Are you wondering how to monetize a lifestyle blog so you can start making money for your blogging efforts? You’re in luck as I’m about to give you my ultimate guide to monetizing a blog.
Many bloggers start with a lifestyle blog because it’s the easiest kind of blog to setup. It can however be one of the most difficult types of blogs to make money from but it is quite possible so strap in and let me show you how.
Firstly, what is a lifestyle blog? Let’s make sure we’re on the same page here.
What is a Lifestyle Blog?
A lifestyle blog is a website that’s updated frequently with info to help you live a better life in some way. It usually spans a long list of topics hence the broad categorization. Still, there’s usually an underlying theme coming out eventually which I will talk more about later as this is very important for you to take note of.
People who start lifestyle blogs usually start out thinking they have lots of interests and are knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics, and they want to write about them all. Lifestyle blogs cover anything from beauty, fashion, health and wellness, some recipes, lots of DIY, maybe some crafts and home decor, organizational skills, homemaking and cleaning, parenting if the blogger is a parent, maybe a gaggle of gardening posts, etc. Whatever is going on in the blogger’s life is usually reflected on the blog.
What a lifestyle blog is not, is a personal journal. If your blog mostly chronicles your life and has a series of life updates, then it’s more of a personal journal, resonating with those that know you and want to follow your life. This is an important distinction.
A blog that can be monetized is always geared to helping the reader by providing a solution to a query. Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.
Can you monetize a free blog?
If you’re blogging on a free platform such as blogger.com or wordpress.com, then monetizing is going to be really hard. If you want to make money as a blogger, I implore you to start thinking of your blog as a business. You will need to invest in your business to make it professional, especially if you want to work with ad networks and sponsor partners.
Free wordpress won’t even allow you to monetize without paying for their upgrades and there are much better options. If you want to monetize, you should first ensure you’re using a self-hosted platform. You’ll pay to host your blog on a managed platform so that you own your content and run your own show. This host can also help you with any technical issues you run into which is very handy, especially as a beginner.
It’s also very affordable to invest in a blog host. There are many things you can pay for to help you as a blogger. Some of them are more important than others. Some help you further down the road when you start to make money and need to automate. Some of them help you to get your blog off the ground. Your blog host is the most important of all blogging tools you will come across in your journey.
The blog I use and love is Siteground. Their customer service is super quick, efficient and very helpful. Take it from someone who has broken their site quite a few times. I have a tutorial on getting started with Siteground if you need help. You can also transfer your existing free blog to Siteground and they will help you to do that!
Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a professional blogger completely review your blog? Let me help you with that! I’ll check all aspects of your blog, tell you what’s working and what can be improved upon and I’ll give you 5 actions to take right this minute that can help you make MORE MONEY, increase your email subscribers and grow your traffic on your blog. Sounds great? Book a blog audit here.
How to Monetize a Lifestyle Blog
Let’s talk now about exactly how to monetize a lifestyle blog. Here are the main ways you will be monetizing your blog, ranked from easiest to more advanced.
- Display ads
- Affiliate marketing
- Sponsored posts and collaborations
- Selling digital products such as ebooks, workbooks, courses, workshops, memberships, masterclasses etc
- Selling physical products such as merchandise or going into eCommerce
- Coaching or providing freelance services
These are the main ways bloggers make money online. If you want to blog and get paid, you’ll want to learn more about the above ways to monetize a blog and pick your end goal. There are many ways to make money online so don’t think you have to be doing all of these things to make a successful income as a blogger.
Do you want to become an influencer and focus more on sponsorships and collabs? Do you want to eventually become a coach in your field? Do you want to set up an eCourse that you sell over and over again? These are the most profitable ways to make money as a blogger but they take time so let’s look at the easier methods first.
Easy Ways to Monetize a Blog – Display Ads and Affiliate Marketing
Display ads are the ads you see above, below, to the side of and inbetween the content on a website. One might look like the one below.
(Feel free to click on that ad, it’s for the beautiful theme I am using now.) Display ads are the easiest form of advertising because it’s completely managed by the ad company. Once you have a blog, you apply to an ad company and if approved you’ll get some code to put on your website to start running ads. They send you your money each month and booyah, you’re in business.
Adsense.com is the most popular ad network because it will allow blogs and websites with lot traffic on its platform. This is because the payout is also quite low. If you want to make any real money as a blogger, you’ll want to build up your blog traffic to the threshold of an ad network that pays better, like Mediavine or Adthrive.
The current minimum traffic threshold for Mediavine is 50,000 sessions within a 30 day time period. This is the downside of ads as an income source for bloggers. It can take a lot of work to reach and maintain a traffic level of 50,000 sessions per month but once you get there, ads are easy money.
