3 Ways To Make Money From Your Blog That You’ve (Probably) Never Thought Of

When I first started my niche site journey some six years ago now, I was very wary of ‘over-monetising’ my sites. I stuck exclusively to promoting affiliate offers for a long time, which limited my ability to make money.

Eventually, I decided to give advertisements a go. This quickly doubled my income and made it possible for me to turn my websites into a full time business.

Selling digital products on your site like eBooks or courses is another popular way of making extra site revenue.  However, there are plenty of other ways to make extra money from your website that you might not have heard much about. 

Here are the three website revenue methods to make money we’ll be discussing in this article:  

1. Earning BAT Crypto from Brave Browser Users
2. Use the JustAnswer Chatbot
3. Author Consulting Services

1. Earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) Via Brave Browser

Brave browser is one of the fastest growing smaller web browsers in the world. It recently hit 50 million monthly active users and has doubled its user base every year for the last 5 years, with no signs of slowing down.

One of the biggest appeals of the Brave browser for users is that it features built-in ad blocking. Unfortunately for those of us monetizing with ads, this means that you aren’t going to make money through advertising revenue from anyone using Brave….but there is another way to earn revenue from Brave users. 

All you have to do is sign up as a content creator and verify your website, which will allow you to earn cryptocurrency; specifically, Basic Attention Tokens (BAT).

How Much Money Can You Earn From BAT

To be clear: unless your site is a massive site in the tech/crypto niche then you likely aren’t going to see enormous revenue from BAT. Brave only has a 0.05% market share as an internet browser, so there isn’t a relatively huge amount of users (and therefore money) to be made on it.

However, earning something is always better than earning absolutely nothing!

Since my site isn’t a particularly large or influential cryptocurrency site, I’ve only made about 35 BAT (currently valued around only $14, thanks to the recent cryptocurrency slump), despite seeing over two million page views. 

Most of my sites are not tech or crypto related, so I can’t expect to make money in significant ways from this income stream alone. The one exception is my SEO related site danrich.co which, despite getting only about 5,000 sessions a month, has earned more than four times as much BAT as my site that’s getting around 100,000 sessions a month in a non-tech related niche.

If you have a site that is in the tech niche, you can make money a lot more efficiently as tech savvy users are more likely to be using Brave. Case in point: MDX Crypto makes around $1,000/month worth of BAT from his YouTube channel and website combined…because all of his content is about crypto!

You can also increase your chances of getting Brave users on your site by writing articles about the Brave browser.

How To Register Your Site To Earn BAT

To earn BAT from your site follow these steps:

1. Head to publishers.basicattentiontoken.org and sign up.
2. Once you’ve signed up, login and head to your dashboard.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click ‘+ add channel’.
4. Select ‘website’ (you can also earn BAT from your YouTube channel, Twitch channel, Twitter, Vimeo and Reddit accounts here). 
5. Enter your web domain and click the checkbox that says ‘Allow Brave to serve ads on my site’.
6. You can then choose to verify your site by either downloading a trusted file and following these steps:
   1. Download the file.
   2. Upload it into the ‘.well-known’ folder on your website – if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself I recommend getting on live chat with your hosting provider and asking them to help you with it.
   3. Then select the verify button.
7. ..or you can verify your site by adding a TXT record to your DNS:
   1. Head to your hosts control panel (this can also be done via Cloudflare if you use them).
   2. Locate your DNS settings.
   3. Select ‘add record’
   4. Change the type to ‘TXT’
   5. Copy and paste the Value into the data field, then save it.
   6. Click the verify button.

2. Chatbots

Imagine that you’ve just frantically Googled an emergency search, something like: “Does my ferret have rabies?”

You then land on a webpage that gives you lists of symptoms, causes and treatments. 

For many, that type of information is enough to allow them to make an informed decision about whether or not they need to take their pet to the vet.

However, many ferret owners would love the reassurance of being able to confirm the specifics of their case with a vet, right on the spot.

With the Just Answer Chatbot they can do exactly that, and make money in the process.

What is the JustAnswer Chatbot?

The JustAnswer chatbot aims to streamline the question and answer process through a more intelligent chatbot.

The chatbot starts by asking basic diagnostic questions, then specific follow up questions based on the user’s answers. Finally, it promotes its premium service where users can live chat with a qualified professional.

If a user chooses to have a chat with a professional then you will receive a payout of $15 per signup!

What Niches Can It Work In?

One of the great things about JustAnswer is that they have experts in a broad range of niches, not just health.

In addition to doctors and vets, they have lawyers, mechanics, electronic technicians, computer technicians, electricians, plumbers, accountants, appraisers, engineers and more experts available to answer questions.

How Can You Make Money With It?

Of course, your revenue from this income stream can be hard to project. For me, my best month to date led me to earn about $80 dollars (from around 50,000 pageviews). 

If you have a lot of problem solving or health related articles then you could do significantly better than that! It’s a natural tool you can seamlessly integrate into your content, helping people get live answers for pertinent questions they may have.

How To Setup The JustAnswer Chatbot on your site

1. Sign up to the Just Answer partner program here.
2. Once you’ve been accepted into their partner program head over to your Impact affiliate dashboard.
3. In the header menu select Content > Assets.
4. Tick JustAnswer in the sidebar.
5. This will show you documents containing the required code to set up the chatbot. Search for the most appropriate one for your site for example ‘law’ or ‘consumer electronics’. Be aware there are two styles of chatbot you can use; fixed & subtle. Fixed will display a 300×250 chat popup ready to go, subtle will display a friendly face in a circle that users can click on to chat. I prefer the subtle one as it is less prominent but still converts without running the look of my site. 
6. Once you’ve found the appropriate code, copy the ‘article’ text and login to your wordpress dashboard.
7. Head to Appearance > Widgets
8. Create a new HTML widget.
9. Paste the code into it.
10. Save it.
11. Clear your cache.
12. …all being well it should be up and running!

3. Author Consulting

The idea behind author consulting is that if you’ve got a popular article breaking down how to do something complex, then there is a good chance that someone may be willing to pay for access to your expertise.

Here are a few caveats to this idea:

1. You actually have to be an expert…it’s no good selling consulting calls when you yourself didn’t write the article.
2. It could directly compete with the JustAnswer chatbot income stream.

A few ways of dealing with these are:

1. If you outsource most of your content, then you could agree to pay your writer a fee to do the calls and take a % of the total cost.
2. Exclude the JustAnswer chat bot from appearing on certain pages.

How Much Can You Make With It?

Of course, it depends; however, the more authority and expertise you can demonstrate in your articles, the easier it will be to attract potential customers. 

To test this out, you can simply start with an offer of something around $50 (niche dependent) for a 20 minute consulting call. If you can help someone solve their problem in that 20-minute call then you will be more than worth their money.

If you get no inquiries then perhaps lower your price. If you get more clients than you can handle, then put your price up until you reach a price point that works.

In Conclusion

Growing traffic is the hard bit that takes months – even years – of effort. But if you can implement multiple income streams on your site, you can earn significant income throughout your journey and stay afloat as you learn more about how to be a publisher. 

Increasing the amount of money you make from your site can be done quickly and easily by trying out some new monetisation methods, adding some more affiliate links or optimising your site for improved RPMs.

While not everything will work the way you might expect, it’s always worth experimenting and running tests on your sites because you never know where you might find a pot of gold hidden away.