People have been making a living off of their blogs since online advertising became a thing. In the last 20 years this industry has taken off like a rocket ship, though, opening dozens of new doors for monetizing and profiting off of an online blog. In this post I’d like to go over my favorite 5 ways to make money with a financial independence blog. This is far from an exhaustive list, and rather than post a behemoth article listing a hundred different things — many of which probably would not even be applicable to most people — I thought I’d focus on my 5 favorite ones.
How are blogs monetized in the first place?
Even though there are many different ways to make money with a blog, they generally fall into a few broader categories, and tend to follow a similar path.
- Start writing your financial independence blog (or whatever your passion is) as a hobby. Fill it with great, useful content. Hope that it reaches people.
- Gain a following. Hope that readers contribute valuable substance to your posts, or benefit from your writing. Use word of mouth and great content/search engine optimization to reach a wider base.
- Sell advertising space to make money.
- Become an affiliate for other marketplaces or vendors.
- Begin your own product or brand, also known as private labeling.
- Start a service related to your financial independence blog. This could be personalized consulting, an online financial independence course, or even just a weekly mailer of some sort.
- Rinse and repeat.
The formula seems pretty straightforward, and if you spend any time on Google, you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds of popular sites and bloggers claiming they have made this system work for them. Whether they are being truthful or not with their results is another story. There surely are plenty of financial bloggers out there touting their success in the hopes of selling products.
To some degree this niche is self perpetuating. Think about all of those book authors, who sell books on how to get rich. Meanwhile they’re making a living on the book sales themselves. They are getting rich by selling people a book about how to get rich.
Do your best to look past the curtain in these cases and take these writers and authors at face value. In this blog, I give you an unfiltered view of my successes and failures, and will never claim to have achieved something that’s not true. I also choose to be up front and transparent about when/where I am making a profit off of your readership. I hope that this transparency will inspire you to do the same if/when you decide to start your own financial independence blog.
#5 – Make money with a financial independence blog by just writing great content
Ok this one is kind of a filler, but the truth is this is how most bloggers get their footing. It’s also the easiest to manipulate. The reason it’s not my #1 is because even though I see the tremendous value in writing great content, I think it’s ultimately a stepping stone to the other methods of profiting from financial independence blogs (or any blog for that matter).
When you write great content that people can use, search engines will recognize it, and they will start to organically drive targeted traffic to your site. Why is that important, you ask?
Once you have targeted readers visiting your site routinely, it’s time to start some unobtrusive advertising campaigns. These don’t need to take much work on your end at all. You want them to be unobtrusive because new readers are easily frightened by in your face marketing, and web sites whose motives clearly are about profit rather than content.
For this reason I highly recommend Google AdSense. If you’re using WordPress, which I highly recommend, there are dozens and dozens of plugins that can assist with your implementation of AdSense into your blog. AdSense will incorporate unobtrusive, relevant, and highly targeted advertisements to your readers. These are great because they’re generally things the readers are interested in, rather than just annoying popups. Their benefit is two-fold in this way, because they help you make some coin, and also give your readers additional value.
With enough readers, AdSense can easily be your sole money-maker. There are other advertising platforms out there as well, such as Taboola, which I have used in the past. For a beginner, I prefer AdSense due to its ease of use, and also its versatility as a result of being backed by Google’s mountains and mountains of targeted data.
So… remember… content is king. Write good content, get organic readers, and then start using AdSense.
#4 – Become an Amazon Affiliate
Affiliate marketing, in particular Amazon’s affiliate program is ubiquitous with online blog profit. There are few financial independence blogs, or any other successful blog that doesn’t capitalize on Amazon’s affiliate program. Similar to AdSense, Amazon has mountains of user data that it uses to deliver targeted advertisements. Where it differs from AdSense though, is that Amazon pays you a commission based on the price of a product sold, rather than based on the price of a click per ad.
Getting approved for an Amazon affiliate account is much more involved than getting approved for AdSense. There are many stipulations and requirements that your site or content must adhere to. A certain percentage of your site must be unique, specific disclaimers must be clearly posted, among other things. This is why it’s not the first thing I suggest you focus on, but rather something to build upon an already money-generating foundation.
Once you’ve been approved for an account, you simply link to Amazon products or pages using your special affiliate link. Build things links into relevant articles. Make them unobtrusive and relevant in order to generate reader interest.
