How do you monetise a blog?
I've been writing on my tech blog for almost 10 years, it has 40k sessions a month and I have never tried to monetise it.
Nevertheless, I have recently started to write more in-depth courses (a 12 chapter course on Git for instance), as opposed to the usual blog posts.
I wonder if there's a way to make money out of it. I was thinking of selling e-books, potentially with some extra chapters that aren't available on the online version.
I also thought of offerring video in addition to text, with some extra material, complete access to thourough code exemples, access to the complete code of an exemple project…
What do you think about it, do you have any idea?
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Is that your blog? https://buzut.net It's pretty cool! Nice work!
I never monetised a blog, so take my word with a pinch of salt, but some ideas on the top of my head:
@Buzut All of these have potential, and I'd also add memberships since you have a sizable audience. You could gate some content behind a paywall and make that accessible to premium users (like business week or the wall street journal) or a premium newsletter (like the hustle).
Ah I see Benjamin actually put that under sponsors, but yea I think that would work for you!
Thank you Benjamin for your nice words and advice! It is indeed my blog, and Buzeo.digital is my company.
I had never really considered ads, as my understanding is that unless the trafic numbers are insanely high, it doesn't generate meaningful revenue, but I should check the numbers.
My own digital product or service as a product sounds very appealing, I just have to find out what it could be.
As a matter of fact, I'd love to progressively retire from custom dev contracts (which is not scalable) and move towards a productised service.
Looking for sponsors trying to find a model like Patreon's one is very interesting too, I need to give it a thought.
You're welcome.
On what you said though:
You're right, it's not scalable, but there are smart ways of pricing your service to a level which is aligned to the value that you create for your customer, versus the price of the market. Meaning: instead of charging 800€/d for a 2 months project, you charge 10% of the expected value of the project (for a project with a 10M value, that's a lot). Sounds crazy, but if you're good and you have good contacts, it's possible ;)
I can't agree more. They are two ways to scale revenue, increase sales (contracts) or increase the base price.
Charging based on the added value can be challenging though. Anyway, scalabaility is only one of the reasons pushing me to distanciate from consulting, but this is a completely different subject.
When it comes to monetizing I think it's helpful to consider these questions:
Selling a $10 product to 1,000 people requires a different approach than selling a $100 product to 100 people.
If you're selling to people who don't realize they have a problem, you first have to convince them they have one.
Will you teach people how to do something or do it for them?
Will you sell something that earns or costs?
Does the product pay for itself or does it bring additional costs to the purchaser beyond their money? (time, attention, etc.)
Big difference between getting people to spend new money on your thing compared to getting them to shift the money they were already spending elsewhere on a similar product or service.
I expanded on all of these questions here:
https://fortheinterested.com/six-key-decisions-to-make-when-you-want-to-monetize-your-audience/
These are indeed really good questions. I'm going to read your article, thanks!
I would recommend trying to sell premium content like courses.
this guy made 7k of a course with a relatively small blog.
kent dodds makes a full time living off his courses (and really doesn't release frequently). Kevin Powell (a youtuber) make 30k on the opening weekend of his scrimba course.
All of them have a good mailing list and loyal readers who are happy to give something in return for all the free content they released.
I'm really considering it. Actually, in the exemples you mentionned, several offer different pricing for different materials (here for instance).
So my idea of offering videos and full source totally makes sense. Now I just have to figure how how to frame it best.
Thank you :)
I have that concept and I have already selling my ebook on the blog.
My Blog : https://santrikoding.com
My Ebook : https://santrikoding.com/tutorial-set-premium
How does it work for you?
so, I made a tutorial series, a free online course on a blog and also I sold an ebook.
even though I only get around $ 250 from selling ebooks
250 recurring or in total? With what type of audience?
for now is total, audience come from learn tutorial free on my blog and they interest on my ebook
i'm glad you're here!
i tried "problogging" nearly 9 years ago! it was hard, but, i once made > $45k in a year from just writing. that was fun.
but, now, it's a lot easier to make more money... i'm just not as interested in monetizing it ...
directly. indirectly, i share my thoughts on my startup.i learned that i don't like monetizing my writing in this way. so, that's something for you to try and think about!
I haven't monetized a blog before, but I do maintain a web dev blog (https://www.robertcooper.me/) with ~20k sessions a month. I like the paid e-book approach. You could put a call to action in the middle of your current blog articles to advertise your e-book. I think 3rd party ads can hurt the user experience on your blog and i'm not sure how fruitful in would be with 40k sessions a month.
You have some good quality content on your blog, well done 👍🏼 I know how much effort it takes to write a quality blog post.
