Ask HN: How to Make Money Blogging?

4 points by iio7 ↗ HN
I have a friend that has a blog that he's really dedicated to. The blog gets about 100K visitors a month, but he doesn't earn a dime on the blog. He would like to, but don't feel comfortable putting ads on the website and he also really hate tracking.

Is it possible to earn money on a blog without ads? Or with ads, yet without turning the blog into one of those smeared in ads from top to bottom?

10 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] thread
There’s three ways:

1) Ads.

2) Affiliate links. Affiliate links work well if your blog is an authority on products, especially for expensive products like musical instruments.

3) Promoting your own product, like an ebook, course, etc.

Which monetization method you use depends on how it fits into your blog’s content and audience.

Personally, I would do all three to maximize revenue.

Tell him to set up a Patreon (or similar -- it is not the only one) and tip jars (PayPal, Venmo, Stripe). Look up services like Buy Me A Coffee.
Please stop posting these. Users are complaining to us that you're spamming the threads, and they're right.

I actually banned your account but since you've posted other sorts of comments in the past, decided to unban you. But please don't do this sort any more!

The scammy thing is that the links contain Amazon affiliate tags -- that is, it's just sleazy attempts to earn affiliate revenue, not even book recommendations as an attempt to be helpful. If they didn't include an affiliate tag, they'd be a little strange but not really a problem.
What does your friend do for a living, can he monetize his blog by promoting himself?
It seems like a lot of people are turning blogs into Newsletters via SubStack or similar. Maybe he could look at that?