How To REALLY Make Money Blogging Without Many Followers!

Today’s post is a little different to usual, I thought I’d switch out the beauty posts for something a little more helpful to those who may need it. This year has been tough for us all, many people have lost their jobs or their earnings have considerably dropped meaning that a lot of those people are starting side hustles to make some passive income. I have listed so many ways you can make some REAL money Blogging; even if you don’t have many followers. So let’s take a look at your options…

Photo by Ella Jardim on Unsplash

Ad Revenue:

First off we have ad revenue. This one’s quite an obvious one because if you have a blog, you may as well monetise it; even though you may not earn much from it if your monthly views are low. I use Google Adsense but there are many different sites you can use including Mediavine and Infolinks. Some ad networks pay more than others per 1,000 visits so I’d do some research as to which ones would be most beneficial to you. One thing to remember though is that they all have different requirements when signing up e.g. Mediavine requires 50,000 sessions per month to join. It does take a blog like mine a little while to get to the minimum threshold to get paid, but it’s always a nice bonus on top of what I already earn.

Banners + Logos:

Now, this one is a bit similar to the ads you can display through a network, except a company or blogger or someone else will come to you and offer you some money to display their banner or logo somewhere on your blog for a certain amount of time. This is the kind of one that can make you money without actually having to do much apart from upload the banner/logo. Always be mindful with how much you think that ad space is worth on your blog as you can get some low offers. You can also offer monthly advertisers on your blog to other bloggers where, for a fee, you include their logo on your blogs homepage, share a few tweets with their handle and write a post introducing your audience to them. This is beneficial for all parties as you are monetising your blog and the bloggers are gaining exposure and the potential of some new readers.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketing has completely and utterly boomed in recently years and some people are making an absolute killing from it. Affiliate marketing, if you don’t know, is a way for someone to drive business to a company in return for either commission or PPC (pay per click). So many companies and brands offer affiliate programmes nowadays e.g. Charlotte Tilbury and LookFantastic who actually give you and whoever you send your links to, £££ to spend on their sites. When it comes to PPC affiliate links, I used Shopstyle Collective but others include rewardStyle and Amazon. If you jump on to any of these options that I give you today, I highly recommend using this one because if you’re talking about a product anyway, people may actually go and purchase that item and you’d be none the wiser without these links.

Sponsors:

I’m sure you see the #AD everywhere you look online nowadays meaning those people are getting a fee to talk about a particular product or service and I know lots of people think you need a big following to even get a sponsor, never mind make some money; but, spoiler alert, that is far from the truth. As long as you have some engaged readers or followers then brands/businesses need to you to help them. Sponsors can either come to you with an idea or you can pitch yourself to absolutely anyone and see what they say. What have you got to lose? Again, do remember your worth when it comes to deciding on a price for the sponsorship because MANY MANY MANY brands offer pennies (not literally but you know) and ask for a lot in return.

Sell your Photos + Videos:

This one is a bit of a new one for me but I’ve recently started selling my photos as stock images and you can get paid for them. I’ve been using Getty Images (their app is called contributor) and you basically just upload pictures to their site with some tags and wait for people to buy rights to them. I’ve added a few of my holiday photos of tourist attractions but you can upload many different types of photos. There are many options when it comes to selling your photos and videos including Snapped4U, TourPhotos and even on Etsy.

Guest Posts:

Guest posting is still quite new to me as I’ve only started sourcing bloggers for guest posts in the past year but I’ve loved sharing new bloggers content with my readers and spicing up my site a little bit with a more wide range of styles of posts and niches. Not only can you apply to other blogs to write guest posts for a fee but companies may also contact you to share one of their posts to your site but they will pay you to do so. You can apply to websites like the Cosmopolitan (what a dream that would be by the way!), LookFantastic, BlessThisList and a whole load more. Lots of these sites that except posts have different niches so bare this in mind when reaching out. Some websites can pay up to $200 (£145) for one post!

Become a Freelance Writer:

This one is a bit similar to guest posting but it’s not directly through your blog as it can be for an website, magazine, whatever people need writing for basically. I recently took a course in Social Media Marketing to brush up on my skills to allow myself to become a freelancer full-time and during this course I found out about website such as Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr where you can sell your skills and find clients. There are many different services you can sell on the website but I will cover the rest of those later and focus on freelance writing now. So, in my case I would sell ‘content’ so blog posts, articles etc. but you can also sell creative writing, copywriting, proofreading, cover letters that kind of thing and a lot of people have earned good money from this.

Sell E-Books or Courses:

I’ve seen lots and lots of Bloggers, YouTubers, Entrepreneurs, you name it and someones done it and that is selling e-books and courses. I know people say these are dying out as so many people do them and you can find and learn certain things online for cheaper or free nowadays but if you have something you want to share and you feel it will benefit someone why not create it? This is a great source of passive income as once you’ve made it once you can resell it over and over again with no other work required. Definitely do your research and make sure you’re knowledgeable on what you’re selling though!

Start an E-Commerce Store:

Another really big industry is E-Commerce and this is one that can really help turn your passion into a business and also allow you to make passive income or even, for some of the bigger stores, a full-time income. Not only can you start a website through the likes of Shopify but you can also display your website through your blog and drive traffic and sales through to your store from your own readers. Again, this one is more of an indirect way of making money through blogging, but if you have a following, even a micro following, then you can really make this work!

Social Media Management:

Last, but not least, we have Social Media Management. Being a social media manager is basically self explanatory, although there is more that goes into it that people may first think but they basically manage other peoples social media to lighten that persons work load. A SMM may schedule tweets, upload on Instagram by editing photos, reels, stories, researching hashtags, designing logo’s/banners, reply to comments and much, much more. You can find clients on social media (some advertise that they want a helping hand or you can contact businesses to help build their social media presence), on the freelancers websites that I mentioned previously. Do bare in mind that this isn’t easy and a lot of work goes into it, but if you really want to be your own boss, work your own hours, then this could be the one for you and also be mindful of how many clients you’re looking for as too many may end in disaster when it comes to time.

Extras:

I wasn’t going to include this one because up until a couple of weeks ago I didn’t actually know these were a thing you could monetise but it’s so handy to know. I had a company contact me to include a backlink and a photo in an old blog post for a fee; this literally took seconds to do but it helps those businesses so much too! Maybe this would be a good idea to include in your PR/Sponsorship page on your site to give brands another option on how you can work together.

Pin for Later:

As you can see, there are so many ways to make money blogging and you don’t need to be an ‘influencer’ with hundreds of thousands of followers to do so. Not only are there so many ways to make money while blogging, there’s many many many more ways to make money online and I’ve previously written a post on some of these ways too, so be sure to check that out if you really want to start making a living online. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, I really hope it helped you out and gave you some ideas to get started with and I will see you in a few days with a new post.