Check out this post on 24 ways to build your blog traffic.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another easy way to start making money on a lifestyle blog. Affiliate marketing means you recommend a product or service on your blog using a link unique to you and if the reader buys through your unique link, you make a commission for that sale or referral.
I have a whole blog post on affiliate marketing for bloggers so I won’t go into full details here but this is an easy method because it doesn’t require a traffic minimum. As soon as you launch your blog and have a good handful of posts up, you can start to recommend products on your blog to possibly make a commission.
Of course, the more traffic you get to these posts that recommend products, the better your chances are of making money, but it’s a great way to start.
Blogging is STILL one of the best ways to make a fulltime income online. Take my free course How to Start a Profitable Blog today to learn how to create a blog that makes money from the start.
Sponsored Posts and Collaborations
Sponsored posts and brand collaborations are other great ways to make money with a blog. The beauty of this method is that it was once limited to influencers with large followings but now the micro-influencer has emerged as a powerhouse when it comes to engagement.
This means that eve if you have a small following on your social media or your blog isn’t getting tons of traffic yet, you can still make money from sponsored posts. A great way to get started is to go through networks like MassiveSway and RewardStyle. These networks pair brands with influencers so you wont have to go out and do the leg work yourself.
You can of course approach brands yourself. You’ll need a media kit and your charm to show them just how much you can help them with a collab and why they should partner with you.
This kind of money is a little more active and requires more work as you’ll have to continue to look for brand deals and collabs to keep the money coming in. This is why this isn’t one of my favorite ways to make money as a blogger, even though it can be quite lucrative. I prefer more passive methods.
Here’s one of my latest sponsored collabs if you’d like to see an example.
Selling Digital Products
Selling digital products is one of my favorite ways to monetize a blog because once you’ve created the product, you are able to keep on selling it passively, never having to worry about running out of stock, shipping and handling and all the other components that come with selling physical products.
You can sell digital product in the lifestyle space that helps your readers to go from point A to point B. This could be in the form of a cookbook, a membership, a masterclass where you teach them something, an eBook, a course, printables and so much more.
Check out this post on some amazing ways to make money with digital products.
How to Monetize a Lifestyle Blog with Coaching
Selling physical products is pretty self explanatory. You can sell simple things like merch, t-shirts, mugs, phone cases etc with your image or logo printed on them. There’s no eed to hold on to stock either, these things are printed on demand when an order is made. Google print on demand to see some examples and companies that offer this service.
Coaching is a great way to monetize a lifestyle blog by giving your readers ad followers access to your expertise that you’ve built up. For example, you have a home decor and minimal living blog. You may start to coach others who want to revamp their home and lifestyle with weekly or one off sessions to get started.
If you’re a personal finance blogger, you may help your readers to set up budgets for their home or business. A fashion blogger might help readers to revamp their wardrobe with a mix of trendy and classic pieces that will fit their body type. A beauty blogger may begin to help readers put together their skincare regimen or beginner makeup kit.
The list is literally endless. Start with answering the question, what do my readers always ask me? Then think of how you can start a coaching business that answers that question and provides the most requested solution.
Choosing a Niche to Monetize
A lifestyle blog will have quite a number of niches and categories on it. If you want to monetize your lifestyle blog, you’ll want to choose one niche to build authority in. To start, go with the type of posts that bring you the most traffic. I show you how to do this in my free 5-day traffic building challenge.
From there, flesh out this category as much as possible to build authority. This will help to build traffic from search engines as you show your expertise by covering this topic in-depth in a number of posts. I teach this in my Beginner’s SEO course that you can take here. It will teach you everything you need to know to get passive traffic from search engines.
This will be very important in order to monetize a blog that covers a wide variety of topics. Read more about selecting your blog niche here.
As we’ve discussed, there are many ways to monetize a lifestyle blog. Don’t buy into the myth that blogging is dead and it’s too hard to monetize. Google will certainly disagree that blogging is dead as blogs fill the search results whenever you punch in a query.
Yes, it will take some time to monetize your blog. Like any worthwhile career, blogging isn’t a get rich scheme and you’ll be required to put in work to reap the rewards. Check out this post to see how long it took a handful of bloggers to start making over $1000 each month on their blogs.
If you’re ready to get started and need some help, join my Money Blogging Blueprint course. It’s free and will help you to set up a blog quickly and easily and make money in the shortest possible time.
This next post will give you more ideas on monetizing a blog. Are you ready to get started?
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Great article for new bloggers on how to earn money blogging in long run!