5 Ways to Monetize Your Sex Blog

If making money from your sex blog is on your list of goals and dreams, you’re not alone. Many of us want to make at least a little cash from our efforts — if not our entire income.

Ask anyone who’s been blogging for a while — money doesn’t exactly fall from the sky.

Not only do you need the time to develop an audience, you also need to find the right monetization options that work for you and your content. The one thing that’s true for all online creators — you need more than one income stream to make a decent income. (“Decent” is subjective — it’s whatever you want it to be.)

For anyone not sure what your options are, here are five ways to monetize your sex blog.

Affiliate Marketing

Becoming an affiliate member of a sex toy store or manufacturer is one of the most common ways to make money from your sex blog. All it requires is an active website and a willingness to link to the site’s products using a special link. Of course, ask anyone who does affiliate marketing, and they’ll tell you it’s anything but simple.

Affiliate sales are (mostly) a numbers game. The bigger your audience, the more clicks you’ll get on your affiliate links. Of those who click (a small portion of your audience), an even smaller number might make a purchase. This is known as conversion. In affiliate marketing, conversion rates are notoriously low so the bigger the audience, the better your chances of making money.  Learn more about affiliate marketing.

Sponsored Content

After all these years as a sex blogger, I still haven’t figured out a rhyme or reason on when and why someone will approach me for a sponsored blog post. They have different motives, but the primary one is to get a link from your site to their own. (These should be nofollow links to keep Google happy with you.) Many times the person who makes contact is from an SEO or online marketing company — not the brand itself.

You get to set your rates for sponsored content. There’s no right or wrong number. You also get to dictate most of the terms — what topic is a good fit for your audience, who will write the content (I recommend you write it), and what you will and won’t link to. It’s up to the company to decide if your terms and your rate are worth it to them. Pro tip: Get paid up front for sponsored content. Learn more about sponsored blog content.

Patreon and Other Pledge/Membership Sites

Patreon continues to be the most popular option for monetizing your audience — and sex blog. Over the years, it’s become increasingly unfriendly to adult content, but it still allows us to be there. Ko-Fi is another that sex bloggers often use for one-time donations. Word to the wise: they’ve shut down many adult creators accounts — without paying the creator the money they were owed.

These sites leverage the power, loyalty, and love from your own audience. It allows those who can afford it to support the work you do. Of course, you have to ask them to join — which is another layer of self-promotion. That’s hard for a lot of sex bloggers to do, but it’s worth it. Like affiliate sales, conversion rates aren’t high for this so your audience size makes a difference. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start if you have a small audience. But it does mean that you’ll have to focus on growing your audience if you want your Patreon to grow. Learn more about Patreon.

Books and Products

You can turn your blog into a book or submit a short story to an anthology. You can self-publish your erotica or look for a publisher who likes your work. If you’re crafty, you can make sexy or kinky things and sell them through your website, on Etsy, or by setting up a Shopify store. The possibilities are completely open — stickers, enamel pins, sex toys, art work.

Like every other form of monetization, success is not guaranteed. While products can (easily) be sold to people outside of your audience, people who like you and your sex blog will be your first and best customers. You’re giving them a way to support your work and a product that they can keep. As with everything else, you’ll need to get comfortable consistently promoting your products to encourage people to spend money. Learn about turning your sex blog into a book.

Website Ads and Sponsors

Banner ads might feel like they’re going the way of the dinosaur but for some adult brands, they’re still a way to get clicks to their site. The time-consuming option is to sell individual ads on your sex blog. This offers you complete control over who advertises with you and what the ad looks like. Ad networking sites like Juicy Ads (a popular option for adult content) acts as the middle man for banner ads — they work with the advertisers and publishers (that’s you). The money you make is based on impressions and clicks, but you can still set your own rates.

With the popularity of ad blockers and the importance of needing a large audience, this isn’t one you can expect to make a lot of money from. But it’s another revenue stream to consider. It’s more passive than other monetization tactics but audience size still matters. And yes, there are definitely privacy and data collection issues to consider with ad network services, too.

The Bottomline

Do you have to use all of these methods to make money from your sex blog? Of course not. Do all of the methods require effort, time, and an audience? Absolutely.

Easy money on the internet is kind of a myth. Some forms of monetization are easier than others. But you still have to put in the work of creating content and a sex blog people want to visit. That never stops — even as you’re promoting your book, Patreon, or latest affiliate offer.

If you want to make money from your sex blog, experiment with different options to find the mix that works for you. There’s no single right way to do it. Only what allows you to create the content that matters to you and make money doing it.