How to make money blogging?! Best ways to make money and list of high paying companies.

How to make money blogging?

If you are a blogger, or just thinking about starting your blog, or maybe you are simply curious to know how these bloggers make money. This article is for you. I will share with you all popular ways to make money blogging and the list of the most popular affiliate and advertising companies.

Blogging is one of the most convenient and honest ways to make money online almost without any financial investment. You will invest – your time, a lot of your time. Your time will be your biggest investment.

If you want to make money blogging, first of all, you should take care of your blog traffic. Traffic is everything. The more visitors you have, the more money you make. There are a lot of different ways how to attract more traffic to your website. In my case, social media is the main source of traffic to my blog.

I. One of the oldest and the most popular ways to make money blogging is to run ads on your website.

Read too: Why blogging? Is blogging good for me? How much time does it take to run a blog? How to be a successful blogger! Blogging behind the scenes!

How does it work?

You need to insert an advertisement code in some post on your blog. People reading your posts will see the ads and they might end up clicking on some ad. You will be making money through ad clicks and through ad views. Every company pays a different amount per click and a different amount per views. Anyways, the more visitors you have, the more money you can potentially make. It is very important to have returning visitors to your blog, but as far as ads, it is better to have new visitors, as they will not be annoyed with the ads and there is more potential that they click on your ads.

There are a lot of different companies which are offering this service. I will share with you my own experience and you can take a decision on which can work better for you. For some companies, you may be approved directly to use their service on your blog as a brand-new blogger, but for others, you need to have a certain number of visitors per month or a certain amount of posts in order to get approved.

Best ways to make money and list of companies I am working with.

I tried a couple of different ads companies, but I only want to share with you those which I really liked and which were really trustworthy. I don’t even want to mention any of those bad companies which are liars and cheaters.

1. Google AdSense

It is a very good and respectful company. From the name of the company, you can tell that the mother company is Google. Believe me, you can trust them, they will pay you your money. As I mentioned before, you can make money if someone clicks on the ads, or through your traffic. It is hard to say how much money you will make, everything depends on which country the majority of your readers is. Usually, clicks from the USA, Great Britain, and Canada are more expensive than from other countries.

A lot of bloggers complain that it is hard to get approved to work with this company. The main reason is that they simply do not meet or follow the terms and conditions of the company.

The main mistakes I heard from other bloggers are: very new blog with low traffic and not unique content, copying content from other blogs, not posting their own posts, even if they were running their blog for several months already.

My suggestion: if you are running your blog for over 6 months and you are writing your own unique content, so you should be good to apply and be accepted.

A lot of bloggers with million views per month make thousands of dollars per month. I wish you to be one of them in the future.

2. Media.net

Media.net is the main alternative to Google AdSense. If people violate Google AdSense’s policy and their account gets suspended, they are easily accepted by Media.net and they can work with them. You may run both ads too. I tried to run both of them, but I was making more money with Google AdSense, therefore I stopped using Media.net and stayed with Google AdSense only. Media.net pay more money per views compared to their competitors. I tried them for 2 weeks, but I wasn’t so happy with the results, therefore I switched to Google only. You can try them, maybe you will see better results.

3. Mediavine

You need to have more than 25,000 unique visitors per month according to Google Analytics to get accepted. Some people say that Mediavine is better than Media.net, you will make more money with them. I didn’t try them personally yet, and I still have no experience with them.

4. AdThrive 

A lot of well-known bloggers are working with this company and they say that this is the best paying company, but to be accepted you need to have at least 100,000 unique visitors per month according to Google Analytics. Unfortunately, I still haven’t tried it yet, as I am still working on getting this amount of traffic to my blog.

II. Affiliate marketing.

Briefly, you make a certain commission when someone buys some product through your link with no additional cost to the buyer. A percentage of the sale goes to you.

How do bloggers use affiliate marketing? They use it in very different ways. It can be through posting some article that was written just to advertise some specific product, and the article would include a direct link to buy that product or just through some advertisement banner, and instead of getting a certain amount of money per click, you will make some commission. Sometimes people specially create a website where others can write reviews on some products, and this website would include affiliate links to the products they write reviews about.

Read too: Tips for new bloggers! How to check the loading speed of your blog and other IT characteristics!

How can you insert an affiliate link into a post? You can download a special HTML code into your website, or you can just add your specific affiliate link as a hyperlink.

How much money can you make? Usually, you make from 10 to 40% of the price. When the company is very well-known, or the price is really high, you will make a much less percentage. But it will still be good for you at the end. The main key is your traffic. The more traffic you have, the more chance you have to make money.

