Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode I’m answering a question a few of my readers sent in before the podcast was launched. The question is What is the fastest way to make money from my blog?

Let’s dig into the answer...

First, let’s touch on the different ways blogs make money. Typically there are 4 different ways to make money on your blog:

• Display Ads (ad network or private advertisers)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Sponsored Content
• Creating and Selling Your Own Products
  

Part of the answer to the question of “what is the fastest way to make money blogging”, depends on how much you want to earn and if you want it as a one off or consistently. I’m going to assume you want to earn money consistently from your blog and ideally as much as possible.

You can do display ads, nearly from day 1 with Adsense, also media.net, but based on my own experience I would do adsense over media.net. The thing is you won’t actually earn a decent amount until you have a ton of pageviews.

Even then you will likely move ad providers. You likely hear a lot about MediaVine and with their 50,000 sessions requirement, it may take a while to get there. But I don’t think qualifying for MediaVine should be your goal, for one there are lots of other ad providers in the game. And by the time you qualify for them you should be earning a lot more from other revenue streams.

Affiliate marketing you can also start doing from day 1, or close to it. The thing with affiliate marketing is that you’re really planting seeds to earn money down the road. You might not earn a lot to start, and it will likely take some time for it to become consistent, but is something that is easy to start with and can grow with time.

I personally am not a huge fan of doing sponsored content, because to me it feels like trading time for money and so it’s only scalable in terms of what you charge. The more you can charge the more you can earn. But it usually requires you to have some following first.

I know tons of people love monetizing with sponsored content and it can be pretty awesome, if it’s something you’d like to explore I’d recommend checking out Tracie Fobes, who spoke about this topic as part of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit in 2020.

Selling products is something that won’t make you money right away, but you likely don’t need as big of an audience as you think to do well with product sales. When it comes to selling products, it matters more how engaged your audience is rather than how big your audience is.

Which is not to say you won’t have a product flop. I definitely have, but it’s always a learning experience, and you never know those products make work for some other time down the road in some other way.

Okay, so what is the fastest way to make money blogging, probably display ads, but long term with the potential to grow more and more, you’re looking at affiliate marketing and digital product sales.

I hope that helps give you a bit of clarity, and with that I invite you to join me next week when I’ll share 3 things you should stop doing to start earning more, I’ll catch ya next time.

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