How to make money on a blog

I launched my blog in November 2018 and I made my first profit!  On the 3rd of February 2019 this blog made £0.29!  

Alright it is not quite boats, champagne and endless BBQ food yet but it is a start.

The view from my laptop as I write my blogs....

This has inspired me to write this article about how I did it and give you 10 ways to make money by writing a blog or creating content. 

How I made £0.29 blogging 

Do you care if Alan made 29 pence from blogging?  Probably not.  

It is not the 29pence you should care about it is the principle and how you could use it to build passive income over the years. 

The main steps I followed are:

1. I wrote a blog article with content I felt people would be interested in
2. I recommended a product with an affiliate link.  In this case it was a book
3. I shared it on Facebook and saw if people wanted to read
4. I waited patiently 

The article I wrote was entitled "What are you spending your money on?"  It had a reasonable title and I wrote content I felt passionate about.  I wrote about helping people save and invest and then within that article I recommended 2 books that I truly believe in.  

One is called the The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins HN and it is a book that changed my life.  It simplified investing for me and really helped me to get going investing in the stock market.  

I signed up for an Amazon Associates account and then I added an affiliate link with a picture of the book just like the one to the right.  I wanted to make it easy for anyone to buy the book that helped me so much!

If anyone clicks on this link it takes them to Amazon where they can buy the book.  If they order it within 24 hours then I would get a commission for being the person who sold it. 

That is how affiliate sales on a blog work. You recommend a product to an audience and then if they buy the product the person selling it (in this case Amazon) gives you a commission for selling it

Affiliate sales ethics

I felt comfortable recommending this book because I have read it, I have met the author and the book truly did change my life. I would recommend this book to anyone!  So I felt it was a win/win/win if I recommended i!

I would not recommend something I didn't believe in! ​

Alan, Katie and JL Collins at the UK Chautauqua in 2017

The winners out of this deal are:

• JL Collins sells another copy of his book and gets royalties
• Alan Donegan gets a 29 pence commission and a big cheer from Katie
• The person who bought the book gets a book that has changed my life and I truly believe will help them

Where affiliate sales goes wrong is when people recommend products they don't believe in just to get affiliate commission!  There are a lot of sites out there that have made money and scammed people this way and there has been new legislation bought in saying that influencers must disclose when it is an affiliate link and they are making money out of recommending things. 

I felt comfortable because I truly believe in the product and it clearly says it is an affiliate link!

So far we have...…
written good content that I thought would help people, shared further reading that I thought would continue to help those people on their journey and then the all important step

Promotion

I shared the post on Facebook on my personal time line. You can see the post I wrote to the right and the engagement it got. 

I replied to every single comment which caused greater engagement on Facebook and meant the post was seen by more people. 

​There is no point having good content and an affiliate link if you don't share it!

Traffic to alandonegan.com

I have linked Google Analytics to my Weebly website so I am able to see the people that visit my website.  Not who they are by name; but lots of other information about them, like how long they stay on the site, where they come from and what pages they click on.  

This is the Chart for the traffic and you can see when I shared the post on Facebook on the 3rd of February there is a big spike of traffic to my site.  96 users came through to my site that day

We can also see where that traffic came from and 96 sessions were from Facebook and specifically 79 where from mobile Facebook! So people saw my post, clicked through and read the article. 

I love data...……..

Traffic to affiliate sales and 29p

I was checking a day or two later and I noticed in my Amazon account I had 29 pence!  I did a little dance, Katie and I screamed at each other (it doesn't take much to get us excited) and we had made some money!

You can see some cool data from Amazon to see who clicked on the link and if they bought or not. This graph shows the clicks, the times and then if they actually bought the book within 24 hours afterwards. 

You can see from the little chart from my Amazon Associates Account that over the week 11 people clicked through to Amazon from my blog and looked at the product and 1 person actually bought the book!  

Here it is!  The order that someone placed for the Simple Path to Wealth through my website.  We made money and I am so, so, so pleased!  I am so happy for two reasons; the first is because I have a cool story to share with you all and secondly because who ever bought the book is going to love it and get great value out of it!

Is it possible to make money blogging?

I think we have categorically shown that it is possible to make money blogging here but there is a critical thing to remember.  If you want to make money out of affiliate commission then you need a lot of traffic.  

I had nearly 100 people to my website that day and 1 person bought so that is a 1% conversion rate.  That is actually pretty spectacular for affiliate earnings.  I would need to work to get 1000 people to my website to make £2.90 a day and 10,000 people to earn £29 a day or about £1000 a month. 

It takes a lot of traffic to generate a reasonable income from a blog but that is not to say it can't be done.  I just want you to know the size of the task in front of you if you choose to start a blog, YouTube channel or podcast! 

We do have lots of alumni of the PopUp Business School that make money online in this way but it is one of their income sources that they compliment with different ways to make money as well

It is possible to do this and that article is live now so if someone finds it and reads it and buys the book then I would get another commission and earn money for no more work. 

10 ways to make money blogging

Here are some different ways to make money online through your blog, YouTube channel or podcast:

1. Affiliate fees - promote products you believe in and receive a commission
2. Sell an online course. One of the most successful bloggers I know sells an online course on how to make money through being an affiliate
3. Create a product - if you have build a blog with a following then ask them their biggest problems and build them a product that fixes it!
4. Sponsorship - once you get enough traffic to your site people will be interested in becoming a sponsor of your site/content.  You have to go out and find these sponsors though
5. Google Adwords - you can put adverts on your site and receive a commission for every person that clicks on the advert - this requires a LOT of traffic
6. Sell an e-book - create an e-book on your subject and then sell it through your website.  Or get it on Amazon and then sell it through your own affiliate link!
7. Create a membership site - build a group of people that are interested in a particular subject and then sell them membership to your group
8. Offer services - you could sell yours or other people's services through your blog, like coaching
9. Sell social posts - if you have a large social follow you can sell posts on your Instagram or Facebook for $25 - $500 a time! 
10. Sell Merchndise - watch out for the Alan Donegan t-shirt coming soon!  lol

There are so many different ways you can make money from blogging and an online business.  I was inspired to write this post to share with you what I have been up to and how I made my first 29 pence from my new blog!

Do you think content creation is a viable way for you to make money?  Have you tried launching a website and a blog?  What have your biggest challenges been doing this?

I would love to know.  Write to me and tell me more and this will inspire me to create more content for you and more examples...…….

Thanks for reading.  Stay happy, have fun and make a little money doing something you love! 

​Alan