The difference between ads and affiliate marketing is that, with ads, you make money in any case if you have visitors and they just see or click on your ads. As for affiliate marketing, you only make money if somebody makes a purchase through your affiliate link.

A lot of bloggers say that they make thousands of dollars from affiliate marketing, even with low traffic, and they are so happy for it. My personal experience working with different affiliate marketing companies was not so successful yet. Ok, I didn’t try so many of them, and the ones I tried, I didn’t keep their links for so long, but I tried Flexoffer.com for 2 months and I only made 2.99$. And for the same period of time, I got the opportunity to make much more with Google AdSense.

I will not go through details about the difference between the most popular affiliate marketing companies, as all of them work more or less the same. You need to apply for your favorite one or more, and then wait until you get approved, then you can start working with them. Choose the link to the product which you would like to advertise on your blog, insert it in your posts and you are done. There are tons of those companies. For some of them, you need to pay to be able to advertise their products on your blog. I personally think it is ridiculous, they need to pay you, not you pay them. But they have a different point of view, they think that they give you an opportunity to make money. For some of them, you need to pay just a symbolic 5$, which they return to you as soon as you make your first commission, but some others charge you monthly (29-75$).

 I am currently using 2 of the most popular and free companies:

1. Shareasale

2. Flexoffers

III. Sell your own products.

This is best of all these options on the list. But you need to have what to sell. If you have a product to sell, then all the money goes to you.

What to sell? The most popular are eBooks, online courses, software, and services.

A lot of bloggers, as soon as they acquire some experience blogging, are willing to help other new and fresh bloggers to set up their blogs and to help them to grow it for money. I think that, in 2018, I will start my own blogging coaching services too, as I have so many things to share and to teach others. I created and I maintain, improve and develop my blog just by myself. I won a couple of bloggers awards and received a lot of very high positive feedback from professional web developers and web designers about my blog. I think it is time to start helping others and sharing my knowledge.

I wrote and published my first eBook “Short Stories of Moral”, and I’m currently working on another “Jokes” eBook. You can find my eBook on the most popular online-selling eBooks platforms: iTunes, Amazon, Kobo, etc.

I have a plan to create some online course in the future, but it is still early to talk about it.

I know some bloggers who created their blogs, just for the purpose of promoting their online shop and selling some of their products. You can sell anything you want to sell. It can be some handcrafted unique products, toys, electronics, paintings, or any other kind of products.

IV. Sponsored posts.

There are companies that pay you if you write some article about their products. The most common way is when you write a nice review of some product.

The most popular company is Izea. This company will help you to connect with brands that can be interested to advertise on your blog. It works like a platform and you choose which brands you want to work, and you negotiate on the price of your services.

How much money can you make? Everything depends on how many people can read your post, including your blog traffic and your social media accounts followers. Actually, it is a very-very individual, and you negotiate directly with some brand. You can write some article and just share it on your blog, or you can write it and share it additionally on your social media profiles. Averagely, you can make from 50 to 500$ per article. But again, everything depends on a lot of factors, including your blogging niche.

In this article, I shared with you the most popular ways how bloggers make money from their blogs. Of course, the list of companies with which you may work is not limited to those which I shared here. I shared just those which I am using on my own blog and with which I had some experience before. If you would like to add to this list any companies you believe are very beneficial for this post, I will be very thankful for it.

Read too: Why I moved my web hosting from Bluehost to SiteGround

I hope this article helped clarify this topic for you and gave you the answer to the question “How those bloggers can make money?”. If you are just starting and still have this question in mind, I can tell that you can make money blogging, but it will take time. Believe me, it will really take time. You will learn everything more, deeper and at the end, you will become more successful. I know a lot of very successful bloggers who make thousands of dollars, even six figures per month just from their blogs. But all of them started many years ago and they already have a huge experience in blogging.

Is it possible to become successful in blogging if I start now? Surely yes. Everything depends on you. It is a business, if you give better services than your competitors, then you are more successful. In blogging, if your articles are more attractive for readers and you found a way to solve your readers’ problems better than other bloggers, believe me – your blog will be successful. The most important keys of success in blogging are to be creative, consistent and to write something you are expert in. Find that topic in which you are really the best and your readers will benefit from your experience.

I would like to wish you success in your blogging path. Please share with me your thoughts and experience in the comments below. I am sure it is very interesting and it will help other readers too.

Yulianna.