Make Money from Your Blog

Generally speaking, advancing your position within your organization, finding a better job, amplifying your influence, and establishing yourself as a leader in your field are the most valuable benefits for a technical blogger.

Still, for necessity or inclination, you may want to directly monetize your blog. We’ll cover selling your own products, if you’re a startup or small business, in the next chapter. Here, we’ll consider some approaches to making some side income from your blog.

The following are some of the most common direct monetization strategies for blogs:

• Ads
• Sponsorships
• Affiliate links
• Subscriptions and Patreon supporters
• Donations
• Merchandise
• Selling your own products

Let’s review each of them, except for the last one, which will be covered in the next chapter.

Ads

Thanks to ad networks such as Google AdSense,^[91] placing ad units on a blog is very straightforward.

Such networks act as intermediaries between advertisers and publishers (i.e., you). The details vary, but essentially ad networks aggregate a series of ad spots on a large number of sites and let advertisers pay to place ads in them. This frees you from the burden of finding advertisers, agreeing on a fair price, collecting payments, and so on.

If you intend to place ads on your blog, you can sign up for free with Google AdSense (the most common choice among bloggers) and then set up one or more ad units. AdSense is the site owner (i.e., publisher) counterpart to the Google Ads program, which is the interface used by advertisers to buy ads on search results and sites that are part of Google’s program.

You’ll be provided with an embeddable snippet of JavaScript code for each ad unit you create, which you then place in strategic spots on your blog. You could, for example, select a full banner above each of your posts, a vertical skyscraper for your sidebar, and a box ad unit at the bottom of each post.

Ads that are relevant to your content will automatically be displayed inside such spots on your blog, and your account will earn a variable amount of money each time a visitor clicks one of those ads. This is called contextual advertising because the ads served vary depending on the content of the page.

The amount of money you receive will be what the advertiser paid in order to have an ad displayed on your site—minus the substantial cut that Google takes. Realistically, this means putting anything between a few cents to a few dollars in your pocket for each click. Such numbers really depend on the competition level and niche you’re in, but for technical blogs the CPC (cost per click, meaning the cost to the advertiser) you’ll earn tends to be below a dollar.

Google will display a maximum of three ad units regardless of how many units you place on a given page. This means that you shouldn’t place more than three ad units on any page of your site. (Each unit may contain a multitude of ads, however, and this is handled automatically by Google.)

WordPress users can include ads in the sidebar by adding a text widget containing the JavaScript ad code provided by AdSense. For other spots, such as below each post, users can choose their theme’s ad options (if provided by the theme), use one of the many ad plugins available, or edit the theme’s files directly (the least preferable option, as explained previously). Common theme files to edit are header.php, footer.php, and single.php (for adding content above or below each post).

Blogger users can configure their ads’ strategy under Earnings and take advantage of the AdSense gadget to customize their layout.

Regardless of your blogging engine, you can also add a search box powered by Google AdSense, if you wish. When users search your site with it and end up clicking any ad that’s displayed on the results page, you get a cut. Google also enables you to include native in-feed ads within your RSS feed.

Using fonts and colors in your ad units that match your theme will increase your CTR (click-through rate). Squares and wide rectangles also tend to have good CTRs. Likewise, choosing key positions in your template will help you achieve a higher CTR. In my experience, visitors are significantly more likely to ignore AdSense units that are located in the sidebar than those placed before (much more so) or after your posts, as shown in the following figure.

To increase your revenue you can either bring in more visitors or up the number of clicks you get from the current volume of visitors you receive (your CTR). Ideally, you’ll be able to do both.

Avoid positioning your ad units in a way that makes them appear to be actual content, such as horizontal ad units that contain a few links that resemble a list of categories or pages for your blog. Such ads shouldn’t be placed where your navigation bar would normally be. Misleading your visitors is never acceptable, and Google will sometimes intervene in situations where such behavior is reported.

