There are lots of routes to make money from your UK blog. These include affiliate marketing, display ads, digital/physical products and offering your expertise in the form of consultancy.
While this may sound simple, the journey from a blog making £0 to even £100 a month can feel like a world away.
In this post, we’ll discuss the different ways that you can make money from your blog in the UK (including honest advice on the pros and cons of each) and give you some helpful tips on how to get started.
If haven’t started your blog yet don’t miss out step by step guide on how to start a successful blog in the UK.
Create a product that you can sell on your blog
Creating and selling a product on your blog is one of the best ways to make monetise your blog without any input or help from external entities (people or organisations help you monetize your blog).
In simple terms, it means you can keep complete control over what you promote and sell to your audience because you’ll be making it yourself.
With that in mind let’s look at some of the best practices you can follow to create a successful product to complement your UK-based blog:
Create a product that is relevant to your blog. If you have a beauty blog, then selling makeup or beauty products is going to be an easy sell for you. If you have a food blog, then it might be great to try selling cookbooks using recipes from your site.
Selling physical items can be more expensive than selling digital products because there are overheads associated with manufacturing and shipping physical goods. However, selling physical products is typically easier because you can display the value clearly with images and descriptions, unlike digital products where the value is very specific to the use case.
Whatever you sell make sure to include some kind of return policy just in case someone receives an item they don’t like or doesn’t work properly after purchasing it.
Sell an e-book
Another great way to make money from your UK blog is by selling e-books. You could even sell a bundle of them as part of a course.
E-books are a popular format for writers and bloggers because they’re less expensive than print books and they allow you to reach people worldwide without being constrained by physical shelf space or shipping costs (and if you want them in hard copy form, there’s always CreateSpace).
Essentially you’ll be compiling a selection of posts on the same topic to offer as one complete solution to a problem. Creating your e-book doesn’t require huge amounts of investment and can be completed without the need for any expensive publishing services.
Use affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting products or services (that you don’t own or produce) on a commission basis. You add relevant links to your articles and if someone clicks on that link and buys the product or service, you receive a commission on their purchase.
While this is simple in practice you need to make sure that the products or services you affiliate are relevant and most importantly helpful and good value for your readership.
Promoting poor affiliate programs is a quick way to lose the trust of your audience.
So how do you go about starting affiliate marketing on your blog?
Amazon Associates is probably the most widely used affiliate program in the world due to its gigantic catalogue of products and relatively easy signup process.
As a UK-based blogger, it gives you a handy feature called OneLink that allows you to send US traffic to Amazon.com so you still get an opportunity to get some commission.
Once you’ve signed up you’ll get access to SiteStripe which sits at the top of your browser when you search the Amazon website. As soon as you see a product that looks like a great fit for your readers you can simply click SiteStripe and copy the links it gives you.
Now head over to any relevant blog posts and add your link. Voila, you’ll now make a small commission every time one of your readers clicks through to Amazon and makes a purchase.
Remember, the more information you provide about the product and incentives to purchase the more clicks and in turn conversions, you’ll get.
Just adding links all over your website won’t do the trick, guide your readers to the purchase, explain why it’ll help, what made you recommend it and anything else that might improve your chance of a revenue-earning click.
Scaling your affiliate marketing
Now you’ve mastered Amazon Associates you can start to entertain other affiliate programs available online. Some of the most popular options are:
- Flex Offers
- Etsy
- eBay
- Clickbank
- ShareASale
You’ll quickly find that you can make considerably higher commissions with certain programs and this could even affect your content strategy to focus more on high-earning affiliate blog posts.
Head over to our article on conversion rate optimisation for online businesses to learn more about some of the tactics you can employ to increase your affiliate income.
Put display ads on your blog
Display ads are an easy way to make money from a blog. You display them on your site and they’ll generate revenue for you as more visitors browse your content.
The main issue with display ads is that they’re annoying for readers. If you have a large number of ads on each page, it will be difficult for people to keep reading through them all and find useful information within your posts.
This could negatively affect your overall traffic numbers, which can lead to lower ad rates or fewer clicks altogether. Additionally, many people use ad blockers or block all external scripts when browsing the web, making display ads disappear alongside your chance of making any money.
As a general rule, you should keep display ads for your informational content like guides and how-tos. Affiliate-based articles should be left to focus on getting that click which will typically bring a much larger reward than display ads.
Write sponsored posts
A sponsored post is when a business or brand pays you to feature them, their products or their services on your blog. It could be in the form of a brand spotlight, product review or just an informational piece to introduce them to your audience.
The benefit to other businesses and brands is twofold:
- They get introduced to your readership and have an opportunity to shine a light on what they do and offer
- Sponsored posts typically contain a link to the brand or business’s website, helping with SEO and improving their search engine rankings.
Authoritative blogs in the UK can usually charge hundreds or thousands of pounds per sponsored post, so this is a great way to make serious money blogging.
Just remember to thoroughly vet the companies that approach you to make sure they’re genuine and legitimate. The last thing you want to be doing is promoting a complete scam!
Offer your skills in a consultancy role
Just by being the owner of a successful blog in the UK, you’re part of a very small group of people. Blogging requires careful planning and lots of hard work and people understand that these skills are fairly rare.
Things you can consult other businesses or brands on include:
- How to create a successful blog
- How to launch a successful content strategy
- How to build an audience
- As an expert in your topic or niche
- Copywriting assistance and advice
- Project management and workflow for blogging
- How to hire writers and scale your content production
This is just a snapshot of what you can offer as a consultant and the niche you’re in will often open up lots of other opportunities to help others just like you but in an earlier stage of growth.
You’ll need to remain patient as you build up your audience before making a lot of money
Making money from your blog requires an audience. In the early stages of blogging it’s important to focus on building out your content and increasing your traffic.
As a general rule, I would aim to have at least 30 posts and 1000 monthly visits before I even think about adding any affiliate links or display ads.
To really make money from your blog you’ll need to find a happy medium between efforts to increase your traffic and efforts to increase the amount you get paid for that traffic.
We tend to spend a lot more time on content than monetisation purely because it’s easier to increase your revenue further down the line.
If you’ve found this guide useful then don’t miss our other detailed articles below. From copywriting for small businesses to our extensive brand glossary there’s always something new to learn that can help increase your online visibility and your revenue.
