendous amount of people coming to your blog. Even then there are better ways to make money. It won’t really hurt you to just throw google ads on there, or sell some other advertising, but you will figure out fast that the money you get from it is not worth the real estate on the webpage that it takes up.

Sponsors

Sponsors are another way to make money in your blog, however similar to advertisers you are not going to make a fortune this way. Again, sponsorship money is based on how many people you have coming to your blog. It’s a little bit of extra money but we have found it’s not really worth it.

Affiliate products

One of the better ways of making money on a blog is affiliate products. Whether this is products from Amazon or digital products from places like Clickbank, you will make more money from affiliate sales than you will from straight-up advertising. There are lots and lots of affiliate programs all across the net with various payouts. Some of which can even get you over a thousand dollars for one sale. The nice part about this is you can talk about whatever the product is in a blog post. Of course, you don’t want to turn your blog into a hard sell site, because people are only going there to read about what you write not necessarily to listen to your sales pitch. But still, affiliate sales are probably one of the best.

Your own products

Better than affiliate sales, though a little bit more work as you have to supply inventory and do other things, is selling your own products. You might be able to sell an e-book, digital music, a program, or anything else that can download. You can also sell real-world products, and you can send them in the mail, but again the focus is on your blog to be entertaining, not to be a sales e-commerce site. From your point to view the money is the most important, from your customers’ point of view the blog is the most important for entertainment. So, listen to your customer.

There are of course other ways on a blog to make money, such as membership or take sponsored blog posts, but selling a product or an affiliate sale is definitely the easiest way to go for the most money. First and foremost, you need to have a popular blog before you’re ever going to make decent money. So, start writing, write some more, improve your craft, be entertaining, and the world will be at your feet.