Detailed reports will allow you to figure out which ad units and products (e.g., AdSense for content, search, and feed) are performing well. These reports include details such as the number of ad impressions/pageviews you served, the CTR, CPC, RPM (revenue per mille: mille is Latin for “one thousand”). RPM is often called CPM elsewhere, where the C stands for cost. AdSense will also suggest optimization strategies and recommendations from time to time to help you squeeze more revenue out of your blog.

Don’t try to game the system or you’ll be banned and all of your unpaid earnings will be frozen. Avoid clicking your own ad units, and never invite your readers (or friends) to click on them either.

Finally, it’s important to note that Google requires you to have a privacy policy on your blog (as do many other networks), a subject, you may remember, we discussed in Chapter 3, ​Setting Up Your Blog​.

AdSense may be the most common ad provider for bloggers, but it’s certainly not the only option available. A wide variety of ad networks exist, and some of them may be good matches for your blog.

Some of these networks pay publishers in the same way AdSense does, on the basis of the actual clicks received (CPC-based), whereas others sell your ad spots at a fixed rate per thousand impressions (CPM-based) or per given time period (e.g., $80 a month). For the latter two types of ad networks, an ad’s CTR does not affect your earnings.

Keep in mind that if you opt for an ad network as a technical blogger, you may be better served by niche networks that specialize in the area of your blog, if one is available. For example, for developer and design blogs, Carbon tends to perform better than the more generic AdSense, in my experience.^[92]

Recipe 64

Keep an eye on fellow bloggers in your niche to spot niche-specific ad networks.

In the majority of cases, there’s an approval process that your site must go through before you can join a network, some of which are by invitation only. The main criteria are always traffic and content quality. If you show up with a brand-new site and little traffic, relatively few ad networks will take you on. Build a following first.

Shortcomings of Ads for Technical Blogs

Placing ads on your blog is a low-effort monetization strategy, particularly if you stick with a network like AdSense, which won’t make you jump through hoops in order to have your site accepted. Unfortunately it’s not the most profitable way to monetize your blog (as we’ll discuss later), and it comes with a series of negative implications. Let’s review the most noteworthy shortcomings.

• Ads tend to put visitors off, particularly technical folks. Don’t place too many ads, or your blog will end up looking like a spam site and you’ll be bouncing visitors like a pinball machine.

• Accept that many technical users will have ad-blocking browser extensions installed, such as AdBlock Plus. Don’t try to detect and block these users from viewing your content, as some sites do. It’s your right to show ads with your content. It’s your visitors’ right to decide not to see them.

• Search engines tend to dislike overly commercial sites that are filled with ads and other offers and may penalize your search result ranking if you go overboard. Two to three ad spots are okay.

• Technical audiences tend to ignore ads. This means that your click-through rate will be low, which in turn means that for every thousand impressions of your ad, you’ll only get a few clicks and bring in very little revenue. The end result is that your average RPM (again, your revenue per thousand impressions of an ad unit) won’t be worth boasting about. In most cases you’re looking at the lower end of the US$1--$5 range. In turn, this means that if you manage to attract 10,000 visitors in a given month, that ad unit will only bring you between $10 and $50, and the actual figure will probably fall in the lower end of the range. This is why AdSense is sometimes humorously referred to as “blogging social welfare.”

• It can be argued that you’re inviting the visitors you worked so hard to attract to leave by clicking ads at the rate of mere pennies per visitor lost, instead of steering them toward calls to actions that are more profitable to you (e.g., signing up for your newsletter or buying your ebook).

• At times, people have been banned from ad networks like AdSense through no fault of their own, simply because foul play has been suspected. Many thousands of dollars have been lost by bloggers in such disputes, where there is little recourse for the innocent. It’s unlikely to happen to you, but it’s conceivable. Don’t depend solely on ads.

Should You Place Ads on Your Blog?

