Online Courses and Workshops
Books and Ebooks
Affiliate Marketing
Advertising
Speaking Gigs
Consulting/Coaching
Selling Freelance Services
In a moment, I’m going to show you a general framework you can follow to start a profitable blog from scratch.
But first, let’s jump into the specifics of how to make real money blogging, including real-world examples you can study and learn from.
Free Training: The 31 Most PROFITABLE Niches for Bloggers in 2022
Here are the top 7 awesome ways to make a good blogging income:
1. Online Courses and Workshops
Here at Smart Blogger, we make most of our income from online courses and workshops — over $1 million per year — but we are far from the only successful blog doing this. Most of the people making a lot of money from their blogs are doing it through online courses.
Ramit Sethi reportedly crossed $10 million dollars in annual revenue with his suite of premium courses:
Ramit Sethi - Premium Courses
And it’s not only business or wealth-focused topics that are doing well. You can find successful blogs on just about any topic or niche monetizing with online courses. For instance, the popular interior designer Maria Killam has quite a few courses and workshops in her catalog:
Maria Killam - Courses and Workshops
Online courses and workshops can bring in one-time payments or, depending on your model, recurring income via subscriptions.
2. Books and Ebooks
Quite a few writers have parlayed their blogging success into a major publishing deal. Mark Manson, for instance, published a blog post called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck in 2015. Millions of readers later, he got a book deal with Harper Collins and went on to sell over 3,000,000 copies in the US alone.
Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Self-published books have also been successful. The most notable success story among bloggers is probably James Altucher’s Choose Yourself, which is now sold over 500,000 copies:
James Altucher - Choose Yourself
3. Affiliate Marketing
If you’d like to create some passive income streams from your blog, one of the best choices is affiliate marketing — recommending the services, digital products, and physical products of other companies in exchange for a commission.
Here at Smart Blogger, we make more than $100,000 per year promoting affiliate products, most of that coming from casually recommending products we love like SiteGround (affiliate link) and Elementor (affiliate link).
Editor’s Note: Read our in-depth review of SiteGround here: SiteGround Review: Still the Best (Or Not-So-Good) in 2022? And, for an in-depth review of Elementor, read: Elementor Review: Is it REALLY the Best Landing Page Builder?
But there are lots of other examples too. For instance, John Lee Dumas of EOFire made $710,835 in affiliate income last year. Digital Photography School has reportedly made over $500,000 in commissions as an Amazon Associate from promoting photography equipment:
Digital Photography School - Amazon Affiliates
With so many companies offering referral programs to help spread the word about their digital product or service, the number of different affiliate marketing opportunities is enormous.
Joining an affiliate network such as CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, eBay Partner Network, or ShareASale is one way to begin tapping into this revenue stream and to start earning extra income from your hard-earned organic traffic.
Free Bonus: Click here to get our “cheat sheet” for affiliate marketers delivered straight to your inbox (for free).
4. Advertising
Normally, we’re not big fans of selling ads on your site as a monetization strategy. You need roughly a million visitors per year for the large ad networks to take you seriously, and affiliate marketing is almost always more profitable and just as passive.
That being said, some niches like recipes, fashion, and news are hard to monetize through many of the other methods mentioned here, and they get LOTS of page views. In that case, putting a few banner ads on your site can make sense as a supplementary income source.
For example, here’s a screenshot of a 2016 income report from Share the Yummy:
Share the Yummy - Income Report
Normally, you make money by joining an ad network. Nearly anyone can join Google AdSense and add a Google Ad or two, for example, and you can later grow into more selective networks like Mediavine and AdThrive.
5. Speaking Gigs
If your blog takes off, and you start being recognized as an authority in your space, you might be surprised by how many invitations you get to speak at conferences. And it’s amazingly profitable. I typically make a minimum of $10,000 per speech and it can go as high as $100,000 when you count product sales resulting from the speech.
Not bad for a 60-90 minute talk. 🙂
Ryan Deiss Testimonial
6. Consulting/Coaching
While this certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, doing a bit of coaching or consulting is an online job that can earn you a surprisingly nice living, even when your audience is small. I rarely do consulting anymore, but the last time I did regularly, I charged $1,000 an hour with a six-month waiting list.
But I’m not the only one. Going back to Maria, again, she’s been quite innovative in coming up with ways to do design consultations by photo and email, currently charging $1,275 per room:
Maria Killam - Consultations
You can make this work in almost any niche. You just need to know what you’re doing and be confident in the value you are providing to clients.
7. Selling Freelance Services
The next step up from consulting is to actually do it for them.
Typically, you’ll make more money freelancing than with anything else, but it’s also the most draining and time-intensive. That being said, I’ve seen bloggers make six-figure incomes with no more than a few thousand readers on their blog, essentially using their blog as a lead mechanism to get clients.
It’s so profitable, even if successful bloggers continue to do it. For example, Elna Cain continues to sell her freelance writing services:
Elna Cain - Freelance writing services
If you’re a freelance writer, designer, photographer, programmer, or other service provider where your skills can be sold digitally instead of you having to be there in person, you might want to consider this income stream from day one. All you really need to get started is a contact form for clients to reach out to you.
Okay, now for the fun part. Let me show you the framework I used to become an honest-to-goodness millionaire…
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