But I was curious to know if anyone has monetized technical blogs.
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)
Congratulations! That's a big amount. Risky though as well, if you only have one client that covers your majority of revenue.
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.
I would guess that is a significantly more lucrative monetization strategy than something like running ads on the blog.
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 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.