Thank you for the positive words about my blog! I really like yours too, content & design. I'm especially found of the cards presentation on the articles listing. I might take inspiration from it!
You can try Ezoic..
p.s.. my Affiliate link :): https://ezoic.com/?tap_a=6182-5778c2&tap_s=921331-613246
It has better rates than Adsense and fits your current audience size.
After you pass 100k you can try Mediavine
I make a decent side income from online courses. I suggest you create an online course which summarises the key content and then use your blog as a marketing channel to drive traffic to your course. This will vastly outperform an ebook.
You could experiment with this for free using Udemy (you can create your own coupons which you could put on your blog - this would allow you to see what kind of traffic you can generate on your own)
If things are going well on Udemy, you could then self-host a course using platforms like teachable or podia - you'll have to pay a monthly fee, but if sales are good then it is worth it (at 40k sessions per month it seems likely that this could work for you). My personal blog (~8k sessions per month) still makes it worthwhile.
Don't get me wrong, creating a course is a lot of work, but if you've been writing consistently for a decade, you've got the discipline and the drive necessary.
Here's a more detailed write up of the whole self-hosted vs. marketplace decision
Thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve read your article with interest. I’m really stunned by the extremely low prices of the courses on Udemy.
I also agree that online allows for more interactivity than an ebook:
To me it subconsciously translates to mediocre content (reasoning: you can’t get a high quality course for such a low price). It really contrats with highly priced courses like this one where my subconscious tells me “you really need to buy it, there must be hidden gems you must know in there”.
If using Udemy (which you seem to do), what’s preventing you to migrate everything back to your own platform any time you want (except not owning the students list).
Also, you mention other dedicated platforms, what do you think about simply hosting a course on my usual website with just a paywall to access it and its materials (that could be easily implemented with just Stripe or MemberStack)?
ooh that React2025 sales page is nicely done. Yeah, Udemy's prices are staggeringly low - and actually some of the courses on there are incredible. For example this course on Tensorflow 2.0 is a masterpiece (no affiliation).
Nothing prevents you from migrating to your own platform - I currently operate courses on both Udemy and my own platform built with teachable - (soon to be replaced with CourseMaker). The reason for this that Udemy does drive a steady stream of traffic, whereas I have to do all the marketing for my own courses. As a result, I still earn more through Udemy (probably 80% of my side income, depending on how much traffic my personal blog sends to my self-hosted course site).
You could definitely host your own course, but there are some hassles to think about - tracking student progress, compliance (EU VAT, GDPR), comments, growing out to memberships, coupons/sales funnel stuff - none of this is crazily hard but it is quite a bit of work in aggregate. It's definitely doable though.
Thanks for your thourough answer. I know there are some high quality courses (actually the one you mentionned has a base price of 134,99€), but having low prices, I think our subconcious is trained to understand that it either didn't sell well (leftover) or just isn't of the highest quality.
I now get what you meant, Udemy takes care of a lot of things for you and allows to quickly try out if a course works or not before investigating too much time and efforts. In this regards, Teachable looks promising in a way that it is "batteries included" with a lot of flexibility.
On the other hand, if I understand well, unlike Udemy, they won't drive trafic to your course. What about CourseMaker?
Yeah - Udemy is a funny one because they constantly run ~90%+ discounts. So that course which you see for 134,99 euros - the vast majority of people will end up paying under 20 euros for it.
But yeah, the flipside is that Udemy does send the traffic. The big risk for any new Udemy entrant is that you pick the wrong niche, or one where the incumbent course is just really popular, and then you just drown and your course gets ignored. Thankfully that didn't happen to me when I was starting, but if you surf around you'll find some courses which are like 8hrs + with fewer than 50 students (that must be soul-crushing).
Yep "batteries included" is a good way to think of Teachable. And yes, you're right, the deal is that you then have to handle the marketing. So it appeals to course creators who don't mind doing some marketing and/or already have a following.
CourseMaker will be the same model as Teachable, but targeted more at technical course creators and with affordable pricing. I'm looking for beta testers from the end of August (happy to arrange a discount in exchange for feedback) so if you're interested let me know: [email protected]
Hey Chris,
Sorry for my late answer. Thanks for the offer, I'll send you an email. I'm not sure when I'll be able to create this course yet as I have a ton of work at the moment.
But I will definitely give CourseMaker a try.
I'm thinking about going the e-books route. Seems like the best option as far as I can tell.
And what about the printed books? That's what Axel Rauschmayer does (not sure it converts the best though).
I'm not thinking about that right now (I feel like ebooks scale better, cost-wise).
Maybe once I'm successful with ebooks, I would consider it. What are your thoughts?
There are a lot of ways through which you can monetize your blog: