This article is part of a 4 part series on generating more traffic and revenue with your blog. 

Part I: How to Build Blog Traffic: Smart People Use These 3 Strategies While Everyone Else Struggles

Part II: How To Turn Blog Readers into Customers Step by Step

Part III: Multiple Streams of Blog Income: Because One Just Won’t Do (you are here)

Part IV: How to Scale Your Blog Business

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Well, many bloggers definitely are passionate about their blog topic and I love it. But they’ll continue to work many days in their lives because they can’t establish a profitable business to fuel the passionate blog. Today you’ll begin a different path that not only leads you to one source of income but multiple streams of blog income.

I know this because there are so many bloggers that build tribes or communities without even thinking about turning it into a business. They started their blog or website because they were passionate about a specific topic and they wanted to share their voice.

This is how my wife and I started our blog, in a tiny bedroom of our Waldorf, MD home at the time.

I like to say that we followed our passion and through the process of following our passion, we quickly discovered our purpose.

Our purpose was to promote, encourage and equip marriage in the African- American community with our website BlackandMarriedWithKids.com.

We didn’t see this being done enough in our community. We believed that we could step in to fill that void ourselves with our blog.

But there was still a step missing.

After our passion led us to our purpose, we quickly realized that we were missing a third “P” and that was “profit.”

Click To Tweet: Profit is vitally important because without it, it’s hard to maintain the first two, passion and purpose.

When you don’t have profit, you have to work a 9-5 that you hate. You’re doing side jobs  that you don’t want to work and everything else that’s distracting you from your passion and your purpose.

Again, it’s vital for you to focus on the profit,  if you want to turn your blog into a business.

Multiple Streams of Blog Income

Now some of you may be asking why you need multiple streams of income instead of just one. If you currently don’t have any, you’re probably really asking this question.

Well, it’s simple.

If you only have one stream, I can guarantee you that at some point, that stream will dry up. So you must have multiple streams in order to fortify your business for whatever may be ahead.

In my last article, I talked about our business initially being built on ad revenue. For us, the ad revenue, was our one stream.

But we quickly found out that due to the ad agency’s budgets, restraints, changing fiscal years and priorities, changes at the agency level could greatly effect our ability to make profit or not.

This determined whether or not we could pay employees, or whether we could afford the cost associated with running a website and formulating a plan to leave our 9-5 jobs to follow our passion and the purpose we’d created through blackandmarriedwithkids.com.

As we began to make the shift to convert our readers into customers, we realized that we had to create multiple streams of blog income to really fortify and strengthen the business.

Through BMWK, we’ve had multiple streams of income. Here’s a list of some of those streams below:

1. Speaking

By creating a blog about marriage, we became a respected voice in the Black marriage community. We initially began to speak around marriage related topics but eventually people started to ask us to speak on other topics such as building a blog and building a business since many of our audience members watched the progress of our own business. Now we frequently travel the country getting paid to speak on marriage, relationships, business, entrepreneurship, blogging and a host of other topics.

2. Advertisements

Even though we no longer use ads as our sole source of income, we still participate in different ad campaigns with different brands and agencies that want to reach the African American families we speak to on our blog. The beauty of not depending solely on ad revenue is that it makes it easier to say NO when a campaign comes across your desk that doesn’t match up exactly with the vision and mission of your brand.

3. Products

We create physical and digital products that we deliver to our customers. Some of these physical products include DVDs, books and workbooks. Digital products include eBooks, audio books, membership sites, paid webinars and more.

Having trouble coming up with more ideas? If this is your first time on the site, you should have gotten a chance to opt-in to our Six Ways to Make Six Figures download which includes more examples of digital and physical products. If not, click the hello bar at the top of the site to get in on this resource.

Remember, don’t work harder, work smarter.

4. Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales are when you sell someone else’s products and services in exchange for commission on any sales that come through you. A great site to start your affiliate search on is cj.com. You can find companies that offer products that fit your brand.

5. Freelance Writing

Over the years we’ve freelance written for a number of outlets from small blogs to internationally known magazines. There are pros and cons to freelance writing.

Click To Tweet: Generally, we’ve found the more you get paid, the less you get in return besides actual payment.

With larger contracts, not only will you be required to contribute content but they also may require you to deliver traffic to it. For me the focus in freelance writing was always to write for platforms that gave us more exposure and allowed us to grow our audience in the process.

6. Social Media Management

We’ve done social media management and social media consulting with several large brands and individual small business owners as well. We were able to use the insight we’ve learned from building a social media brand to help others grow in a similar capacity. What tools could you use to help other small business owners?

7. Live Events

Over the years we’ve had multiple live events from social mixers and marriage boot camps to the BMWK Marriage Cruise. Live events are not only a great way for us to generate revenue but they also allow us to connect in real life with our online audience by taking them offline. What local events could you hold that make sense for your brand? How can you pull your readers in? What can you do to make the experience special?

These are the top 7 ways we generate revenue. They are our multiple streams of blogging income and I shared them in hopes that they would spark ideas for you and your business. If they did drop a note in the comment section letting me know.

Now on a sheet of paper, write down the streams of blog revenue that you can create in your business and begin attacking them one by one.

Also make sure you join our FREE Facebook group called Traffic, Sales & Profit with Lamar Tyler.

See you soon!

-Lamar