When a reader clicks on one of your affiliate links to Amazon, a cookie is stored on their computer for 24 hours. From that moment on (until they click on someone else’s affiliate link, anyway), for the next 24 hours, any product or products they purchase from Amazon will generate a commission for you.
If someone clicks your link to a book on blogging, and then 15 hours later decides to order a $2,000 3D printer, guess what? You get the commission on the printer sale!
This can be a very profitable venture, provided you a consistent number of readers and can stick to Amazon’s terms of service. A successful niche web site or financial independence blog can become your sole source of income through this program if you develop it correctly.
#3 – Create a Private Label Product
This depends on what your blog’s focus is. If it’s a financial independence blog like this one, creating a physical, privately labeled/branded product for sale might be difficult. But for blogs that start off as affiliates, it’s easy to find your prime generators of sales and then create private label offshoots of them for sale directly on your site.
Survival Life is a great example of this. They link to lots of affiliate sites, but based on their successful marketing and traffic, they also sell lots of privately labeled products like knives, paracord bracelets, etc.
Private labeling is something to pursue after items #5 and #4 for sure. Without an abundant reader base, it’s pretty much pointless. But instead of making a commission on potential Amazon sales, you make nearly 100% profit on every sale. The cost:profit ratio is much better in this case.
Products can be lots of different things. You could market an e-Book if your site is strictly informational. Many sellers of physical products use web sites like Ali Express to source their products from China and sell for a profit directly to readers. There are some pitfalls here, particularly when it comes to shipping, returns and customer support. Since you don’t likely have the support structure that sites like Amazon have, returns and customer service become a lot more labor intensive for you, should they occur. Just something to think about.
Private labeling is really something to pursue after you’ve gotten a solid footing. It can involve a slight amount of overhead or investment, as well.
#2 – Start a service
Like private labeling, creating a service depends a lot on your blog’s niche. Many financial independence blogs like this one end up creating courses that are sent out to readers/subscribers in sections. They can range from budgeting boot camps to full fledged investment courses. Many create simple mailing lists.
Subscription services are the holy grail of online marketing. In fact, they’re the holy grail of all marketing. Apple’s iPhone is still it’s most popular product, but it’s fastest growing products are its subscription based services. The same can be said about nearly all major marketing and product behemoths, including Google and Netflix.
Once people have subscribed to a product, there is a biological resistance in them that rejects the idea of canceling the subscription. Sure, some people do cancel, but most don’t. Many let their subscriptions expire without renewing, but at that point you’ve already gotten the entire subscription cost out of them.
Don’t misconstrue this. Your goal isn’t to mislead people. Your goal is to provide them with a quality subscription in order to get them to renew over and over again, generating consistent cash flow for you.
Services can take many forms. Blue Apron provides a physical product for its subscription. Longtail Pro provides a web-based subscription to help people with search engine marketing/optimization.
For someone just getting started, online courses provide great value to your readers, as long as they’ve got good content. Don’t create a garbage subscription with no content, with the hopes of getting people hooked and forgetting to cancel. A “Six Week Financial Independence Crash Course” might be something to consider, if you’re thinking about starting a financial independence blog like this one.
How to deliver a subscription service?
There are lots of course delivery platforms out there. Udemy is a great platform for delivering online educational material. If you’re not trying to go so heavy, a simple e-mail list can suffice.
Subscription services provide a great avenue for reader retention as well. One thing you might consider is creating a free subscription service just in order to keep readers. From there you can fit in the other monetization tactics into each mailer you send out!
#1 The number one way to make money with a financial independence blog
Ok this is kind of a trick. The ultimate success story for any blog is the correct implementation of all four of the above steps. Successful bloggers who have capitalized on all of these systems make salaries that easily pass six figures or more. These are largely passive incomes, created through the generation of quality content, proper search engine optimization, and offering valuable products and services.
You simply cannot jump to this step without first mastering steps #5-#2. Each path builds upon the foundation set by the step before it.
All of them stem from quality content.
So in the end, the best way to make a living with your financial independence blog is to create quality content that is helpful to your readers. Seems pretty straightforward, right? With quality content, readers will come. With organic, targeted readers, advertisements will sell themselves. Once money is coming in, private labeling and subscription based services will naturally create opportunities.
CONTENT IS KING
Do you agree with this list? What are some unique ways you’ve made money through blogging? Do you think these steps are out of order?