Blog is all about putting across your thoughts and ideas in a creative and informative manner. It provides you a platform to build your audience and connect with them. In the long-run, it acts as a great revenue generator and may also replace your first income or the second one. A healthy blog which could be used for monetization can be developed through authority, engagement, focus, quality, and value. So, don’t skimp on these five basic constituents to reap the most out of your hard work.
To start with, build an authority in your field. A greater authority pulls up more revenue your way. So, leverage on that authority and work on expanding it. Secondly, churn-up engaging content. The purpose of a blog is to engage people into some sort of an action. So, the more engaging your blog, the more likely people are to act on it. Next, your blog needs focus. Stick to a single subject for discussion and don’t go all over the map. For example, if you write about children’s health, then obviously a review on stock-market trend would not fit in there. And while you are at the writing, do not compromise on quality. Write a limited number of contents, but make them high quality. Lastly deliver value to your blogs. If you are an expert on a particular topic then teach that to your followers. You can develop informative posts and tutorials and offer them free or for a small charge. Once you have a good traffic lined-up to your site then you can start monetizing it.
14 Sturdy Ways to Monetize Your Site
The internet is filled with innumerable opportunities to make money. However, there are in reality just a few sturdy ways to monetize your blog and take home a plum income.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is undoubtedly the easiest and most preferred way of making money. This facility is particularly helpful for new bloggers as they lack their own saleable service or commodity. The best way to affiliate marketing is to develop unique content to a particular market. For example, if you run a maternity advice blog, then you could easily market products like cribs, baby clothes, accessories, maternity clothes, and such. As you already have the relevant followers for the maternity blog, people would naturally get attracted to the products on offer and you would earn through a passive income.
2. Advertisements
Bloggers traditionally puts up relevant advertisements on their sites to earn revenues. However, this source of monetization really works only for blogs with 10,000+ daily visitors. Anything less would only generate a marginal revenue and would distract the visitors off your site. You can earn a greater amount through advertisements by substituting PPC ads by display ads. For this, you need to establish a niche market and then engage in direct negotiation with your advertisers.
3. Create Saleable Courses
People everywhere are looking for digital courses like online marketing, graphic design, and web development. If you are skilled in any trendy subject then you can develop an entire set of digital courses and earn by selling them. Just remember to add value to your courses and leave them to generate passive revenue through autopilot.
4. Create Saleable Coaching Products
Today coaching services are definitely on much demand. You can make use of this demand by using your blog to sell such services in the form of a coach such as a business development coach, a career coach, happiness coach, or a life coach. This would bring you substantial revenue even with just a select number of clients.
5. Develop Listed Members Only Content
Once you have developed a value-added blog and have built-up a large audience, then you can convert certain parts of your blog or even the whole blog into listed-members-only section. Your loyal audience would be ready to pay to get greater access to your select works. You can fill-up this section with audio content, downloads, and in-depth blogs. However, starting on this step is a big-time commitment as you would be required to regularly add and update newer contents for the listed members. You could use WordPress membership plugin to develop a listed-member site as it is beginner-friendly.
6. Digital Product Sale
The blog can also be used to sell digital products like SaaS, ERP software products, PDFs, resources, videos and downable guides. Just remember to create products that are compatible with your niche and fill in the specific gap for the audience so that they would be tempted to invest in digital products.
7. Donations
Many non-profit blogs accept donations to earn their revenues. There are several effective WordPress plugins to accept safe donations like PayPal, Charitable, and Give. In fact, profitable websites also use this tool to generate income. Some bloggers like Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex earns a monthly income of $2493 from only 410 fans on Patreon. However, to earn that kind of donation, the blog must also provide sufficient value. The latest example is the Wikipedia site. The website created lots of free content for readers to use, and developed a huge list of followers. After establishing itself in the market for few years, it started asking for donations and is now ready to reap endless fruits of all the years of hard work.
8. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a sturdier approach of monetizing your site. However, to succeed in it, you are required to build your list. You can engage in it through various means like creating lead magnets and promoting blog updates. There are several email marketing platforms such as InfusionSoft, Aweber and Convert Kit that assist you in implementing the essential systems to market through email. Through this service, you could generate around $1 per subscription on a monthly basis.
9. e-Book Sale
In this age of kindle, creating an e-book is very easy. You can develop an e-book in the line of your blog and use it to earn money. If the book targets a particular need of the visitors, then chances are that it can generate a healthy profit. The promotion of the book could be done on the blog itself. You may even develop a sales funnel to automate a multi-step sales mechanism for autopilot sales.
10. Google Adsense
Google Adsense is similar to advertisement. However, here Google choose the ads for you and places at different locations within your blog. You get paid about 68% of the click amount and the commission is dependent on the CPC and the competition in the niche.
11. Podcast Launch
Currently, we are witnessing a huge explosion in podcasting. The 2019 Paid Insights inform us that there exist more than 700,000 active podcasts broadcasting in an excess of 29 million episodes. The interest in podcasting is picking up all over the world. Hence, if you possess a blog, then try to include podcasts to generate greater traffic by cashing on the popularity of this latest phenomenon. New bloggers should especially make use of podcasting as most of the content in your niche has already been written by established bloggers and podcasting offers an innovative way to catch the interests of the people.
Besides making you popular, and generating a high traffic for your site, podcasting also acts as a good source of income. If you manage to build-up a huge audience, then you could begin to sell sponsored slots to brands who want to connect with certain section of your audience.
12. Secure Sponsorships
Sponsorships are another significant approach to earn through your blog. However, you can only hope to generate a decent income via this means if you have a huge traffic to your site. The ideal method to earn through this is to label the sponsored posts as sponsored. All the marketing services and products are smartly cracked down by the FTC, and this includes sponsored articles even if they are labelled as organic. So, it makes sense to do the right thing and label the sponsored articles accordingly. However, using this method requires certain caution. Primarily, you need to be honest with your readers and practice transparency. Otherwise, the link as well as your site would receive a penalty from Google.
13. Sell Physical Products
Your blog could also be used to sell physical products directly to your audience. You could start by selling select items and move on to create a full-fledged e-commerce site besides your original blog to sell items related to it. The audience is already there, and you understand their needs and requirements better than most retailers and manufacturers. This would help you design products according to their needs and you would have a ready market to sell them.
14. Write Paid Reviews
Another exciting way to monetize your site is to write paid reviews. Writing paid reviews is different from sponsored articles. Here you get to review a product for a definite sum of money and also keep it for free. You can go about it the same way as you do for sponsored posts, that is, accept only those products that are pertinent to your niche and which you think would interest and benefit your audience. For this type of monetization, you can directly approach the suitable organizations with query about paid reviews. Alternately, you can look-up Pay-Per-Post websites to get connected to businesses of your interest.