Don’t you wish your music blog was more than a passionate hobby project?

If you love music and blogging, running a great blog about music is a worthwhile project. But it can take a lot of time and dedication, with little in return.

With today’s internet environment, turning your hobby into your job has become a reality. Blogging about music can actually make a great way to earn money.

Monetizing your blog is a simple matter and has the potential to make you rich. You just need to know how to go about it.

Whether you’re looking to make some side income or turn your blog into your occupation, these five blog monetizing tips will help you achieve it.

1. Create a Webshop

Setting up your own shop and selling things to your readers is a simple way to start making money.

There’s a vast variety of things you can sell to make money on a music blog. This includes both physical and digital goods.

First of all, there’s music. You can sell your own music, and you can sell other people’s music. You can sell music production software, and you can sell concert tickets. Since music is the main attraction of your site, start with the music.

You can also sell merchandise. This can be your website’s merchandise or band merchandise. Posters, t-shirts, mugs, and other typical products are easy to sell.

Using print-on-demand services makes custom merchandise easy.

While you need some basic web development know-how to implement a shop, it’s simple enough to do.

If you don’t know where to start, look here.

2. Affiliate Marketing and Ad Networks

The easiest way to make money with a website is through advertising. There are many advertisement networks you can use. The popular ones, such as Google AdSense, are very easy to set up.

A lot of these pay you a little money for each visitor who clicks through to the sponsor’s website. If you have a sizable following, this can give you a steady flow of ad money.

Affiliate marketing is a bit different. When you use an affiliate program, you get paid for each purchase. If a visitor to your blog clicks through and leaves, you don’t get paid. However, if they buy something, you get a chunk of the profit.

Affiliate marketing can also include contests and special discounts for your followers.

Affiliate marketing is a huge and growing business with an annual growth rate of about 10 percent.

You won’t get as many payments from affiliate programs as you will from ad networks. The affiliate payments will be bigger though.

Many bloggers combine the two types of advertising to make more money. You get a steady flow of small payments for pay-per-click ads, and more spread out bigger payments for affiliate sales.

3. Sell Ad Space Yourself

When you use an advertising program, there’s a middleman that takes most of the profit.

If you can put in the extra work to advertise without a middleman, you can get a bigger profit.

A lot of the time, you can get a bigger chunk than you would from affiliate marketing. And best of all, you get to choose what’s advertised on your site.

With prefabricated ad programs, the ads may not appeal to your readers. If you select the ads yourself, you’re more likely to get people to click.

Another advantage is that you don’t need to implement anything complex to do direct advertising. You can use the articles on your music blog as ad space.

Contact various businesses related to what you blog about and ask if they want to advertise on your blog. Examples include music stores and music teachers.

You have a few different options for how to advertise as well. One way is writing sponsored posts or review articles. Another way is to host a custom ad in a sidebar or banner. Get creative and find as many ad spots as you can.

4. Paid Subscriptions

This strategy can take a fair amount of work to implement, but if you have a big following it should be worth it.

Create premium content that will only be available to paying subscribers. THen give people a glimpse at what they’ll get if they pay. If it’s attractive enough, people will pay to sign up.

One form of premium content you can use is useful articles. This can be tutorials on how to make music, for example. You can also make it so that paying subscribers get all material earlier than free visitors.

Resource pages related to music, musicianship, and partying are great ideas. Infographics like this page about the Phases of Alcohol Withdrawal make great sources of inspiration.

You can also give paying subscribers access to special videos, competitions, product discounts, and giveaways.

Think of ways to incentivize signing up for premium content, and start implementing them.

5. Increase Traffic to Your Music Blog

They key to all monetizing strategies is getting a lot of website traffic. Making sure that you get a steady stream of visitors to your website is half the challenge.

All of the above tips for making money with your music blog rely on a big number of visitors. The more visitors on your blog, the more sales, advertising money, and potential subscribers you’ll get.

Also note that more traffic to your site will increase the value of the site in case you want to sell it at some point. Selling a website can generate a lot of money if you’ve managed it well.

The first step to boost traffic is to improve your SEO game. There’s an endless sea of SEO guides online, but not all advice is created equal. A lot of it is outdated or incorrect.

My SEO guide is a good place to start learning about proper SEO.

If you want to speed up results, consider hiring an SEO expert to help you get started. However, you should still keep up with SEO tactics. At least the basics.

Networking is also important. Use social media to your advantage. If you haven’t already set up channels on the most popular social media sites, do so now.

Use them to draw more attention to your music blog. Generate as many inbound links as you can. Connect with relevant pages and trade followers.

Create and relay sharable content to get more followers and shares.

Browse music forums and Reddit pages and spread the word about your awesome blog.

Get as much exposure as you can to maximize profits.

Final Thoughts

Monetizing your blog is a simple, straight-forward process in general. What it comes down to is putting in the work to set up the systems and attract more visitors.

With these five powerful blog money-making strategies, you can turn your passion blog into a source of passive income.

Apply your mind and think of more ways to boost income from these strategies.

For more tips on blogging, keep reading my blog.