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How To Monetize Your Blog
There are many reasons to start a blog. One of the main reasons is often to earn enough money with a blog to escape the 9-5 life and start living a life of freedom.
Unlike those bloggers where teenagers share their angst-filled thoughts, you’re blogging as a business.
You’re looking to turn your content into cold, hard cash. And that means you need to create a plan as to how you’re going to monetize your blog.
Let me share with you the following three ways to do it:
1. Sell Your Own Offers
Do you have your own products or services? If so, then your blog is a natural outlet for advertising these offers. And best of all, there are plenty of ways for you to promote your offers on your blog, including:
Using graphical ads. You can place banners and graphics of all sizes in your header, sidebar, footer and even between the content.
Note: A word of warning, however: Just don’t stuff your blog so full of graphical ads that it looks like a circus rather than a blog.This will rather get the people leaving your blog than reading your content.
You can place your text ads in the same places you put your graphical ads. Your blog should be about great content and not be overwhelmed by ads.
This is often one of the best ways to advertise your offers because it puts your ads directly in front of your readers. In other words, you can create blog posts which contain promotions.
Nobody likes to read ad after ad. Your blog readers are coming to your blog for the great content– not the ads.
Instead, you can weave your offers directly into useful content.
Example: If you’re writing a “how to” article about how to lose weight, you might have a step that talks about reducing calories. You can then include a link for your low-calorie cookbook.
If you really are interested in selling your own products I can recommend ClickFunnels. With Clickfunnels it is very easy to build high converting landing pages and sales funnels. (See here my review)
2. Promote Affiliate Products
Usually, if you start blogging you don’t have your own products or services. That is absolutely no problem.
Another option is for you to promote affiliate products on your blog. This includes:
Digital products, such as those found at Clickbank.com. These are often some of the best products to promote, simply because they usually have high commission rates (50% or more).
Physical products. Because of the overhead and fulfillment costs associated with physical products, these tend to have low commission rates– as little as 5% or 10%. Depending on what you’re selling you may have high conversion rates, especially if you sell through a trusted vendor like Amazon.com.
Services. These also tend to have lower commission rates, simply because the vendor is trading his or her time for dollars. There are exceptions, such as certain services which the vendor may have automated or otherwise found out how to do at a low cost.
And some of these programs also award recurring commissions to affiliates. This means that if you sell the program once, you get paid again and again for as long as your referral remains a member of the program.
Here’s a hint: If you want to start selling products, it is always a good idea to start a mailing list. If you want to know how to start with email marketing check out this post!
Let’s say you send your visitor to an affiliate product. Of course, only a small percentage would immediately buy the product.
Again, don’t do too many ads. Try always to bring value first and then advertise.
3. Sell Advertising
Another way to monetize your blog is to sell advertising to other marketers in your niche. Here you can sell banner ads and other graphic ads, text ads, links (especially if your blog has a high Google Page Rank), and even ads embedded directly in your content.
The benefit of this particular monetization method is that you get cash in your pocket no matter what happens with the offer. In other words, you’re not in charge of writing ad copy or trying to figure out how to get your visitors to buy an offer. All you have to do is sell the advertising space and let your advertisers take care of the details.
The money you get per visitor is pretty small. I would always recommend trying affiliate marketing because the earning potential is much bigger and no one wants to see a website with a lot of ads on it.
And of course, you can certainly use more than one method at any time. You just need to do a little testing to see which methods bring you the greatest revenue.
What method did you try on your blog? And what has been your most effective? Let me know by writing a comment below!
About the Author Fabi
While I was in college I was not amused to become a 9-5 worker. So I searched for other ways. And I found online marketing. After many failures, I finally succeeded and I was able to escape the 9-5 and live the life I always wanted. I believe that if you want something you can achieve it. And if you want to build a successful online business I can help you achieve your goal!
