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Monetizing your blog in the early days is something that is really hard to do, but it is possible! Many bloggers dream of making money blogging. But how do you do it? Can you monetize your blog right away or should you wait?

In this post, we’re going to be talking about the best way to monetize your blog as early as possible!

1. ADS

This is one of the first and easiest ways to monetize your blog. Within a few days, I had ads running on my site. I wanted to get monetized as quickly as I could, and take advantage of all the eyes I’d get on my site

There are pros and cons to having ads on your site, which is why some bloggers skip the whole ordeal altogether. I’ll go over both sides.

THE CONS

First, we’ll go over the cons. Now, I’m not sure if these cons are the same for all ad sites but I know they’re for Google AdSense, which is the one that I use.

-AUTO ADS

I use this system called Auto ads, which is a blessing if you ask me. You set it up once and it automatically puts ads in optimal places on your website and you never have to touch it again.  

Some people don’t like this because they can’t completely control where ads are shown on their site. You can change the settings a bit, where you do and don’t want ads shown but it’s still mostly Google doing it for you.

-TYPE OF ADS SHOWING

Another thing you can’t control is what type of ads you show on your site. Ads are mostly targeted for your reader and are based on what they have been Googling. So, it’s difficult to determine what is being shown to who.

This is a con for some if they don’t want certain ads showing, and therefore loosely related, to their site.

-RUINS THE LOOK

Others may not like the look of ads on their site because they think it looks tacky and ruins the clean theme they are going for. You can’t exactly style your ads to match your color scheme because, as mentioned before, what the ad shows is not controlled by you.

And others just simply don’t like the idea of showing ads on their site.

It’s totally a personal choice but I prefer to show them just to get a little bit of revenue in the beginning!

PROS

-INCOME

The biggest pro to having ads on your site is you get a couple of cents of income for every view of your ad and even more if somebody clicks on it. Income is, especially in the beginning, hard to come by. So having ads on your site is just one of the things to push your income along a little bit.

Obviously, until you get thousands of visitors to your site, you won’t see much of a difference in your ad revenue, but every penny counts!

-PEOPLE WON’T NOTICE THEM

I’m not necessarily sure if this is a pro or not but most people are so used to ads being thrown in their face they won’t even notice the ones on your site.

Which if you’re trying to get people to click on your ads, this can be a negative side. But if you just want people to just see them, then they won’t be turned away. No one really notices them! 

2. AFFILIATES

This is where I actually earned my first dollar, with affiliate income.

After starting with ads, this is the next place bloggers generally gravitate towards.

Despite that, affiliate marketing is harder to make money in than most people think. It’s way more than just finding a product and slapping the links on your site, hoping someone will buy.

I tried for a very long time to understand affiliate marketing through every free blog post I could find. I quickly realized that wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

Making money online is the ingima of the blogging world. Everyone says they are doing it, but no one is willing to share with you HOW they are doing it.

Not for free at least.

That’s why, eventually, I broke down and bought a blogging course called Mastering Sales with Ell!

It’s an awesome course that has really helped me increase my affiliate income!

3. MAKING YOUR OWN PRODUCT

I’ve created a few products over the year, and it has been a good income source for me! I personally think it is best to make a digital product over a physical one but you could do either!

• Digital products

Creating digital products or printables is by far the easiest option. all you have to do is create the product once, create the listing once, put it up in your shop and the customer and computer do the rest!

Of course, there is more that goes into creating a digital product that isn’t easy, like creating a product that your audience actually wants and marketing it. But once the upfront work is done, it gets easier!

You can create products and sell them on either Gumroad or Etsy. I personally have a shop on both, are there are pros and cons to both as well.

• Physical products

Physical products are going to be the hardest to deal with because you have to keep inventory, buy materials, make the products, deal with shipping prices, and going to the post office. But, if this is the way that you want to go, you can sell your products on Etsy or Gumroad as well!

4. SPONSORED POSTS

I’ve decided to lump these two together because I haven’t done much with them myself, so I don’t have much to say about them. However, I wanted to keep them here because they are legitimate ways to make money.

Making your own product is probably the best way to make the most money. Since you are the creator, there is no middle man to take most of the money like with affiliate marketing.

However, there is a high risk of making your own product because you have to put in a lot of time and effort, perhaps even money, before you can even launch your product. And if no one ends up buying it, you could lose out on a lot.

Sponsored posts are when you contact a company (or one contact you) and they can ask for a number of things. A blog post review on their product, a video, or a social media post. And in exchange, you can either get money or a free product.

Essential the company pays you (either in product or money) to promote their product.

However, as a blogger, there will be a lot of these companies that will email you to try and get you to buy their product, and then you review it AND most times won’t even get paid. but they will offer a discount code to your followers.

This is the cheap way companies get you to buy their product to review it and also not get paid for it. What?! You should never have to pay for a product to review it. It is just free publicity for them at that point.

However, doing a sponsored post for free product is okay, as long as you are okay with the exchange.