Resources on making a living from blogging are often adorned with images of people whose screens act like money printing machines, with blogs taking the role of a mythological cornucopia of our internet age. These are usually accompanied by pictures of people who earn money by blogging on beaches, with their villas creating a shadow in the background. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why the blog monetization process may appear like anything but hard work and long-term dedication. So, if these two lie at the foundation of your work ethics, you are the best possible candidate for investing several additional minutes to learn more about top ten ways of turning your blog monetization efforts into reality.
1. Affiliate Marketing:
Affiliate marketing imposed itself as one the more popular methods of turning your blog into a source of revenue. This boils down to engaging in performance-based marketing, where bloggers get a commission if their site successfully refers visitors to a company that offers products or services. Commissions are based on the value of purchases of the items that you recommend to your visitors, with usually highly variable rates.
Commissions are received via affiliate programs that serve as the basis for engaging in this sort of marketing business. There are many quality programs at the blogger’s disposal whose choice will be determined both by your good judgment as well as your ability to make your content fit seamlessly with the products offered as part of this arrangement.
2. Advertising:
For many bloggers, this the first association when it comes to monetization of their web property. This model works similar to old-fashioned advertising in newspapers, in which you use your site’s space to advertise various brands and products. This approach can involve dealing directly with advertisers, which usually entails offering them proof that you have a sufficiently large audience following, or working with ad networks that make it possible even for smaller publishers to run ads on their blogs.
3. Selling Digital Products:
If you feel that affiliate marketing or advertising sits uncomfortably with your content, you are free to cut the middleman and create your own digital products and sell them to your audience. These can come in form of ebooks, PDF guides and edutainment videos that can be put behind a paywall. In any case, you’ll have to carefully consider what content will be made available in this manner, taking into account the size of your audience, niche and other factors. Consider using tools like website visitor recordings to see how your audience reacts to these kinds of offers and tweak the offers accordingly.
4. Offer Your Freelance Services:
This one seems like a logical upgrade of selling your own digital products, which is now taken to a whole new level, where you interact not just with your audience but with specialized clients as well. The essential prerequisite is building a large enough audience who would have full confidence in your ability to act as an expert in a particular field. These freelance services can include translation, ghostwriting, photography and other skills that you consider to be your forte.
5. Become a Consultant or Coach:
Your expertise in a particular field can also be utilized in a more hands-on manner, if you decide to expand your blog to serve as a platform that offers consultancy or coaching services. These include having special scheduled sessions with the members of your audience who require your guidance, advising and training in relation to a particular problem or need they have. Provided that you convince them that you are able to help them, the existing audience will serve as a reference point for other clients who may require your assistance.
One of the examples of a blogger-turned-coach is Mark Schaefer, whose {grow} blog about marketing served as a stepping stone for him to become one of the most sought-after branding coaches and business consultants in the world.
6. Writing Paid Reviews:
Another method to monetize your blog is to devote your attention to writing paid reviews, in which you get free sponsored products in line with the niche you operate in, and evaluate them for your audience. These can take form of standard reviews as well as advertorials, in which you need to align your content with the overall marketing effort. This is best helped by honing your skill with native advertising and upgrading your level of expertise relating to relevant products. Once again, make sure to use website visitor recordings to feel the pulse of your audience.
7. Sponsored Content:
Similar to writing paid reviews, this method includes generating and placing content in collaboration with various brands, depending on the niche in which you operate. Yet, the focus here is on informing your readership about the product as an influencer, rather than convincing them to take action in relation to it. The rates a blogger receives depend on audience size, social media presence and the blog’s general outreach. This method is particularly popular with fashion and travel bloggers who are able to turn their lifestyles into job-like arrangements with brands.
8. Create an E-Store with Physical Products:
This method requires putting additional efforts making it viable, as you have to produce both content and products that need to compete with a myriad of other e-commerce sites. Your chances of standing out from the amorphous crowd depend on the niche and the level of your knowledge of what your audience wants the most in terms of these products. One of the less risky approaches to monetizing your blog in this manner include starting to produce and offer items with a more universal appeal, such as t-shirts, mugs and other similar products.
9. Have Your Audience Support You:
Provided that you have loyal audience that wants to support you in exchange for having access to ad-free and transparently produced content, going the way of crowdfunding and donations seems like a reasonable monetization method. It gained traction among bloggers engaged in more creative pursuits, such as artists, writers and others, as it allows them to create content unburdened by the vicissitudes of having to provide for the author’s daily existence. Today, crowdfunding platforms are almost omnipresent and you’ll have no problem in picking the right one for you.
10. Blog Sale and Resale:
Finally, your blog can always be sold for a short-term gain, or in case you need an investment cash injection. This usually entails having a large enough audience and stable content production infrastructure on your blog whose sale can thus become a lucrative opportunity. Another approach involves buying other blogger’s property and rebuilding it, followed by its resale at a higher price.
Provided that you can build a blog with a value, this strategy can net you a handsome income, going up to $20,000 within the scope of just a few months.
Wrap-Up
Blog monetization is a long term effort that rewards every minute of dedication and creative atom that you put into it. Think of it as a Lego-like structure whose construction requires careful thought and patience, rather than being built upon stories of overnight success and unrealistic outcomes. Thus, acquainting yourself with monetization methods described here can be seeing as laying down your first brick in designing the commercial foundation of your blog.
x