The 5 Ways That I Make Money Online

Every single way that I make money online is directly connected to my blogging but I don’t want to say I make money by blogging. 

That might be a small technicality but I wanted to get that out of the way.

1. AdsThis is the second easiest way from a technical standpoint to make money online because you don’t have to do much to get them set up. If you use one of the ad networks that I mentioned above then they actually do all of the work for you!

What you do need though is a shit ton of traffic for this to be effective. By this, I mean at least 30,000 page views before you even want to consider putting ads up on your site.

I don’t use ads on all of my blogs but the few that I do, I use AdThrive or Mediavine and both have been wonderful.

Now I know the question you are asking is how much money do I make for the amount of traffic that I get. I get paid every time an ad is shown on my site but you get fractions of a penny for each view. For this reason, ad dollars are measured in CPM.

This means that for every 1,000 page views I make $X amount of money.

So with AdThrive/Mediavine, depending on the niche and the quality of ads, the CPM fluctuates between $5 – $30 per 1,000 page views.

If I do 100,000 page views in a month (the minimum you need to apply to AdThrive) then I will make anywhere between $500 and $2,000 for that month. Again, it’s dependent on the topics that you write about.

Not bad, but not great considering the other ways that you can make money.

However, ads are the most passive way to make money online. Your only focus is to get people to continue to come to your site which can be challenging in its own right.

As of May 2018 I do about $15,000 a month in ad revenue.

2. Affiliate Marketing

This is the easiest way to make money online from a technical standpoint because you don’t have to do anything but post a link on your site. 

That link points to a manufacturer of some product that will pay you every time someone purchases from them.

For example, if I run a car blog and I sign up for an affiliate program with a car parts shop, I can link the different car parts that I like on my blog and when people click on the link and purchase from the car parts shop I get a cut.

The commission that you get is totally dependent on the affiliate program. There is no status quo. I’ve seen percentages range from 4% to 90%.

However, making money with affiliate marketing is a lot harder than people present it. You might think that all you need to do is put a link on your site and then watch the money flow but that isn’t the case.

You have to do a lot of upfront work to convince your audience that they want/need a particular product. If you can’t do that then your links will just sit there unclicked.

If you want to learn more about making money with affiliate marketing then check out this guide to affiliate marketing.

I also have an awesome course dedicated to affiliate marketing that will show you all of the steps that I take to 

make money with affiliate marketing.

3. eBooks

I love writing eBooks because you can make them as simple or as complicated as you want. The easiest way to make an ebook is to simply write it in some type of word processing application (Word, Pages, or Google Docs) and export it as a PDF.

There you go. You now have an eBook that the world will enjoy.

eBooks are a great starter product for many bloggers because everyone has the tools to create them.

Some people believe that your ebook has to be super long for it to be successful and I’ve seen 4-page ebooks do well and 200-page ebooks bomb.

It’s completely dependent on the subject matter and what problem you are trying to solve.

If you don’t even want to set up your own website you can go directly through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing to reach millions of people instantly. Of course, you are dealing with a lot of competition but I know authors that make over $40,000 a month with their Kindle books.

4. Online courses

This is one of the most lucrative ways to make money online when you have an audience.

To make $1,000 with ads (on a good ad network) you need to do between 70,000 – 250,000 page views a month (remember it depends on the niche). That’s a lot of people!

To make $1,000 with affiliate marketing you might need to sell a couple dozen/hundred items.

With online courses, you can make $1,000 by selling just a couple (dependent on price).

For example, the current price (as of this writing) for the Billionaire Blog Club is $400+. To make $1,000 this month from the site I will need to sell 3 seats.

That doesn’t require me getting 100,000 people to the site. Hopefully, it only requires less than 100.

Out of these 5 methods, online courses are both the most technically involved and the most time-consuming.

I love teaching people but I hate the process of making courses just because I like instant results.

With my online courses, I have to come up with an outline of what the video is going to be about, plan the shots, hope that I can do it in one take, edit the video, convert the video, and then upload the video.

This takes hours and my throat always hurts when I’m done.

But again, I make most of my money from online courses so the effort is worth it.

5. Membership Sites

Technically the Billionaire Blog Clubis a membership site that happens to have courses in it. However, most people think of membership sites as having recurring monthly or quarterly fees.

The Billionaire Blog Club is a pay once and you get a lifetime membership type of deal.

It’s the same thing with my weight loss membership site, Keto Dash.