How to Make Money Blogging in 2020: 12 Proven Ways I Made $451,238+ Blogging This Year (Free Guide)

If you’re here to learn how to make money blogging, then you’re in the right place.

Back in 2014 when I first started my blog, I didn’t have a clue about how to make money blogging, let alone how much money was even possible to make from a blog. Flash forward to today, it’s even more shocking (still) that I’ve gone from learning how to make money blogging to now earning in excess of $50,000/mo from my blog.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, then you’ve watched my journey going from earning just a couple thousand dollars in monthly side income supported largely by freelance clients, all the way up to now making more each month from my blog than I made per year in my first few jobs.

In 2019 alone, my blog made $451,238—with some months topping more than $58,000—all while I still held a full-time job for the first half of the year. During 2018, my blog generated $127,418 and the year before that, I broke the $100,000 mark for the first time.

So when my readers ask if it’s really possible to learn how to make money blogging in a relatively short period of time, my answer is a resounding yes.

How to Make Money Blogging in 2020: 12 Proven Ways (How I Make $451,238+)

1. Sponsored Blog Content

2. Affiliate Programs

3. Blog Advertisements

4. Sell Online Courses

5. Physical Products

6. Release a Software Tool

7. Selling Your Own Services

8. Writing (and Selling) eBooks

9. Launch a Virtual Summit

10. Business Partnerships

11. Podcast Sponsorships

12. Freelancing

How to Make Money Blogging in 2020: 12 Proven Ways (How I Make $58,234/mo)

Now we’re getting to the fun part… how to make money blogging (the exact ways I make money from my blog).

Thanks for hanging with me as we covered the foundational steps that’ll help you get ready to profit from your efforts toward learning to make money blogging. It takes a lot of time and work, but trust me—the investment is well worth it in the long run.

In all honesty, there are dozens—if not hundreds of different ways to make money blogging.

I’d like to tell you that I’ve tested all of them, but I haven’t. And after years of experimentation, there are about a dozen that’ve proven to stand the test of time and generate life-changing revenue for not only my own blog, but that of hundreds of others I know. For that reason, we’re focusing only on the most reputable, proven, broadly applicable monetization channels in this guide.

And what I can tell you is these top twelve ways to make money blogging (that I’ve both personally done and have been successful with) helped me turn this blog into a source of $50,000+ in monthly income.

These are tried and true techniques used by the most successful, most popular blogs you’ve heard of.

Make money blogging by getting paid for the content you create.

The first overarching theme we’re going to cover in this guide to make money blogging is getting paid for your content. This is the easiest and quickest way to start monetizing your blog. Of course, that’s also why you see so many bloggers pursuing this monetization channel.

The important thing here is to stay true to your blog, your expertise and to keep your target audience at the forefront of everything you create.

Let’s dive in!

1. Sponsored Blog Content

Sponsored content is a tried and true investment for brands of all kinds, and it works wonders in the right scenarios. This makes it a clear win-win of the many ways to make money blogging.

Over and over again, this method is not only proven to work for advertisers, it’s proven to help you make money blogging at the same time.

What is sponsored content? It’s when company pays you a fee in return for you writing an article that’s either about them—or on a topic related to them, where their product, service or brand is prominently featured as the go-to resource for those of your readers that want to learn more.

It’s one of those sweet deals between a blogger and an advertiser where you’re both truly benefiting from the relationship.

When sponsored content is done well (and not just a plain & simple advertisement), it comes across as genuine, unique, and free of a high-pressure sales pitch. In my opinion, if your sponsored post doesn’t lead with providing real value to your readers, then you’ve already gotten off track.

You’ve already built trust with your audience, so they trust you to recommend products that you know and believe in. That’s why I always recommend staying true to your audience when making sponsored content.

So how do you get sponsored? If you run a popular, heavily trafficked blog, you may already be getting sponsorship opportunities flooding your inbox. If that doesn’t sound like where you’re at today, then let’s talk about what it takes to get sponsored content offers.

