9 Ways to Monetize a Blog Without Ads

Most bloggers see Mediavine or Raptive as the goal. Once they get there, then they can monetize their blog.

…except you have to wait a long time to get to that point!

It took me almost 5 years of blogging before I go into Mediavine. Now, I did a lot wrong. But even with a new site doing everything right, it typically takes a year and a half.

I don’t know about your, but I don’t want to wait 18 months to start making money when I’m putting in full-time hours worth of effort.

I’ve been able to monetize new blogs much faster once I learned these easy ways to monetize a website that don’t involve ads.

These are also great for bloggers who are user experience purists (aka. they don’t want any ads on their site). I used to be one, too, until I learned how much you can make per month with ads.

You deserve to get paid in some way for the amount of effort you’re putting into your blog. And you shouldn’t have to wait 2 years to make your first $1!

1. Affiliates

The easiest way to make money with a blog or even social media is to work with affiliates.

Affiliates are brands, companies, or individuals who pay you a % commission when you refer a sale to them.

Affiliates are one of my highest sources of income, easily making 3-8x as much as I do from ads.

To make money with affiliates, you need to:

• Find affiliate networks for products you already love, or networks like Amazon Affiliates that are marketplaces for products you love
• Create dedicated blog posts reviewing that content
• Internal link to those blog posts from other blog posts, especially ones that get traffic
• Include clear calls to action (such as “buy now!” or “this credit card saved me $1000 in fees!”) in both affiliate and non-affiliate blog posts
• Take original images of you with or using the product, and include it in your post (if possible, add a video, too)

Affiliates aren’t magic.

You still need to sell the product, just like you would any product or service that you create. But this way there’s no overhead or time lost in creating the product.

It’s also a good way to do market research for which products or services your audience buys the most.

One of my starter sites I use for tests makes over $500 a month with less than 15k pageviews. It only has 4 affiliate posts on it. I could write more, or even optimize those ones better, and make even more.

I made less when I was with SheMedia with a blog with 30,000 pageviews during Q4 (the highest ad revenue season). I made $300 my best month.

Affiliate commissions can range from pennies to thousands of dollars per item sold.

Be sure to do your research on which ones are the most profitable. But ultimately, stick with what you love and what your audience needs.

For example, check if a product is offered on multiple programs and find the highest commission option.

You can learn more about affiliates in depth in the affiliate marketing module of the Profitable Part-Time Blogger.

I cover how to find affiliates, legally protect your blog, and how to write affiliate copy that converts on any platform. Join the Profitable Part-Time Blogger here!

2. Digital Products

Digital products work in any niche. They can be ebooks, video courses, spreadsheets, workbooks, printables, or templates.

I’ve bought everything from puppy potty training workbooks to RV toilet disaster ebooks to cooking video courses.

Digital products are an easy way to monetize early on in your blog’s life, as long as they are valuable to your audience and solve a clear pain point.

You don’t want to make an ebook for the hell of it, or “slap together” something to sell. These should be valuable products that have a clear transformation for your students.

I sold my first $30 ebook for She Knows SEO with less than 100 people on my email list, and less than 1k pageviews a day on my blog. I had no other social community to speak of.

Making $30 with 1,000 pageviews is pretty impressive! You’d make maybe $1 with ads, if you’re lucky.

3. Services

Most people start and online business for passive income. But passive income pays a lot less than services, so keep that in mind.

She Knows SEO started as a services-first marketing agency, and then migrated into more of a passive income business as I was away traveling and then had health issues.

I’m grateful I could make the shift, but my services still earns 3x more than the passive offers, when I turn them on.

People love custom help. It’s why tutors exist, even though there are free group classes at school.

Maybe the person needs a slightly different learning style, or they just want the dedicated attention to their specific problem.

Whatever the reason, people will pay more for custom.

Getting your “season” of colours done in an ebook probably costs $20, but I know someone who charges $400/hour for this (and is fully booked out for months).

Services do require more time on your part to complete the service for each client, but they also tend to have the highest return. You can always switch over to other passive income streams later once you have a strong foundation and community.

Keep in mind that some services require licenses, such as being a travel agent. Or they may require specialized insurance to be able to participate, like anything involving giving financial advice.

Before I officially started She Knows SEO, I did 1:1 blog coaching for $75/hour.

There wasn’t even a blog with any traffic yet and I was easily doing $300+ months around my day job. If I had done it more full time, I could have been making thousands.

Many bloggers also supplement their income by working as a freelance writer or as a VA for other bloggers. This is a great way to make some money, using your site as a portfolio of sorts to show off you abilities.

I used to make $3-4,000 per month freelance writing, even while I was working full time as a law clerk.

Pro tip: companies will pay more than bloggers for writers, but the work is less fun.

4. Software, Tool or App

Have an idea for a software, tool, or app that will make your audience’s life easier?

Many blogs are built around a software, tool, or app, like Affilimate. The blog is meant to market the software, but ultimately the subscriptions to the tool itself are the way that the website makes money.

Most of these will never have ads on them, as they want all that real estate to go to their own promotions for their tool.

You either need coding knowledge yourself or to hire a developer.

This will mean some up front costs to get started, and some trial and error, as everyone I know has had at least 1 developer fall through in their tool creation journey.

