Really depends on the content of the blog. Here are a couple ideas
1. Sell courses. If it's a technical blog teaching people how to do things, you can sell an ebook or a video course that dives deeper than the blog itself.
2. Affiliate links. Is the blog teaching people to build websites? Why not strike a deal with Linode or some other hosting provider, and encourage your readers to use that service. In return, Linode will send you some kickback for each successful referral.
3. Google ads. You can go the regular route, get some google ads, and just add them somewhere on each page. You need a lot of traffic for that to be anything meanful though because the ad targeting kind of sucks and adblockers impact these majorly.
4. Native ads. If you have enough traffic, and it is targeted well to an audience that fits a specific product, reach out to the company selling said product, and offer them a native ad on the site. (This, in my experience, is the best option. I am receiving monthly ~$4k from a company suited to my niche on my own side project)
I get what you mean, but in this case I think the risk is low because even though I have one native ad on my site, there are probably a dozen other advertisers that would love to take that spot. Thats the game :)
No, unfortunately contractrates.fyi is not quite yet at the $4k mark! The site I am referring to I try to keep quiet because it is very niche and I'm without any competition.
But, hoping to take the things I know from that initial project and leverage what I know with contractrates. So far, so good.
If you get the idea "I want to write a blog" it seems likely you will pick one of those topics that is impossible to monetize such as an anime or programming blog.
If you get the idea that "I want to monetize a blog" you would pick a random topic and find that a randomly selected topic probably monetizes a lot better than a programming blog.
Irrelevant compliment: I'm impressed by your idea and execution of gitbook-as-blog! (Or if your gitbook is your homepage and your substack is your blog, gitbook-as-homepage.) Nice taxonomies, information-dense: https://www.bhavaniravi.com/
Honestly, if your goal is to monetize a blog, I think a technical/programming blog is not best suited for that. You could try newsletters with affiliate links or paid courses, but the market for that is pretty saturated, and there are plenty of equally good courses and content available for free. Alternatively, you might consider Google Ads or native advertisements, but YMMV depending on traffic and your audience.
Personally, technical blogs that are loaded with ads tend to make me look elsewhere and are a huge turnoff. I am not sure what others think about this, however.
My blog is intended to be a repository of technical learnings and lessons, as well as a place for future me to reference as-needed. If I was interested in monetizing a blog, I would probably choose a more mainstream topic.
I started my programming blog mostly because it was one of the common recommendations for marketing ebooks (the idea was that you could share your blog posts on HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc and hopefully readers would get to know about the books).
I don't have analytics on my blog to know how effective that was. But, I did manage to write some posts that I'm really proud of.
1. Sell courses. If it's a technical blog teaching people how to do things, you can sell an ebook or a video course that dives deeper than the blog itself.
2. Affiliate links. Is the blog teaching people to build websites? Why not strike a deal with Linode or some other hosting provider, and encourage your readers to use that service. In return, Linode will send you some kickback for each successful referral.
3. Google ads. You can go the regular route, get some google ads, and just add them somewhere on each page. You need a lot of traffic for that to be anything meanful though because the ad targeting kind of sucks and adblockers impact these majorly.
4. Native ads. If you have enough traffic, and it is targeted well to an audience that fits a specific product, reach out to the company selling said product, and offer them a native ad on the site. (This, in my experience, is the best option. I am receiving monthly ~$4k from a company suited to my niche on my own side project)