For starters, identify a handful of products and their companies that fit perfectly into your niche.

Often, you’ll find that it’s products or services you’re already using yourself. Make a list of at least 10 products you’d be eager to advertise and could passionately support.

2. Affiliate Programs

Let’s talk about affiliate programs. Joining (and promoting) most affiliate programs is arguably easier than pursuing blog sponsorships, if you ask me.

Companies that have affiliate programs already built in, are ready and willing to pay you money in exchange for directing them your blog readers—which means you don’t need to pitch sponsors or invest time into creating your own product before starting to make money blogging.

But, in order to generate a meaningful income from affiliate marketing, it usually takes a good amount of traffic to your blog first.

For example, here’s a snapshot of my Bluehost affiliate revenue for the month of February 2019 where I generated $43,510.00 in referral fees from them…

3. Blog Advertisements

Displaying advertisement space is arguably the easiest, most basic (and quickest) form of starting to make money blogging.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying basic in a bad way. I mean that simple advertising space is the core component when you’re first just figuring out how to make money blogging—and it’s the first channel I personally pursued. But because it’s so comparatively easy to do, it also tends to pay the least amount in financial return.

For context, this simple blog advertisement (pictured below) on my blog here generates anywhere from $800 to $1,200 per month in blog income based on around 300,000 monthly readers.

Of all the different ways to make money blogging that I’m engaged in, this is one of the lowest returns in terms of total dollars earned (especially for my amount of traffic).

The trade off however, is that it takes me zero effort on a daily basis to make money blogging with this channel since I’m an approved publisher with the ad platform Carbon Ads, that goes out and brokers deals with advertisers like Atlassian, Adobe, Slack, and hundreds of other tech-related tool companies that want to reach my audience.

Are blog advertisements still a legitimate way to make money blogging?

In short, yes. Advertising space is still an active component in many digital marketing campaigns, and for a good reason. First and foremost, it’s mimicking ads before the digital age—billboards, magazine placements, newspaper ads, and such. On the right blogs (especially if you’ve followed my guide about how to name a blog creatively), advertisements can be an incredibly easy way to get a brand’s name out and in front of the public eye.

Selling Your Own Products and Services

Asking other companies to pay you in exchange for sharing their products with your audience isn’t the only way to make money blogging.

When you’re still figuring how to monetize your blog, it’s important to consider what you’re really excited about (probably not advertising other companies products right?), as well as what you’re personally skilled at to find opportunities where you can sell your own products and services to readers.

4. Sell Online Courses

Do you have a skill you can teach others? Do your readers look to you for your expertise in a particular area?

Monetize that skill by creating an online course and you’ll be on the fast track to learning how to make money blogging.

The best part? Creating an online course can be as easy as filming a series of a few short instructional videos that teach your blog readers how to do something meaningful based on your own skills, experiences and successes. If you’ve excelled at something, there are people out there who would gladly pay to benefit from your expertise and accelerate their learning curves.

Major online course platforms like Udemy, Skillshare and CreativeLive all feature a wide variety of courses that range in length from 30 minutes up to 30 hours or more—with the longer courses naturally commanding higher prices because they’re often significantly more in-depth.

On the other end of the spectrum, an online course can be as time-consuming as you’ll allow it to be.

Here’s a shot of me filming a course several years ago that turned out to be a very in-depth, 30-day step-by-step process for students to follow along with. Needless to say, it took a while to create all the content, but it was also one of the most impactful courses I’ve ever launched for my students.

My advice as you’re still learning how to make money blogging with online courses, is to start with creating a short-form course (less than 60 minutes of video content) on a very specific niche topic that can be taught without too much hand holding along the way.

Take it from me… I’ve created 4 online courses over the past 5 years—all of which have been different in size, scope and topics—you’ll want to start with creating a simple course your first time around the block.

