The Ultimate Blog Podcast - Which Monetization Method Is Right for You?

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

If you’ve been thinking about how to start making money from your blog but aren’t sure where to begin, you’re in the right place. In this episode of the Ultimate Blog Podcast, you’ll hear part two of our three-part series all about making your first $100 blogging. We’ll break down three beginner-friendly monetization methods to help you find the one that fits your niche, strengths, and style.Check out the show notes for this week's episode!If you haven’t listened to part one, make sure to listen to Episode 184 to learn how beginner bloggers actually start making money!💵Your First $100: 5 Beginner-Friendly Ways to Monetize Your BlogDo you love this podcast? Say thanks by leaving a positive review and/or rating!  

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinicki. I'm Jennifer Draper. Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice.

Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Hey there and welcome back to our series where we are talking about getting started with monetizing your blog right from the beginning. This is our second episode and if you haven't listened to episode 184 yet we would love for you to go back and take a listen. It's a quick episode and we were just talking about how to get started earning early on in your blogging journey and why that is so important.

Today what we want to talk about is figuring out a monetization strategy that is the best fit for you, where you are right now in your blogging journey. There are so many ways to make money and you'll hear a lot of advice, but not every you'll hear a lot of advice, but not every method of making money is right for everybody. What might work for one blogger in a specific niche might not work for you. So if you don't get started now, you're not going to figure out what's going to work. What we really want to encourage you to do is to start today and find your own path. to encourage you to do is to start today and find your own path. So what we want to do in this episode is just to give you a few examples. And these are not meant to be the only ways that you can make money. And these honestly aren't even meant to be like these are the ways that you should make money. But there are just some ideas. These will get you started and they'll get your brain

kind of thinking about what sounds good to you, what sounds right to you and what might work. So honestly, the best thing to do is stay open-minded, think outside the box and just always be looking for opportunities. But we wanna just kind of briefly touch on three ways that a lot of newer bloggers start to make those first few dollars in their blogging journey. So the first one you've probably heard of is affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing is where you're connected with a company and it could be something like Amazon or it could be like a really specific niche type of company.

But what happens is you get a link or a code and you're able to share about that company's product or service and you would get a percentage of any sales that happened. So this is great because you're not having to create anything in order to do this. The product is already there, so you're looking at products or services that align with your values, your messages. And it's typically more of a passive type thing. So what it does require is for you to have a good relationship with your audience so that they trust you and want to buy what you're suggesting. So it's important to obviously maintain that integrity when you're sharing things. Don't just go after every opportunity, but choose the ones that are truly meaningful. And this is great if you are somebody who's naturally recommending products, if what you're

talking about aligns really well with recommending products, then this can be a great opportunity for you. And so affiliate marketing is something to think about because you can start building that right from the beginning. Even if you're not making a lot of money from it, at least you can start the process and it will be integrated into your website and into your processes right from the beginning. Another way that beginner bloggers can be successful with making some revenue is by creating digital products. And what we mean by digital products are things that you create and can share online. So that could be like a PDF, it could be a video, it could be like a template. There's so many different things. So this would be great if you're maybe a teacher or you're a craft blogger, you're a recipe blogger, you could create some type of digital product that would be

useful to your audience, whether it might be, you know, a recipe PDF download where somebody could meal plan. There's so many different opportunities there, but think about the things that you do on a daily basis that make your life simpler or solve a problem that you're having. The great thing about a digital product is it doesn't really cost you much to make. You might have to buy a template or something, but other than that, it's pretty easy to create. You can use a tool like Canva and create a digital product pretty quickly and easily. So you're not investing a lot into this to be able to test it out with your audience and see if they like using it. And digital products can easily be sold using Kit, which is your email marketing software.

They have such great functionality for supporting creators and being able to sell digital products. They make it really simple. So honestly, creating a digital product would be something you could do in a day. I mean, it should only take you a couple hours and you can get this out there with your audience and see if it works. It's also something that's really easy to promote, like with your audience, whether you're on social, you can create a Pinterest pin, put it up on Pinterest, have people share there.

If you're podcast guesting, you could have it as a podcast guest, like as a way to create a lead essentially. So the options are endless with digital products and it's not just for one niche. It's literally for every blogger, no matter your niche, you can create a digital product of some sort. Like there is one for you. So just don't be afraid to like brainstorm that and where you could potentially provide more for your audience.

Yeah. And they're such a, they can be such a low cost offering. Oh yeah. So yeah. Yeah. And then something similar would be like just offering a service or like a mini offer. So it could be like a little workshop or anything like that. So if you have a skill that might just take a little bit more teaching or a skill that you could offer

to someone, whether you are maybe kind of working with one of your audience members one on one for some coaching, you might be teaching them how to complete something, how to do something that they need help with, maybe some health coaching or nutrition counseling, like whatever your specialty is, whatever your skill is, you might be able to work with somebody one on one, or if you're specifically tech savvy, maybe able to offer some skills in the blogging industry to other bloggers who are like, hey, I don't know how to create a PDF.

You could offer that service to them. Just be always thinking, like, what is something that if I offered it at the right price, it's kind of a no-brainer, somebody would love to have help with it, and I could start making a little bit of money and learning a little bit more about what people want help with. It starts building those connections. It gets you some income right away, and you're just really learning like, what am I good at? What do I like to do? I think that's important.