In the beginning, when you’re just getting your site off the ground, don’t place ads on your blog. Initially you’ll have relatively little traffic, so the chances of earning anything substantial from ads are remarkably slim. On the other hand, the chances of putting off your early visitors are substantial.

Recipe 65

Don’t place ads on your blog until you have at least 10,000 pageviews per month.

As a general rule of thumb (and depending on the economic goals you’ve set for your blog, if any), don’t place ad units until your site is established and receives at least 10,000 pageviews per month. However, I would think twice before placing ads in your feed even at that point, as they’d be going out to your most valuable readers, the people you want to maintain and not annoy (with ads) the most.

Also keep in mind how well-defined of a niche your blog currently is in. A targeted audience will generally perform better ad-wise than the audience of a general blog. In the case of contextual advertising through programs like AdSense, the ads that are shown will be more relevant and interesting to your audience, who will then be more apt to click and, in turn, generate more revenue for you.

Once you’ve managed to attract a decent following and have established yourself somewhat in your niche, use a tasteful number of ads (e.g., one or two, three at the very maximum). Don’t, initially at least, view ads as your main source of income for your blog, because they likely won’t be. Instead, ads can be one source of revenue in a diversification strategy that includes multiple sources of income.

Recipe 66

Diversify your sources of blog income.

Finally, don’t place ads on your company blog. Your main objective with a company blog shouldn’t be to make an extra $50 a month by filling your blog with ads. Your primary product, whatever that is, has far more potential to earn you real money. Putting off readers or sending them away from your site when they click an ad doesn’t make sense from a business perspective.

The same applies if you’re not an established startup or business but you start selling a digital product like an ebook through your blog.

Sponsorships

Conceptually not far from ads, sponsorships are a good way to make money with your blog. The basic idea is that you find companies that are relevant to your niche and then contact them about sponsoring your blog. In exchange for a monthly fee, you’ll provide them with high visibility to your blog’s readership.

Before you approach potential sponsors, though, you should have detailed information about your audience, which is easily obtained from Google Analytics. Prepare a page on your blog or as a PDF that you’ll send by email with the details of your demographic as well as with details about what you’re offering. (Include survey data as well, if you directly surveyed your users recently.)

If you’re good with graphic design, make your presentation appealing and be sure to include lots of attractive graphs. Eye candy sells.

Traffic stats aside, what really seals the deal is an appealing offer. You could offer any or all of the following perks to potential sponsors.

• A banner advertisement in a predefined format and position on your blog (a so-called “media buy”): Link to the sponsor, of course, but opt for a nofollow link (i.e., rel="nofollow"). This way Google won’t think that you’re selling links for SEO purposes. In your offer, let the sponsor know that such links will be nofollow to comply with Google’s policies. Specify if you’re limiting the offer to the front page (unusual) or throughout the blog (more common).

• A thank-you note and backlink at the bottom of your posts: For example, “This post was sponsored by Acme, the best solution for all your cartoon explosion needs.”

• A periodic thank-you post that includes a shout-out to your sponsors, links to them, and a brief explanation of what they offer your readers: If your sponsor turnover is not significant, this kind of post can become annoying for your readers, so you’ll want to keep them infrequent (e.g., once per quarter).

• Interviews, guest blogging, and other content-based arrangements that benefit both the sponsor and the readers: Always disclose your affiliation. Don’t hide from your readers the fact that you have a sponsor.

• Trials, giveaways, and special offers that are useful to your reader and great marketing for your sponsor

If you don’t have any companies in mind, do some research to see if companies in your niche are already sponsoring other blogs. It’s far easier to convince them to also sponsor you than it is to approach a company that’s never heard of blog sponsorship before.

You can also have an Advertise page in your navigation bar, as well as a Your Ad Here banner or button in a spot that you’re offering to sponsors that links to that page. Making a post in which you explain that you’re accepting sponsors is also an aggressive but legitimate way to go about it.

