How To Make Money With An Online Magazine

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If you want to start an online magazine business, you must understand how to make money with it. For example, while I do not have a print magazine, M3 is a digital magazine with multiple revenue streams.

I love telling people about what I do and how I make money at Miss Millennia Magazine. My story always prompts follow-up questions to explain how it all works in more detail. I get questions like:

Can you make money from an online magazine?
Are online magazines profitable?
What did I have to learn to start it?
Do I work on it solo?
How much time do I dedicate to it?

But there is one question I frequently get, way more than the other questions combined. “How do you make money with an online magazine?”

The magazine has not made me a rich woman. But in the past, we have earned as much as $10,000 in a single month. In this post, I’m giving you a peek into how Miss Millennia Magazine makes its income.

Creating Sponsored Content

Let’s start with our number one money maker, sponsored posts. Sponsored posts are when we make an agreement with a brand to write an article or post on social media about them.

This agreement can consist of giveaways, photography, videos, social media posts, and sometimes even attending an event. As our reach has grown, so has the price of each campaign. Over the years, we’ve made anything from $200 to $2,500 for a single campaign. Not a shabby way to make money with an online magazine, IMO.

Regardless of our agreements with a brand, we always stay authentic to how a product or service performs. We have the rule to give as much helpful, quality content in a sponsored post as possible in any organic post.

If you saw a lineup of some of our article titles, I bet you’d have a difficult time figuring out which are sponsored and which are not. (That is until you see the disclosure in the beginning.) Sponsored posts make up around 20% of our published content on M3.

How do you get connected with brands?

Ah, good question! Primarily through media companies who let us know about the brands that are looking for blogs in our niche. Some of our favorites include:

There are a TON of other sponsored post companies you can apply to. I have a list of over 100 below.

But with hundreds of different networks offering tens of sponsored post opportunities, it becomes very time-consuming to log in to each network to search for your niche’s highest-paying opportunities.

So, suppose you want to save time and see only the BEST sponsored post opportunities, and you want them sent directly to your inbox 3 days per week. In that case, I highly recommend you sign up for our sponsored Post Opportunities Newsletter, Blogging Money Update. My team combs through over a hundred different networks and handpicks the best sponsored post opportunities ranging from $50-$5,000 to send to your inbox three times a week! If you want to learn more about Blogging Money Update, click here.

And if you are interested in how you can make some serious dough with sponsored content?

You should join my online program called Blogging Money Formula!

Blogging Money Formula is my online community where I show motivated bloggers exactly how to bring in consistent income from their blogs every month. In my program, I start by showing you how to set up the foundation you need to make real earnings with your blog.

I’m talking about structuring your blog to earn the type of money that can make the financial difference for you and your family that you always hoped your blog would do.

My program will teach you to:

Establish yourself as a professional blogger: everything your blog needs to be recognized as a professional blogger.
Properly apply for sponsored posts so you get selected for more opportunities: step-by-step how to apply so that brands choose you more often!
Get brands to reach out to you: what you need to set up on your blog so that brands reach out to you and where to go to put yourself on their radar.
Build long-term relationships with brands: get recurring business with brands instead of pitching new ones all the time.
Write content that appeals to your audience and the brand: great content does not need to be either-or!
Drive traffic to your blog posts: great results produce repeat customers, and I will show you how to make that happen.

Enroll in the Blogging Money Formula here.

Advertising

This is how many people assume we bring in income, and they are correct, but it is not a huge earner for us. We work with an advertising company, Mediavine, that sources and adds different brands to our ad spaces for us. And depending on the brand, our income for ads can range. We typically make a few hundred bucks from advertising, but it can vary between $50-$3,000 a month.

Advertising can consist of us receiving banner ads to display on the sidebar of our site, brands wanting to do an advertisement on our Bloggers Supporting Bloggers Facebook Group, or brands wishing to be featured in an article that is already written on our site. There are also video ads, native ads, and other ads you can do on your site. I am just grateful that Mediavine covers all of these different types.

Our favorite part of this process is how passive it is to manage. We do not look for brands to work with regarding advertising. Instead, they typically come to us. However, this is something we are working to change.

We’ve recently gotten into the habit of securing ad space one brand at a time, which can be more lucrative for both you and the company since they get more exposure, and we typically get paid more. I am still venturing into making a system out of this new process.

Products

Products are another great way to make money with an online magazine. While this is a relatively new way to bring in income for M3, products currently bring in anywhere between $600-$3,500 a month for us.

While it can be challenging to determine which products will be money for you and time-consuming to create, they can be very rewarding.

Once your product is created, all you have to do is create a marketing funnel for people to buy it and watch the money roll in, almost on autopilot. If your goal is to quit your job one day and only have income with your blog, creating products is the way to get there!

Affiliates

Lastly, my love/hate relationship is affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing is when you promote a product that says they will pay you if and only if the readers click, buy, or sign up for that given product. We earn anywhere from $50-$1,200 a month with affiliates.

The benefit of doing affiliates is that you write an article with links in it, and so long as the article gets traffic, you earn income. SIMPLE! The best part of this is it can be passive too. Most of the work is done upfront, and the rest is just making sure it is seen.

I’ve recently taken a course on affiliate marketing by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner called Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing which is SO GOOD. This is the way to a long-term affiliate strategy. We add affiliate links in many of our organic posts on the site, and we especially make sure that our viral posts have affiliate links.

It took a long time for us to see affiliate income, and when we did get it, it was hard to continue earning it every month. Often enough, we don’t generate revenue from affiliates, not a lot of it if we do, but we are glad to see some progress! Mostly because we know in due time that it will grow. We hope that this will be a substantial way for us to make money with our magazine in the future.

Where Do You Find Affiliates?

Another good question! I go through affiliate networks. These networks are filled with well-known companies who are willing to pay you in exchange for getting sales from your target audience.

A few networks we’re on include:

So there you have it! Our overall income strategy for M3. While these are our ways of making income now, it does not mean that these are the only options we will ever have for affiliate earnings. Check with us in a year, and we may have new strategies!

Are you interested in creating your blog now? Then, check out my step-by-step article on how to set one up!

What do you do to bring in income from your blog? Do you have other questions about making money with an online magazine? Let us know in the comments.

Interested in how you can make some serious dough with sponsored content?