Like, what do I even like to do? Do I want to spend time doing this? So you're listening to that feedback. People are like, maybe they're not buying it at all. And you're like, well, darn, that's not what it was. But you only spent a couple hours getting it set up. So it's not the end of the world. It's information that you need to know.

And it's happened to all of us. I just want to say that right now. we've all created something and it did not go the way that we thought. And you just go back to the drawing board and redo it again, like find something different and make a couple of changes. It doesn't mean that you're not good at creating something. It just means that that didn't hit the way it needed to. Yeah. So don't take it personally,

just always take it as information and always just be looking at that feedback and then just trying the next thing. So don't overly invest in creating one thing, just continue to put things out there. We want it to be good quality, of course, but it doesn't need to be overly perfected or anything like that, you just have to try it. Yeah, I think that is just really the theme behind

what we're trying to say is you gotta to just start, you got to try it. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be like Jillian Leslie has been on the podcast a couple of times. It just needs to be like B minus work. Don't overthink it. It doesn't need to be the perfect template. It doesn't need to be the perfect colors. Um, it needs to have good solid information, especially if you're

going to put a price tag on it. It does need to give them what it needs to give them based on what you're selling them that needs to align. But it doesn't have to be perfect. If we wait to put out perfect content, like a perfect blog post or a perfect paid product or that affiliate just doesn't feel perfect, all those things, they'll never make a dollar. You'll never get anywhere if you're stuck in that perfection mindset, you have to be willing to get a little messy, get a little scrappy. And I think that those are the bloggers who are able to like really get off the ground running are the ones who are like, all right, I'm going to make this money.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to get scrappy. I'm going to figure it out. I'm not going to wait until I have every single thing figured out. I'm going to do it like in the messy middle. And so just know that you have to have that place to begin. Like Jennifer said, it's not personal if something doesn't work out. We've created a lot of things that have not worked out in the way that we thought that

they would. That doesn't mean that they were impactful in some way. And it doesn't mean that we didn't learn something along the way. But we gained information every single time. And you take that information and then you utilize that for the next thing that you're creating And so I think that the common pitfall is like you spend way too much time on it You invest way too much money. You feel like you need all of this stuff and in reality You don't so simplify it down to the point that it gets the job done

It creates the product that can then in turn create revenue in your business. Set a time limit for yourself. Say, okay, I have three hours on a random Tuesday. Today's the day I'm gonna create it. When I get done in that time, make the list ahead of time. So be prepared, know exactly what you need to create,

know exactly what you need to do, and then go, get it out. Do it. Once again, if you don't know what to do. That's why we created that guide for you and you can still get that guide. So you can find it at the ultimate blog podcast.com slash 100. And what this is, if you missed last week's episode is, it's just going to walk you through like five beginner friendly monetization methods methods and they don't require a huge audience. We know that many of you are just starting out, but they are also doable in just a couple hours for you. So you can grab it, hopefully make your first $100 sooner than you would have without it.

And within there, we have provided some worksheets that are going to allow you to brainstorm and think through your ideas before you just go like slapping it all down. So having that plan is going to be really important. And that's really the goal of the guide is to help you make that plan. That way, when you sit down to to decide what you want to do, whether that is affiliate marketing or creating your own digital product, that you're going to know exactly what you need to do in order to make the most impact. And so we want you to do this, but we don't want you to invest in this if you're not going to do the work. So ask yourself that first.

Am I willing to just do this? Am I really willing to commit to what I am doing and understand that I have something that I can offer? Because I want you to know that you do. You do have something that you can offer. You're obviously very passionate about what you're doing or you wouldn't have pressed play on this podcast. You want to make money doing this and we would love to help you do that.

So again, that guide is at the ultimate blog podcast.com slash 100 and then. Just move forward and perfectly. That's the encouragement I want you to leave with today. Just because what you create today is what it is, it doesn't mean that that is what you have to do forever and ever. Blogging is all about pivoting. If I can be honest, you should pivot.

We've pivoted personally in our own blogs, in our business we've pivoted, and I think that clarity comes from that action. It comes from doing things and understanding why it worked, why it didn't, and how you can show up differently next time and maybe make even more of an impact. But what you don't find clarity from is overthinking. Quite honestly, if we overthink, it's just a rat race that we just go down and then it leaves us stuck. It leaves us feeling stuck and you'll never figure out what's going to work for you and what's going to make the most impact in your business.

So I just want to encourage you to put forth that action today. And the first thing I'm going to tell you to do for that call to action is I want you to screenshot this episode and pop over onto your favorite social platform. And I'd love for you to just share like I'm going to take action today and share the podcast with somebody would love it. If you did that means a lot to us to help more people learn about the podcast, learn how we can help people in the content creation space. That's our goal is to help more of you because we know there's a lot of you out there wanting to make money in

this space. And we're here to help and we want to help. And so sharing with others what we're able to do would mean a lot to us too. And then we can help. We can help you all. That's the goal. When you hit play every single week, know that really the intention behind this podcast is to help content creators make the money that we feel that you deserve to make by helping the people that you want to help. So thanks for tuning in today and we can't wait to talk to you next week when we are going to talk about what you can do now even if you don't have traffic yet.

So we will see you here next week. Thanks for listening to the ultimate blog podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit the ultimate blog podcast com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.