There are companies that facilitate the whole process so that it’s virtually identical to selling ads through a network, but part of the benefit of sponsorships is that you deal with a handful of companies only, one on one, for months or even years at a time. So once your initial agreement is set up, there isn’t much work to do on your part except to collect payments. You may as well cut out the middleman, establish good professional relationships with companies, and keep all the revenue for yourself.

You can set your own price by basing it on an honest CPM. If you require a sensible $3 CPM for a given sponsorship offer, you can divide your average monthly pageviews by 1,000 and then multiply that by $3. So if your blog were to attract 100,000 pageviews per month on average, you can request $300/mo. from your sponsor. Generally speaking, the more prominent your banner and overall sponsorship offer and the narrower the scope of your blog, the higher you can go with your CPM rate.

Recipe 67

Aim for high-quality, niche-relevant sponsors only.

As usual, respect your readers. Opt for tasteful ads and banners. Don’t permit ads that include sounds, and limit the animation level of your banners to a minimum. Likewise, don’t feed your readers low-quality, spam-like sponsors just to make a quick buck. I constantly receive offers for sponsorship and to link purchases from companies I don’t trust. I always turn them down, and so should you.

For startup or company blogs, sponsorships, just like ads, don’t make much business sense.

Affiliate Links

When I was growing up, I set up an arrangement with my local computer store in which I would refer people asking me for computer-buying advice to them and the store would then give me a small percentage commission based on what those people bought. I didn’t know it at the time, but the service I was providing to that store was a form of affiliate marketing.

This type of arrangement can be extremely beneficial for both the company and the affiliate. The company receives new business from customers it may not have reached otherwise, and the affiliate gets a commission for each sale that can be directly traced back to the affiliate’s site (online, usually through a cookie or coupon).

Typically, online affiliate offers work like this:

1. The affiliate links to an offer with a tracking ID embedded in the link.

2. A visitor visits the link and is redirected to the landing page on the company’s site.

3. A browser cookie is stored with a certain expiration date on the computer of the visitor. This cookie associates the visitor with the affiliate that referred them.

4. If the visitor makes a purchase at any time while the cookie is still valid, a commission is provided to the blogger/affiliate by the company.

Depending on the type of goods and the company’s approach to affiliate marketing, the commission can be anything between a few percentage points to 100 percent. Yes, you read that right. Some companies will go so far as to give away the entire sale price for a promotional period in order to attract more affiliates and perhaps recurring customers.

More commonly for digital goods such as ebooks and courses, margins are exceedingly high, which means that content producers routinely offer affiliates a 50 percent commission rate for all sales made within a large period of time after the initial referral (e.g., sixty or ninety days, which, again, is often tracked via cookies).

As you can imagine, you can generate a substantial amount of money from affiliate marketing if you have a large-enough audience that you’re offering relevant services and products to.

As a blogger, you already have the audience, and as we’ll see in a moment, you can find relevant affiliate offers to present to your readers. Affiliate marketing really is an approachable monetization strategy you can’t afford to ignore.

Before jumping into key affiliate programs for technical bloggers, I want to provide you with a little background about the stigma associated with affiliates (and affiliate marketing) in general.

The reason affiliate marketing has gained such a bad reputation is that the economic incentives to promote a company’s products are very high. Here we’re not playing around with a dime a click. Depending on the product and the commission, we could be talking as little as a few dollars or as much as hundreds of dollars (on the higher end of the scale) per referred customer.

Affiliate marketers have gone to great lengths to grab such generous commissions, including spamming, misleading, and downright scamming users.

I really encourage you to look past the negative connotations that are associated with affiliate marketing. In this section we’ll take a very ethical approach to this subject, which can reward you handsomely without the need to mislead, spam, or promote crappy offers or products to anyone.

Amazon Associates: A Blogger’s Best Friend

Amazon Associates is one of the earliest and most popular affiliate programs on the web.^[93] Every time you refer a customer to a given Amazon site (e.g., Amazon.com) with your tracking ID, you’ll receive a small percentage of the total cost of whatever that person purchases during the next 24 hours.

