When I started ShoutMeLoud in 2008, I never thought I could reach a point where blogging would become my primary source of income. In fact, like many others I also thought online money was a scam.
I was a graduate guy holding a B.tech degree in I.T and looking forward to joining Accenture in 2009. I started blogging as a part time hobby and later on I got to know about AdSense and affiliate marketing. You can learn more about how I started on myblogging journey page.
In the last couple of months, I have been publishing monthly income reports, just to make people aware of the immense amount of money lying in the field of blogging. I make almost 8000-9000$ per month from all the blogs in my network. One of the most common email queries I get is how ShoutMeLoud makes money.
I thought of putting everything on one page, so that people could learn something from it and implement the monetization part, which they are comfortable with. My suggestion is, instead of jumping into all of them, explore every ad network and every method that I mentioned one by one.
Just to let you know, it took me 6 years to reach at the stage where I’m in. Everything I learned comes from my experience; I made mistakes and learned from them. So, don’t just jump on the wagon of getting rich quickly; rather understand every system individually.
I last updated this article in (January 2015), and at the time of writing, I was running 8 blogs actively under the ShoutDreams banner, and a few services which still needed time and attention from me.
Right now, ShoutMeLoud have a total team-member of 3 people. Every blog is monetized with different mothod.
My monetization technique for ShoutMeLoud
Affiliate Marketing:
One are of maximum potential for making money via a niche blog is by affiliate marketing. In simple words, you recommend a genuine product on your blog, and when people sign up via your affiliate link, you will make a handsome money out of it.
Affiliate marketing is something whose income is never decided, and you can’t be sure how much you will make with this. I’m earning about $4200/month from affiliate marketing.
I have covered these following posts in the past, which will help you to get started, and I’m also listing some of the products that I’m affiliated with.
At this moment, Google AdSense is making around 600$ every month, and it is such a relief to have recurring income from your blog. If you have a blog with decent traffic, you can make good money with Google AdSense.
In fact, if you are a newbie and looking forward to starting a blog with the intention of just making money, AdSense should be one of your priority. Because, it give you a sense of comfort, and once Adsense starts making $10-20 daily, you can start exploring the other monetization opportunities.
BuySellAds is an advertisement network that helps you to sell ads directly. They work as a middle man, and they keep a percentage (25%) of the money you make by selling ads. I like this system because I don’t need to interact with advertisers directly, and I can cash-out money twice a month.
It’s a popular network for advertisers and publishers, if you have a nice specific blog, you can use BuySellAds to sell all your entire unsold ad inventory. If you are completely new to BuySellads, here are a couple of posts that will help you to get started.
Update: I’m no longer using BuySellAds, but it’s still recommended network for bloggers. I have removed it in 2014 starting, as I got few direct advertisements.
Direct ad sales:
As I mentioned above, I have 8+ blogs running at this moment and many advertisers contact me directly using a contact form for advertisement opportunities. This is the hectic because you have to give details to advertisers and a payment method.
If you are getting a direct advertisement, it’s good because you are saving money by eliminating the middle man. These direct advertisement sales are making me almost $1500 per month.
The key to getting direct advertisements is by adding an advertisement page on your blog and giving all the necessary details like ad spaces available, ad placement, traffic details and a marketing pitch in the form of what your advertisers can expect. You can see one such example on the ShoutMeLoud advertisement page.
Infolinks:
Infolinks is an In-text advertising program. I was not running it on ShoutMeLoud but added it on few other sutes. It’s making me almost 50$ per month.If you are not into affiliate marketing, you can start with Infolinks here. Recently, I tried Vigilink, which turns out to be a decent platform and in some cases better than Infolinks.
- Read: Infolinks review
Sponsored reviews:
Somehow I’m not very fond of sponsored reviews, but I keep getting lots of emails for paid reviews. I check the software or product myself and after that I approve it for review. If the product or service is free, I do the review for free. Otherwise I charge nominally depending upon how much a single license of that software or product would cost.
From paid reviews, I make about $900 per month. Alternatively, you can always ask for a premium product for free testing, and you can write a review and put on your affiliate link, which will make more money, in the long run.
BlogSpot to WordPress Migration Service:
I have been offering BlogSpot to WordPress services for a long time and have a long list of happy clients who are on WordPress now. One of the unique features that I offer with my service is complementary SEO service. This service makes almost $500-$800 per month. Read more about BlogSpot to WordPress migration service.
Blog Consultancy program:
This is one service that I started last year, and within it’s launch I started getting clients for personal consultancy. In this coaching, I teach about SEO, how to blog for profit, blog marketing plan, Social media plans and in short everything which I have learned from my 4 years of blogging experience. I have been getting good reactions from all the students I have mentored till now and you can learn about it on my blog consultancy page. I target 15 hour of personal coaching in a month and charge $249 per hr for now.
In between, I offered a few more services like WordPress SEO and WordPress theme development, but with time I retired them to bring something better, as the service sector requires a great deal of time, and time is always an issue for a professional blogger. I realized, instead of offering those 20-30$/hr of service, I could make the most out of time via blogging consultancy.
Well, these are just a few of the ways I use for blog monetization, and there are many more ad networks that I keep trying on my blog network. I keep playing with latest monetziation methods to make most out of my online journey. I will keep updating this page with latest ways, make sure you are subscribes to the ShoutMeLoud Email newsletter for updates.
I’m sure this will help those who are missing ways to make huge money from blogging. Do share your story, How are you making money from blogging?
How I Make Money With ShoutMeLoud
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Reviewed by mevasan
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9:11 PM
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I make $20 for filling a 20 minute survey!
ReplyDeleteGuess what? This is exactly what major companies are paying for. They need to know what their customer needs and wants. So large companies pay millions of dollars every month to the average person. In return, the average person, like me and you, fills out surveys and gives them their opinion.