Aside: I am loving the kind of questions I am getting on Quora, I have recently started answering a lot of questions and the more questions I answer the questions I get, maybe it’s Quora algorithm that comes into the play, but I’m loving it, because I get more ideas to write about on my blog which has been ignored from a very long time.
It is an interesting question for someone who is going to start a blog or even someone who is a beginner blogger, who has been blogging from last few months. Monetization is something which is the goal of the majority of the bloggers, so there is no shame in discussing how someone can monetize their blog.
We have discussed it so many times about several ways you can monetize a blog, but there are mainly three ways.
1. By selling banner ads
2. By selling affiliate products or services
3. By selling your own products or services
Now, you can obviously choose either one of the following ways to make money from your blog or choose a combination of it, but your decision should also depend on the type of blog you are running.
Not every category of a blog is going to have a lot of products to promote, let alone create one, so, Banner Ads is the most common way to make money from a blog.
About banner ads, it can be either via a middleman, something like Google AdSense or Media.net or it can also be direct banner ads.
For an individual blogger, who has to take care of their blog hosting, the design of the blog, the content, or the promotion, it is not feasible to go and hunt for direct advertisers, you can still try but it is tougher than signing up with a middleman like Google AdSense, which is probably the most popular ads platform available for the Publishers.
Advertisements or Affiliate?
To address the original question, as to whether advertisement would be great or affiliate marketing would be great for your blog, I will talk about my experiences.
I have a blog where I do not put banner ads, this blog (Asiogroup.net) is the blog where you will not see any type of Ads running, I am a monetizing this blog using affiliate marketing, which is, I promote products useful for bloggers and when they buy them, I get a commission out of it.
The reason I decided to use affiliate marketing instead of advertisement on this blog is that this is a kind of B2B website. where I cater to businesses (because other bloggers are also small businessman, well, kind of).
Also, the blog industry has a lot of products that can be bought online and consumed, it is probably one of a few categories where there is a lot of digital products.
On the other hand, I have got a Tech blog, where I use both Google AdSense ads along with Amazon affiliate.
And since it is a tech blog, I do reviews of a lot of Electronics and Gadgets, these Gadgets are available on websites like Amazon, so I put my Affiliate link at the end of every article, and when someone buys it, I get a Commission out of it.
But I am also running Google AdSense ads on the blog, because, not all the articles on the Tech blog are product related, there are many tutorials and informative articles as well. So, putting an affiliate product link wouldn’t really convert better.
Same is the case with a blog in the entertainment category, suppose if you are writing about Celebrities, or Movies, or anything like that, there isn’t really much scope of putting affiliate links and promoting a product, so advertisements would work much better.
You might have come across a lot of news blogs that post articles that is only information about a particular industry, these are also not appropriate for affiliate marketing, because there isn’t actually any kind of product that can be promoted on such blogs.
On the other hand, if you are an individual blogger, who has the fashion blog, and you have a great following, there is a scope of you doing affiliate marketing where you can review fashion products and then post the link of such products for your visitors to buy.
There is a term that has got a lot of attention lately and its called Influencer, which means someone who can influence others. There are Influencers on Instagram, there are Influencers on YouTube, or Facebook, who don’t even have got a blog.
So, for them, the advertisement doesn’t even come in the equation, but they can still do Affiliate Marketing, and most of them all already doing and killing it
So, my dear friends, it’s 2019 you are living, and there are so many possibilities you can make money from, its not just Advertisement or Affiliate marketing, there is much more.
If you are still in learning phase, I would highly recommend you go through the articles that I have already written on the blog, they are going to be useful if you want to be a blogger, and make money from it.
You might also find the subscription box somewhere on the blog, maybe below this article, or in the sidebar if you are visiting the blog on a desktop computer so I would suggest you sign up for email updates from me.
This is an article from the Blogging Dilemma series on our blog Asiogroup.net