Some affiliate marketers and bloggers greatly underestimate the earning potential of Amazon Associates on the basis of the tiny cookie duration (only 24 hours, instead of, say, 60 days) and the small commissions (usually between 4 and 10 percent, depending on the product, instead of the 30 to 75 percent commissions that are common for digital goods elsewhere).

While both counts are true, Amazon Associates provides many benefits that make it a very worthwhile program for reputable bloggers.

• Virtually everyone knows and trusts Amazon as a store. You don’t have to convince your visitors that their credit card number won’t be stolen when they shop there.

• Amazon’s inventory of physical products is fantastic. They carry so many items that you can always find something of quality to promote, nearly regardless of your particular blogging niche.

• Amazon spends millions of dollars studying ways to increase the percentage of visitors who end up buying products (i.e., optimizing the conversion rate of their pages). Your main goal is really to send traffic to Amazon by way of your affiliate links, after which Amazon will take care of converting many of these visitors into customers, thus earning you a commission on all of those sales.

• Unlike other referral programs, you get a cut for every sale that’s made within a 24-hour period, not just for sales of the product you promoted. My technical blogs have received commissions for goods that I never promoted, including watches, swimming pools, and toys. That’s because you may send visitors to check out a book, but once on Amazon they may purchase other books or other products (either instead of or in combination with the original item) within the 24-hour period for which your tracking ID is valid. Those unexpected, additional sales add up quickly.

• Unlike some other affiliate programs, it’s considered normal for bloggers to routinely link to Amazon in their posts. This means that your post archives will contain many posts that include Amazon affiliate links, generating you commissions long after you initially posted them.

Amazon also offers Native Shopping Ads,^[94] which are a great alternative to Google AdSense (in my experience, certainly a more rewarding one).

Amazon has several associates programs, depending on the locale of the store you’re targeting. You don’t have to reside in one of these countries to sign up for any of their respective affiliate programs.

Register for each of the programs according to the demographics of your traffic and your blog’s language. For example, if most of your traffic arrives from the States, the U.K., and Canada, then apply for each of those three associates programs. (You’ll be applying three times.) You can select the locale using the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the Amazon Associates login page.

Amazon even allows you to link these accounts and use a snippet of JavaScript to automatically redirect your readers to the closest store available, maximizing your profits.

You can also provide links to multiple Amazon locales next to the name of the product by linking the words U.S.A., U.K., and Canada with the correct URLs for each, as follows: “The Passionate Programmer (USA, UK, Canada).” This has the advantage of allowing people to choose the marketplace regardless of their current geographic location (e.g., an American reader currently in Canada for a work trip).

Recipe 68

Review technical and business books you read.

Here is a cheat sheet for getting the best out of the Amazon Affiliates program.

• Be genuine and caring. Don’t promote a product simply to make an extra buck. Only endorse the kinds of books and other items you would recommend to your best friends.

• Write reviews of technical books you’ve read and products you’ve tried. A recommendation from someone who’s perceived as an expert in a given niche can convert to sales like crazy, and people will love reading your thoughts on a given item that’s near and dear to their interests.

• Create lists of products (e.g., 5 Books Every Agile Developer Should Read). They can be cheesy or downright good advice. Opt for the latter.

• Announce new books. Let your readers know when an important new industry-related book has been released—even if you haven’t read it yet and therefore can’t write a full review at that point in time. One time I announced that a new edition of a book was out. I wasn’t the first to announce it, so I didn’t even promote the post (it was a heads-up for my regular readers); however, someone saw it and submitted it on Slashdot. My announcement made the front page of Slashdot, bringing me a few thousand unexpected dollars. Results like this are not typical, but it can happen from time to time. Besides, you’re offering a very valuable service to your readers. (Feel free to use my service, https://anynewbooks.com, to discover new books in the first place.)