Another example is Roadtrippers.com, which has a custom map of road trip stops. The freemium model allows people to use the basics for free, but they require a paid subscription to upgrade for the full features like saving maps offline.

5. Subscription or Membership

Running a membership is HARD. I failed at it, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

It’s actually a great way to make money, and to keep making money!

Many people run a low ticket membership. Evelyn Weiss teaches this method pretty extensively.

You could run a community membership with online forum access, or a subscription to a virtual fitness club with new exercises every week.

To make a subscription profitable, you need to find the sweet spot between offering enough value without over offering. And you’ll need to have new offers regularly, so people have a reason to continue being a part of the membership.

This could be new content, monthly lives, or access to a popular community while their subscription is active.

I recommend planning at least 1 year of content before you begin so you don’t make the same mistakes I did.

Here’s the deep dive on how I burnt myself out on my membership and what I’d do differently next time:

6. Sponsored Links

Sponsored links can be doing spammily or they can be done in an ethical way. As long as you mark them as no follow and sponsored, they don’t violate any of Google’s terms.

Companies will pay for a sponsored link in an article for the exposure and traffic, not for backlink juice.

It’s more natural than paying for a Google ad, and often saves them a lot of money.

You can calculate how much a sponsored link should cost in your blog post using this free calculator.

Be sure to have a clear contract, and never accept a lifetime link. The links should be up to 2 years, and then renegotiated.

You can outreach to companies directly, but some will come to you asking for links. Most of these are spam and require a do follow link (NEVER accept payment for a do follow link).

You can start doing this the moment you rank for your first keyword or have a blog post generating traffic from other means.

I would never do a sponsored link for less than $100 a year, even on day 1 of your blog.

7. Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are dedicated posts all about a brand or service. These are paid reviews that require a disclosure and no follow links.

These should always be written by you or your team if they’re going on your blog. They should not be written by the other person (that’s how you get AI spam on your site).

The goal of these posts is to get that company traffic, so it should be well written and SEO optimized.

Sponsored posts can be a part of a paid campaign, like a press trip. Or they can be a singular deal with a brand/company.

Sponsored posts typically start at $300 and increase based on deliverables, site notoriety, and site traffic.

You can get sponsored posts as early as 1,000 pageviews if you have a hyper niche audience that a brand wants to connect with.

8. Paid Newsletter

A paid newsletter is similar to a subscription service, but in this case the deliverable is just an email.

Don’t doubt it though! An email can be extremely powerful.

In the travel niche, Ashley Gets Around has a paid newsletter of business class flight deals that at a very conservative estimate is making her over $200k per year.

Dr. Marie Haynes has a paid version of her weekly newsletter that unlocks additional content, more deep dives, and even historic posts.

And Niche Site Lady has a paid archive of her old newsletters for people to access for a one time payment.

The key here is that these emails provide value. They either save someone time and money or they offer some sort of transformation and growth.

It’s best to start with a free newsletter so you get the hang of writing this content, then you can upgrade to a paid one after.

Some blogs actually start as a paid newsletter and never really get to the whole “online blog” phase.

There was one for an old city I lived in that started as a paid newsletter and has since branched out to 6 paid newsletters for different locations and niches. It was incredibly popular.

A paid newsletter can cost anywhere from $1 to $1 million. Well, probably not $1 million unless you’re offering something significant.

But if you have one for $100 a year, and you get 10 people on it, that’s $1,000. A beginner blogger can do that easily!

Much like the membership, make sure you have a plan for how to last the year with this paid offer.

9. Private Podcast or Patreon

Most bloggers think they have to stick to written content with their paid offers. Nope!

In fact, having a private podcast feed or Patreon option with audio versions of content, or additional audio content is a great way to appeal to different styles of learners.

I love blogs, but I’m very busy. I’d rather listen to move blogs. My screen reader helps with this, but I can’t download them for a flight that way – and it’s a weird robot voice.

Getting to hear the blog owner read the post and even chatting about additional info would be wonderful!

I had a Patreon for my failed travel podcast (well, it was a dissertation project that I dropped after I graduated). Now, I have a private podcast feed for all of my courses as a bonus for accessibility.

Patreon is great to start with no up front costs. But it will take a significant percentage of each sale.

Hello Audio is my go-to for private podcast feeds. It’s a one time, up front cost. But it’s audio only. You won’t be able to add video content like you can with Patreon.

Come up with something that adds on to your content. I recommend additional content or something that feels like community building.

I’m a part of the Redhanded podcast’s Patreon community. You get one additional episode per month, a weekly “news” style aftershow following their podcast episode, and first dibs at VIP tickets to live shows.

I love the extra content, and it helps me feel more apart of their community, which equally keeps me in the Patreon subscription over time.

Private podcasts, just like a newsletter, can start as low as $1. I recommend a monthly or yearly subscription for regular new content. But if it’s unlocking an audio course with no new updates or regular new episodes, I would do a one time fee.

Conclusion

Ads are one of my favourite ways to make money. It’s much more passive than most other forms.

But passive income isn’t truly passive. It’s a dividend for months or even years of unpaid labour.

These methods have much quicker results, and can still generate some level of passive income over time.

Get 1,000 pageviews to your blog organically (from any source, but I prefer SEO), then pick 1 of these options to monetize your blog.

I teach in depth how to create affiliate content, digital products, and sponsored links in my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program. I share my exact methods for growing my blog to $30k/month with these methods.

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