You hear the stories about people who make their entire living from their blogs. At some point, you must have thought something like:

“I run a successful exterior renovation business, why isn’t my blog making money?”

The odds are decent that you weren’t focused on how to monetize your blog. Keep reading to discover some simple steps to make your blog generate some money.

Let’s go!

Join an Ad Network

One of the most common ways to monetize your blog is to join an ad network.

After you join, the network displays ads on your blog in designated areas. The ads usually appear in the sidebar or a banner at the top of the page.

You get paid one of two ways. You can set it up so that you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad. The other option is that you get paid for impressions. In simplest terms, impressions are how many times an ad loads on your site.

The pitfall here is that it takes a lot of traffic to your blog to generate meaningful revenue from ads.

Use Calls to Action for Your Services

If a person only ever visits your blog, it’s easy for them to forget you offer actual products or services. This is where calls to action come into the picture.

A call to action encourages positive behavior from the reader. Say you start offering a driveway sealing service. You write a blog post about water-based sealers and oil-based driveway sealers.

At the end of the post, you put in something like this:

“Click here to learn more about how our driveway sealing service saves you money.”

You highlight in a bright color and link to your page that details the service and its benefits. It reminds them you’re a business and encourages them to consider a paid service.

Sell Information Products

You’re already an expert on the valuable topic of exterior restorations. So, when you’re deciding how to monetize your blog, put information products at the top of the list.

Information products offer an ideal way to generate income from people who can’t or won’t use your services. The rabid DIY types or people who live too far away, for example, won’t hire you.

If they frequent your blog and trust your advice, they often will buy an ebook or video course. You could put together an ebook of easy-to-do renovations or a video course on installing brick paths.

Convert to a Membership Site

A membership site locks some content behind a paywall.

For service-oriented businesses like exterior renovations, maintaining a public blog helps draw traffic. The membership area is where you offer the juicy content, such as:

• video tutorials
• extensive how-to articles
• live Q&A sessions
• forums

This option works best for blogs that already get a lot of traffic and a dedicated subscribers list.

Parting Thoughts on How to Monetize Your Blog

There are lots of answers to the question of how to monetize your blog. What you need to decide is how much effort you want to put into it.

Joining an ad network and calls to action are easy and take little time. Information products take more initial effort to create and promote, but minimal effort after that. Membership sites require more work on your end, but they often promise the most benefits.

Once you lock down how to monetize your blog, you’ll want to turn an eye to security. Check out our post on securing your site.