• Mention books and other products. Even if the point of your post is not to review a product, you can still mention it. At times, that innocent mention can lead to awesome rewards if your post ends up getting popular.

• Start linking to Amazon right away. Unlike other forms of monetization, affiliate links aren’t as annoying, so you can start using them right off the bat.

• Use images from Amazon in your posts. In fact, take your own pictures and/or videos of products you’re blogging about if you happen to own or have access to said items; this will prove that you are promoting something you’ve tried yourself. When you include book or product images in your posts and pages, link them to Amazon with your Associate ID. Such images will increase your CTR and convert well.

• Don’t cloak your URLs (i.e., hide that they’re Amazon links) unless the tool you use to generate and track these links does it for you. Even then, use disclaimers and disclose that your posts contain affiliate links. Honesty and transparency are important currencies as a blogger.

• Don’t specify an exact price. Prices vary too much over time, plus doing so is against Amazon Associates’ terms and conditions. If you wish, say something vague like “which sells for less than $XX at the time of writing.” Generally speaking though, steer clear of discussing prices unless the fact that a particular item is on sale is the whole point of your mention.

• Create resource pages. For example, I have a list of recommended Ruby and Rails books on my programming blog. On the math blog that I sold, I used to keep a huge list of recommended mathematical books organized by category. Both brought me thousands of dollars over the years. Stop and think whether such a page can be created for your own niche and, if so, get to work making it. It’ll be a useful resource for your readers and an easy moneymaker for you.

• Make your Amazon links nofollow. Google and other search engines will be less likely to penalize you for the presence of commercial links.

• Finally, a counterpoint—if you’re a founder who runs a company blog, it’s your call as to whether or not you should include Amazon Associates links when linking to products on Amazon. If your main objective is to promote your own product or service, losing Amazon’s commissions in exchange for coming across as more genuine and less motivated by money in your recommendations may be a worthwhile trade-off. If you’re an indie developer, the revenue such links can generate may help supplement your income, so opting for them can be a good choice. If you’re blogging for an established company or a well-funded startup, then don’t; you’re after far bigger fish.

Where to Find Other Reputable Offers

Keep your eyes peeled for other reputable affiliate offers and networks. For example, an alternative to Amazon Associates (at least for books) is the affiliate program from The Book Depository.^[95]

eBay also has a similar program. Although these affiliate programs won’t typically make you as much money as Amazon can, they’re good alternatives if you were rejected by Amazon, unable to sign up with it, or otherwise opted not to go with Amazon.

Likewise, don’t ignore niche-specific programs. For instance, a photography blogger can sign up with stores who offer affiliate programs, such as B&H Photo Video and Adorama.^[96]

Depending on your niche, there may be other companies looking for affiliates to promote their products that would be really good fits for your site.

Check out popular affiliate networks that have a huge variety of products and CPA offers. CPA stands for Cost per Action, because the affiliate is paid a fee when the referred visitor takes the desired action, so this applies not just to a product purchase but also to other determined actions, such as signing up for a given newsletter, a trial offer, and so on.

Common players here are CJ Affiliate, ClickBank, and ShareASale.^[97]

Particularly with ClickBank, you’ll have a majority of low-quality information products, with a few gems here and there. If you can find decent products relevant to your niche and post, there’s no shame in promoting ClickBank offers, however.

CJ Affiliate and ShareASale can both have rewarding affiliate offers from more mainstream makers. So apply for all of these programs as a publisher/affiliate, and then promote the offer that makes the most sense, regardless of where it originated.

Recipe 69

Promote only products you’d buy yourself.

With the emergence of self-publishing, you should also keep an eye on new releases of good digital titles within your field. Over the years, I’ve made decent money from self-published PDF and video releases created by esteemed colleagues in the STEM field.

Finally, continue looking for possible offers among products you use regularly. Affiliate programs for technical audiences can be found virtually everywhere these days. You can promote hosting, premium blogging templates, domain registrations, email marketing providers, and other similar products simply by using them and then advertising that you do so (and why that’s the case).

