There are multiple ways to monetize your blog. You’ll need to do some testing and tracking to see which ones work the best for you. However, here are some of the most popular ways:
Sell your own product or service. This is generally the best and most profitable way to monetize your blog. So, whenever possible, promote your own products and services (as the blog content should naturally position you as an expert).
However, maybe you’re just getting started in your niche. You have your blog set up, but you don’t have too many of your own products to promote yet.
Here’s the solution…
Promote an affiliate product. Be sure that you choose an affiliate offer with the following characteristics:
- It’s a high-quality product, something that you’re proud to be associated with.
- The vendor who sells it has a good reputation online. This helps ensure the vendor will take good care of your customers.
- The sales letter converts well. (If this isn’t the case, you’ll need to work hard to presell the product to your audience.)
- The offer has a good commission rate (industry standard). For example, most digital products offer commissions of around 50%. You can expect as little as 5%-10% for physical products. Services vary, so you’ll need to do research to see what sort of commissions are standard in your niche.
- You select products with high price points or recurring commissions. Some affiliate marketers make the mistake of only ever promoting low-price products, which is a difficult way to make a lot of money. Be sure you also promote products with price tags ranging from $100 to $1000 or more.
You’ll want to sell a variety of products at different price points to see which ones sell well on your blog.
Sell advertising spots on your blog. This is where you offer other marketers in your niche ad space, such as a banner ad or text ad. You’ll want to check with similar sites in your niche to see what the usual ad rates are. You’ll be able to charge more if your blog tends to have highly targeted traffic that provides great results for advertisers.
If you have a high-quality blog with great content and high-quality traffic, you might apply for a premium advertising network like The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/).
Insert other ads and offers (such as Google AdSense). You’ll want to do some research to determine what sort of keywords tend to result in relatively high compensation per click. (E.G., some niches and keywords pay you as little as one penny per click, while others may net you a couple dollars per click.)
Be sure to read AdSense’s terms of service thoroughly so that you don’t run afoul of their rules. For example, you can’t ask your blog visitors to “support” your site by clicking on yours, as that would basically generate fraudulent clicks.
Compile your best blog posts into a book and sell it. Still another way to monetize your blog is to create a book out of the best and most popular posts. This could be a Kindle book, a physical book you create using a service like CreateSpace.com, or even a book you sell to a publishing house.
Note that most bloggers don’t use this as their primary monetization method. Instead, they use this as a supplemental method, and usually only after they’ve been blogging for a while (e.g., a year or two or even more) and have gained popularity in their niche.
Build an email list. One of the most popular ways to monetize a blog is to direct all your traffic to a lead page, where you encourage visitors to join your list. You can then follow up with your subscribers repeatedly to build relationships and promote backend offers.
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NOTE: In most cases, you should be building a list on your blog regardless of the primary monetization method you choose. For example, if you’ve designed your blog to sell affiliate offers, you should still seek to build a list of prospects. You can then promote your offers to both your blog and your list.
How do you promote offers on your blog? Like this:
- Publish product reviews and comparisons.
- Post case studies.
- Soft-sell products within how-to content.
- Hard-sell offers within articles.
- Post ads between content.
- Promote offers in the header, footer and sidebar.
- Create a “sticky” (featured) post at the top of the blog to promote offers.
Now the next monetization method…
Keep Reading: How To Monetize Your Mailing List
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