5 Overlooked Ways to Diversify Your Blog’s Income Stream

Imagine this: you’re new to the world of blogging and you’re looking forward to the day when you’re able to generate income via your website. Who knows, you may even share the dream of becoming a full-time blogger in the near future.

With tens of millions of blogs out there, you aren’t the only one with this dream. Regardless of your niche, it’s safe to assume that you’ll have quite a bit of competition. Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to gain traction and eventually earn money.

In this blog post, I’m going to discuss some of the best ways to diversify your blog’s income stream. More specifically, let’s examine five of the most overlooked ways to diversify your blog’s income:

1) Private Advertising

This doesn’t come easy, but once you build a strong following it’s an option to consider. Rather than rely on Google AdSense to fill advertising space on your site, you can work directly with companies that are interested in reaching your audience.

In a perfect world, you’d sit back and wait for the advertising offers to roll on. While this may eventually happen, especially if you build a top blog in your space, it’s more likely that you’ll have to take action. This means one thing: putting on your “sales cap.”

Don’t be shy about contacting potential advertisers via email or phone. Sure, you’ll receive plenty of rejections, but it only takes one “yes” to make it all worthwhile.

Tip: you can forgo the sales process by relying on a service such as BuySellAds.com.

buysellads

2) Sell Your Own Product or Service

As you grow your readership, it’s only natural to build a strong connection with your audience.

For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, your readers will turn to you for advice on what to buy (and what to avoid). Over time, this puts you in good position to develop and sell your own product.

Maybe you launch your own fashion line. Or maybe you begin to sell your own jewelry. Perhaps you launch an “online personal shopper” service.

It’s easy to believe that your niche doesn’t lend well to launching your own product or service, but that’s just because you’re not taking the right approach.

If you complete an in-depth review of your blog and industry (as well as your competitors), you should be able to make a list of products and/or services that you can sell to your audience. From there, it’s all about experimenting with different ideas until you find something that works.

Tip: ask your readers for feedback on your ideas before you launch a product or service. This can save you a lot of time, money, and stress. Other tools to check out are:

3) Affiliate Marketing

Let’s assume you have no desire to create your own product or service. Maybe you don’t have the time or money to go down this path, or maybe you’re not confident in your knowledge of the market at this point.

If you find yourself in this position, it’s time to turn your attention to affiliate marketing. This is defined as follows:

“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.”

With this approach, your strategy is simple. Refer as many people as possible to the products or services you’re promoting. From there, you’ve done your part. At that point, it’s up to the company itself to convert the traffic into paying customers. When this happens, you’re awarded with a commission (typically a percentage of the purchase price or flat rate).

Affiliate marketing is far and away one of the simplest income streams to implement, which is why the market continues to grow.  Here are a few networks worth checking out:

4) Start an Online Course

A member’s only course is one of the best ways to generate a large amount of money from your blog. Conversely, it’s also a strategy that will take a lot of time and effort.

Just the same as creating a product or service, you need to get creative if you’re interested in launching an online course.

An example of this would be a blogger with a primary focus on copywriting. While this person can continue to provide free advice on his or her blog, they can also offer a member’s only course that provides in-depth training on how to improve one’s copywriting skills.

Tip: learn more about the many platforms that make it easier to create, manage, and sell an online course.

5) Consulting and Speaking

This doesn’t require much activity on your part. Instead, if you’re willing to offer consulting and speaking services, you simply need to make it known on your blog.

consulting-marketing

For instance, create a page for both consulting and speaking. On each page, provide information on the services you offer, samples, testimonials, pricing, and anything else that will help generate interest.

Your goal is simple: for people in your audience to reach out for more information regarding your consulting and speaking services.

Final Thoughts

So, there you have it. If you’re new to blogging, you may believe there is only one or two ways to earn money. This may have been the case when blogging was in its infancy, but a lot has changed since then.

Above, we’ve discussed five of the best ways to add new income streams to your blog. You may not be able to take advantage of all five, but there’s a good chance that at least one could change the way you approach your blogging business.

What do you think of these five income streams? Would you add any others to the list? Share your thoughts, advice, feedback, and personal experiences in the comment section below.

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