In fact, I recommend trying to find high-fee, niche-specific affiliate offers. For example, on my Rails Hosting page,^[98] I link to affiliate hosting and deployment tool offers. The revenue per referral is much higher than Amazon and the cookie duration is also much longer than 24 hours. In some cases, I’m linking to subscription offers, and the affiliate will reward me with a cut on a monthly basis while the customer I referred stays subscribed. This adds up quickly.

Depending on your niche, you should be able to find similar offers.

Other Common Strategies to Monetization

As listed earlier in this chapter, there are three other commonly adopted strategies to monetize a blog: subscriptions (including Patreon supporters), donations, and merchandise.

Users aren’t exactly fond of paywalls (sites that require a payment in order to access articles), but if you attract a loyal following you can offer monthly subscriptions in exchange for some form of exclusivity. You could offer extra features to pro users (such as your articles in PDF and audio format), access to exclusive content that’s not available to your regular readers (e.g., a screencast section of your site or live chats), or exclusive access to a useful resource (e.g., a private forum where you personally help people).

WordPress users can look into plugins such as WP-Members and WishList Member to obtain membership site features for their blogs.^[99] Users of other blogging systems may have to get creative to find similar features for their blogging platform or use third-party scripts/services.

The risk of membership sites is alienating your user base and creating two classes of citizens, so to speak, among your readers (paying and nonpaying). However, over time, it’s become a much more accepted idea, thanks to the advent of Patreon.^[100]

It’s now accepted that creators and other online influencers will have special perks and exclusive content for users who support them economically each month. So it’s definitely a worthwhile option to increase your blogging revenue.

Receiving donations is much simpler than adding premium membership features to your site or creating exclusive, valuable content for your supporters. You simply add a payment processor button (e.g., PayPal) and invite readers to donate. You can make it cute and ask for a specific amount that would pay for a coffee, a beer, or a slice of pizza rather than having this approach come across as out-and-out panhandling. Add a nice coffee cup icon next to your call to action, and you may get a few donations here and there.

Recipe 70

For one-off donations, consider https://ko-fi.com.

In my experience, one-off donations aren’t a particularly lucrative approach to monetizing your blog. To make them work and be sustainable for you, you’ll need a particularly large audience of very loyal readers. The recurring model (for special perks) offered by Patreon is significantly more appealing to your readers.

Merchandise sales can quickly add up and, unlike the early days of the web, you don’t have to ship products out of your garage. For using services like CafePress, Spreadshirt, and Zazzle,^[101] all you really need is a nice design.

If you did a good job in terms of branding and ensuring that your readers feel part of a community, you may end up selling quite a few T-shirts and other forms of merchandise with your logo or slogan on it. If you have a cute mascot like Reddit or Hipmunk has, for example, selling them will be even easier.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to limit merchandise to your logo or mascot. With the help of a good designer, you can very easily create cute, fun, witty T-shirts and other gift shop--like items that are relevant to your niche and make some extra money via that route.

Much of what you’ll learn in the next chapter when we discuss selling techniques can be applied to merchandise as well. Keep this monetization strategy in mind as something that’s worth exploring later on in your life as a blogger, perhaps a year or two after you’ve established your blog.

The Wrong Approach to Blogging Income

If you look at the list we just discussed, you might be at ease with the thought of implementing some of these, and intimidated by others. This is pretty common.

An overwhelming majority of bloggers who try to monetize their blogs will take the path of least resistance and opt to simply place AdSense ads on their blogs. Doing so doesn’t take much effort and in turn, it typically leads to receiving very little return, perhaps a few dollars a month, unless they have monthly six-figure page views or they cover a very specific niche that happens to have extremely high advertising costs, like law or insurance, and therefore pays out at a much higher rate.

A smaller percentage will then seek higher RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) ad networks (either because of the nature of the ads or because it’s a network specific to the topic covered in their blog). This will typically improve one’s blogging income a little, but it will still be quite limited for sites that don’t receive massive amounts of traffic.

