Want to make money with your Squarespace blog? Let’s avoid all the noise. In this blog post, I’m going to cover the 3 best ways to monetize a Squarespace blog and earn passive income. Ready to get started? Let’s do this.
One thing that’s important to understand about passive income is that the term is a bit of a misnomer. It’s highly unlikely you can set up a revenue stream one time without ever working on it again.
You’re always going to do some work upfront. Beyond that, some sort of maintenance or upkeep is usually necessary.
Don’t let that turn you off from the idea of trying to branch out with your blog. Having one or more income streams is instrumental to reaching your income goals.
With that said, let’s dive into exactly how you can monetize a Squarespace blog.
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3 ways to monetize your Squarespace blog
1. Affiliate Marketing
When done right, this technique can provide long-term passive income for anyone driving traffic to their Squarespace website.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is exactly what it sounds like: you’re marketing a service or product for a company. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. It’s as simple as that.
Best of all, you don’t need to create a product yourself to monetize your Squarespace blog.
How to get started with affiliate marketing
All you need to get started is a company to market for. Then, once you’ve established yourself with them, usually by signing up with them, they’ll set you up with an affiliate link.
Insert the link organically into your blog posts. As per FTC regulations, you’ll need to clearly disclose somewhere on the post that your affiliate links can/will lead to purchases from which you’ll benefit monetarily.
What are the best affiliate marketing companies to work with?
Ultimately, this depends on your niche. However, the best are Amazon Associates, Shareasale, and FlexOffers.
There are affiliate programs for everything under the sun: tea, marijuana products, weapons equipment, software, clothing, etc. It should be noted that some outlets will require you to disclose the platform on which you’ll be marketing for them.
If you have your own business or something along those lines, they often like to have an opportunity to evaluate it before they decide to do business with you.
This won’t always be the case; it’s more or less common depending on the product/service in question. Sometimes signing up with a website will be all you have to do in order to obtain an affiliate link.
How much can you make with affiliate marketing?
The amount of profit from affiliate marketing car varies wildly.
On high-ticket, expensive sales, such as if you’re doing AM for personal computers, you can expect commissions with higher dollar amounts, but these commissions will likely be fewer and farther in between.
The opposite also holds true: lower-priced sales might be easier to bring in, but you won’t be making as much individually.
Is affiliate income passive?
The beauty of affiliate marketing through your blog is that, assuming your posts stay up indefinitely, it’s possible you could make sales through your link even years after you put it up.
Lots of affiliate commissions involve monthly purchases or subscriptions, which translates to monthly recurring income for you.
What about for you? Affiliate marketing comes with no costs, aside from the costs of operating your Squarespace blog.
How to make money with affiliate marketing
To really benefit from affiliate marketing, you have to have a reasonably sizable audience coming to your blog. Ideally, the products and services you’ll be pitching will already tie into the type of content you have your Squarespace blog.
You also have to know what to target them with, and how to do it. This takes research and analysis. If you’re plugged into a system like Google Analytics, this is a time where it could come in handy.
One of the most important decisions to make when pursuing this income stream is whether to go big or small. Smaller companies will have fewer fellow affiliates with which to compete, and likely smaller paydays.
It’s vice versa for larger companies. Try to tailor your marketing plans with your skillset, experience, and niche.
2. Advertisements
Before affiliate marketing, ad space reigned supreme as arguably the most popular method of collecting income from blogging. Banners run across the top, sides, and bottom of your post.
They can also intersperse throughout the page. There are pop-ups and redirect links, among other options.
Once your hard work has started to pay off and your audience begin to grow, companies will start valuing the amount of traffic you’re driving to your Squarespace blog every day.
Whether they reach out to you or you start cold-emailing businesses to pitch ad space on your blog, this is a standard means of generating revenue for your efforts.
Where to sign up to make money with display ads
We’re operating under the assumption that you want to monetize a Squarespace blog, which does not handle these kinds of ads in-house. To get started, you’ll need a third-party outlet.
Although you can work with any adequate platform you choose, of the most commonly used is Google AdSense.
AdSense is actually making the final decision about which specific ads will pop up, but it’s in your mutual interest for them to be good ones.
How to set up Adsense ads on Squarespace
Signing up for an account with AdSense is simple enough, although actually successfully becoming a partner is no guarantee.
Their website can help you learn what they’re looking for with applicants to make sure you’re on the right track as far as your Squarespace website and its content. Once you’re up and running, there really isn’t much else to do.
Adsense is one of the most automated revenue generators you’ll come across.
Google even handles the resizing necessary for the ads to remain visually appealing across different devices – what looks good on a laptop won’t always look the same on a smartphone.
To set up ads on your Squarespace website, follow this step-by-step tutorial.
How to make money with display ads
There are a few drawbacks to this method that should be addressed. In order to make any serious amount of money from hosting ads, your audience will have to be sizable. We’re talking at least several tens of thousands of visitors a month.
Besides that, the ads themselves can be quite problematic. The system isn’t perfect, and some of the ads can unintentionally turn your audience off from looking at your blog.
If the ads are overbearing, they can dissuade your visitors from returning. Having too many of them appear too quickly will have the opposite from their intended effect.
Nobody likes to give themselves carpal tunnel clicking off of ad after ad, no matter how much they like the content they’re seeking.
Should you monetize your Squarespace blog with ads?
Ads will also make it take longer for your page to load. Impatient web surfers never respond well to this kind of setback, especially if they can tell that it stems from the blogger’s haste to make a quick buck.
It could be a tough decision, but some entrepreneurs choose to forgo paid advertisements to maintain the quality of their site’s experience. This can pay off in the back end by resulting in increased loyalty from your fanbase.
Remember, you’ll always still have time and space for other methods of monetization.
3. Sponsored Content
You can work with companies to sponsor individual blog posts on your Squarespace blog. This sort of work can pay in the hundreds or thousands apiece.
Brands that have enough in common with you, or that are large enough to issue sponsored posts with a variety of niches, are always looking for content creators who can help them raise their profile online.
The type of blog posts that businesses are willing to sponsor usually involves discussing a product/service of theirs.
If this item is already geared towards your audience, the company will expect it’ll result in greater traffic and sales, making it worth it to them to pay you well for the post.
What to know about sponsored post sponsorships
Right off the bat, you have to understand that this is another income stream that you need to disclose publicly, just like affiliate marketing.
Sponsorships more often than not involve a contract to make sure everyone involved knows what to expect. Typical stipulations include images and links you’re going to include, the word count, mentions of what the business is plugging, and more.
It might be wise to avoid raising your rate indefinitely just because you’re still growing. Finding a price point that’s agreeable to everyone is more important than getting one huge payout.
Steady work will pay out more over time, so don’t get greedy.
How to get more sponsored post opportunities
Make sure to develop a presence on social media for your blog. This will help ensure more eyes are on your work, and more paying sponsors as well.
Hopefully, this isn’t surprising to you by now, but you’ll need at least a decent-sized audience before businesses will start showing interest in you. This is true no matter what the niche or product is.
Word of your workability will start spreading, meaning you’ll have more and more companies clamoring to work with you as your Squarespace blog continues to grow.
You can sign up at these marketplaces to land more opportunities: Linqia, ValuedVoice, Getfluence, Clever, and Markerly.
Monetize your Squarespace blog: The bottom line
Before any of what we’ve covered today can happen, you’ll still have to start from scratch with your blog. Squarespace is a great place to get started, but you’ll have your work cut out regardless.
The key is trial-and-error. Mix and match different plans, analyze the results, and then recalibrate and try again. Keep it up, and eventually, your blog will be printing money.