5. Physical Products

Right, right… I know you probably started a blog because you’re thinking, “I don’t want to be in the physical product space, Ryan. I just want to write and make money blogging without building products and shipping packages all day every day.”

And I get that. I personally don’t sell physical on my website (anymore), but hear me out on this one because a lot has changed over the past few years.

You no longer need to stock your own inventory—you can dropship your products without ever having to print a shipping label or stock up on cardboard boxes yourself. This relatively hands-off approach makes selling products a pretty attractive way to make money blogging today.

6. Release a Software Tool

Are you a software developer by trade? If not, maybe you’ve got a good friend or former co-worker who is.

In its most simple form, a software tool is something that people (your blog readers or even freelance clients) can use to automate a process—or series of processes—and avoid doing the task in more manual ways.

7. Selling Your Own Services

Selling your time, skills and expertise as a service aligns pretty closely with selling online courses (and freelancing, which we’ll expand upon later).

However when it comes to selling your services, there’s one major difference from selling courses—you’re working either one-on-one or in a small group with a client to give individualized help or deliverables.

8. Writing (and Selling) eBooks

We already touched briefly on why writing and selling eBooks (your own digital product) is another great way to make money blogging—largely because of how scaleable your income can be without the need to put in any additional expenses after the book is written.

With each new sale you generate, the vast majority (if not all) of the profit comes straight to you, when selling an eBook from directly on your blog and collecting payments via Stripe or PayPal.

No middlemen. No publishers. No distributors. No retail stores.

This means that when you learn how to write an eBook and sell it, you’ll keep the absolute maximum possible profit margin on your eBook sales.

9. Launch a Virtual Summit

Yep, you saw that right. Little old me in the corner of each of these video interviews 👆

In 2017, I was hired by Close to single-handedly plan, produce, launch and orchestrate a virtual summit—their Inside Sales Summit. Over the course of three months, I recorded 55 video interviews with some of the world’s most recognizable entrepreneurs and salespeople.

I built a complete website using one of the best website builders around (WordPress), to host the virtual summit, created every page, edited the videos, designed the graphics, established our promotional partnerships and wrote the launch email sequences both Close and all of the partners used to promote the event.

It was a lot of work. But, this side project netted me $30,000.

And it’s only because of my blog that Steli and the Close team originally decided to work with me.

Getting paid to interview 55 of my business heroes?

Now THAT is a pretty amazing way to make money blogging.

But just getting paid to produce a virtual summit for another company isn’t the only way to make money blogging with this monetization channel. You can host your own virtual summit.

Like I said, virtual summits are a lot of work, but with that work can come wild profitability.

A virtual summit is a live (or pre-recorded) event covering a specific subject with multiple guest speakers in tow. This is why I’m consistently harping on the importance of finding your tribe.

If you have a group of like-minded readers on your email list, each with their own communities that align with your messaging, then you’ve got the audience a virtual summit just waiting to be invited.

10. Business Partnerships

When you have a growing blog, you have an audience.

And when you have an audience that’s regularly coming back for more of what you’re giving them—you’ll create opportunities for unique business partnerships as a way to make money blogging and further monetize your audience.

Business partnerships can shake out in a lot of different ways, so it’s difficult to explain just one.

11. Podcast Sponsorships

If you’ve been telling yourself just how much you need to start a podcast…

Well, now is your chance. It’ll be a lot of fun, plus it can significantly help you make money blogging.

My podcast is typically an annual source of anywhere from four to five-figures in sponsorship revenue, with sponsorships from brands like Freshbooks, Monday.com and Skillshare coming in at around $500/episode to get in front of my 30,000 monthly listeners.

12. Freelancing

Freelancing isn’t for everyone, but it’s certainly a good option when you’re still in the process of deciding how to make money blogging.

In fact, up until just a few years ago, freelancing made up nearly 90% of my blog income. And moreover, the relationships I built with freelance clients during my first few years of blogging, are what positioned me to make money blogging from other (more passive) sources today.