I know that some of you are new to the whole world of online marketing and how you can use a computer to make money.

I grew up with technology and it is has always been a part of my life. I used to play GeoBee in 3rd grade and learned all sorts of random facts (and the most important skill of all: How to take a test.

So in order for me to talk about some of the more complex ways to make money through blogging, I know that I need to touch base on the easy ways first.

Think of this as your foundation that we will build on over time. You won’t be tested over these concepts, but you will need to have a basic understanding in order to start seeing dollar signs on sites you visit every day!

So….

How do you make money by blogging?

Well. From my experiences and research, there are two overarching ways to make moneyon a blog (they might seem a little general, but we’ll dive deeper into them in just a few moments:

1 – Selling a product or service

2 – Advertising 

That’s basically it. You can either sell something or help someone else sell something.

Make sense?

Yeah I know. It seems a little simple. There has to be more to it…..Right?

Well there is, but you need to first understand that all of the methods I’ll explain below roll up into one of these two categories.

So let’s dive into the first category:

Selling a product or service.

It’s simple. We have something that someone is willing to pay for. We exchange that item and in return we receive cash.

In the digital space, you can actually do this a few different ways:

1 – You can literally sell a physical product on your blog or website.

For example: I could have a blog that shows people how to make candles. On this site, I could have a place where people can actually buy a candle from me.

Another example: I could make jewelry and sell it to people on my blog.

This can be done a million different ways, but the concept is simple.

2 – You can sell a digital product on your website or blog. 

For example: I could write a killer study guide on a test and I could sell that through my blog.

Another example: I could create a video course teaching someone a skill such as Photoshop or Blogging.

One more example: I could create a software and sell it through my blog to my readers.

3 – You can sell a service on your website or blog.

For example: I could sell a service where I did graphic design work for your business.

Another example: I could sell a service such as DJ services for your wedding or party.

One more example: I could sell a service such as will creation for those who don’t want to pay for a lawyer.

Those are the three basic ways you can make money selling a product or service through your blog. There are a ton of tools that we will talk about in other posts on this blog, but those are the three methods that you can use them for in order to generate revenue and profit.

Advertising

If you don’t have a physical or digital product or services to sell, don’t worry. There are hundreds of thousands of people that already do and they are dying to have you do the selling for them. That is where the second method of making money on a blog comes in for a blogger.

If you aren’t familiar with the internet marketing space, you might have heard terms such as:

Affiliate marketing
Adsense
Video marketing
Amazon affiliate program
Referral marketing
Ad space on websites
Remarketing
Email Marketing
Click Funnels
Etc Etc

All of these fancy words essentially mean one thing:

Helping some other business sell their product or service

That’s it. Those fancy words just describe a way for you to do it.

So if we take a step back, we can actually classify advertising into two separate buckets.

1 – Active advertising

2 – Passive advertising

Instead of getting into the weeds, let’s think of these two buckets in terms I know that most of us will understand:

1 – Active advertising – Commissioned Salesperson

2 – Passive advertising – Newspaper or TV station

Make it a little easier to understand?

So in active advertising, you as the creator of the blog actively tell someone to purchase someone else’s product through your content.

For example:

I could tell you that in order to start your own blog, you will need to have a hosting account and a domain name. I recommend FatCow as I have used them for several years and they have never let me down. If you would like to get a good deal on your first year of service, click here.

Now. If you were to click and purchase a subscription to FatCow above, I would get $100 per conversion. FatCow has an affiliate program and those links are personalized to my account.

So that’s a perfect example of active marketing where I am giving you my recommendation and providing a link for you to purchase said item or service.

You’ll see a ton of different variations of this through sites that give product reviews, announce new products, sites that teach specific skills, etc.

The bottom line is you have to direct someone to a product or service and they have to purchase it in order for you to make money.

Now let’s look at passive advertising. This is more like what you see when you see a commercial on TV or hear an ad on the radio.

They are telling you about a service, but they aren’t actively selling it to you.

This style of passive advertising pays you on the number of people who see the ad instead of the number of people who actually end up buying the product or service.

In general, passive advertising pays less than active advertising, but passive advertising is passive.

Passive meaning you really don’t have to do anything.

For example:

There is an ad right above this. At the time of writing this, I have no f’ing idea what you will see. It simply a piece of code that I have received from Google Adsense and pasted onto my website. Odds are that it’s an ad for something that you looked at in the last week.

For every person that sees that ad, I get a little bit of money (it’s not a ton, but I didn’t do anything other than post text onto my blog). For every person that clicks it, I get a little more money.

That’s how the whole passive advertising side of things works. It’s more about impressions than it is about conversions.

CW