An even smaller percentage of bloggers will try their hand at affiliate marketing, typically with a program like Amazon Associates or the eBay Partner Network. Assuming they’re accepted and that they do a good job reviewing or discussing specific products in their blogs, these bloggers will generally start to see some extra revenue in the form of a percentage commission.

Some, but not many, will seek high-paying affiliate programs where the commission will be substantial (e.g., $50+) or recurring each month if the buyer remains a subscriber of whatever product/service the referral was made for. Having huge traffic becomes less necessary when a single person buying the product (e.g., a hosting package you recommend) can generate $50 or more for you.

Whether people visiting your blog have the right intention (e.g., they’re looking for hosting recommendations) and whether you’re a credible source of said recommendations become much more important factors. But, of course, “the more traffic the merrier” still applies.

A tiny percentage of bloggers will end up creating their own product targeted for their audience (think an ebook for $39, for example). Those who do a good job by creating a genuinely useful product and then marketing it correctly to their readers can start to see income that would take decades to accrue with AdSense at their current traffic level (think of five- [and more rarely six-] figure incomes per year, depending on how successful they are).

An even smaller percentage of bloggers will add a final high-ticket item to their marketing funnel. This is typically an expensive course (in the $297--$1,999 price range) or some exclusive, direct mentorship offer for an equally substantial fee. The sky’s the limit here in terms of income. If successful in this approach, your blog will qualify as a bona fide digital business at that point.

The Inverse Pyramid of Blogging Income

There’s a positive correlation between the effort required and the economic reward, as well as a negative correlation to how popular the approach is.

The least rewarding, AdSense, requires the least effort, produces the least amount of revenue for the blogger, and in turn is the most popular monetization method among bloggers.

The most economically rewarding option, creating your own high-price items, requires the most amount of effort both in terms of creating something of so much value and marketing it (e.g., $297 is definitely not an impulse buy for most people). But you can make scary amounts of money from it.

The real problem is that most bloggers looking to monetize their blogs tend to follow the pyramid presented in Figure 20, ​The common, flawed approach to blogging monetization​. Many will stop at the first three steps, at best, never venturing into high affiliate offers or making their own products.

The secret to increasing direct blogging income, if that’s your goal, is to invert the pyramid and focus your efforts and priorities accordingly, as shown in the following figure.

Now this doesn’t mean that you can’t have AdSense, but you should prioritize the high-reward items because they’re the ones that are most likely to make you serious extra income—even if you only get a few thousand visitors a month to your site.

Recipe 71

To maximize your blogging income, focus on your own products as well as on high-fee and recurring affiliate offers.

How the Pros Do It

That’s how serious bloggers make money! They create what’s essentially a funnel that’s laser-focused on getting readers to buy the useful product they’ve made.

They attract a lot of visitors with great free content that’s relevant to their blog topic, content that both helps people and establishes the blogger’s authority on the subject at hand. Then they’ll typically offer some sort of valuable freebie, like an email course or a PDF guide to turn their site’s visitors into email subscribers (the aforementioned lead magnet).

They’ll continue to provide value to their subscribers with great content, for free, as well as making them aware of some kind of offer related to their products (remember, people love sales). Some will even first sell the inexpensive product (e.g., a cheap ebook or course) and then upsell true believers to their more expensive products and/or services. If you are familiar with Tony Robbins, that’s what he does. But pretty much anyone raking in big bucks through digital sales adopts a similar strategy.

There’s a reason for the common mantra, The money is in the list. Nothing beats having regular readers you can continue to communicate with directly. You’ll be able to email them useful information on a regular basis and sell them valuable products that will help them, and in turn, help you achieve your financial blogging goals in the process.

It’s worth noting that depending on your reasons for blogging, optimizing monetary gain might not be a concern. And that’s okay. Your career itself might be the high ROI “product” in that case.