How to Monetize Your Blog For Beginners
Most people start with blogging online as a hobby or just a side project to make some income online. No matter for what purpose, you've probably heard it's a good idea to start blogging regardless of the niche you've chosen. But how do you monetize your blog. With plenty of options, it's never been easier to monetize and make money from your blog. This guide will help you start monetizing your blog.
Let’s get started…
These are 4 steps you can follow to start monetizing your blog:
- Know your options
- Select your primary monetization method
- Planning your content
- Optimizing your blog for maximum profit
These steps are pretty straightforward and can implement them easily if you've been blogging for a while. Keep it very simple and do one thing at a time. As you start implementing these steps, you'll get better and better.
Step 1: Know Your Options
The first thing to do is understand all the different monetization options that are available to you so that you can choose the best option for your blog. These include:
Promoting Your Own Offers
This is the best and most profitable option, because it’s both profitable upfront as well as on the backend (since you build a list of proven buyers). With this option you can build your list of loyal customers, make money from your own offers as well as promote relevant affiliate offers too which your customers will love too.
What kind of products can you promote with blogging? You can offer ebooks, audio video courses, artworks, you can offer services like web and graphic design, video creation, consulting, marketing services, SEO and more. Even if you don't have your own digital downloadable offers or courses, you can still offer online coaching classes or physical workshops depending on what niche you are in.
Promoting Affiliate Offers
Most bloggers start with promoting affiliate offers, which is an easy and great option. You can promote affiliate offer until you develop your own. As you research, write and promote other people's products, you get better ideas on how to develop your own offers. It’s also a great option if you don’t intend to develop your own products (such as if you’re selling physical products).
These are main affiliate networks you can search for relevant affiliate offers:
Clickbank
Digistore24
Amazon Affiliates
Shareasale
Building a List
Some bloggers don’t promote anything on their blog, and instead focus on getting readers onto their mailing list. (From there, they promote their own offers and/or affiliate offers.) Whether you intend to sell something in the future or want to promote affiliate offer, you should always be building your subsscribers list. It's easy to build email list with some quality lead magnets related to your blog topics. You can even capture email from your blog readers from as simple as offering pdf version of your blog post.
Selling Ad Space
The key to this method is to vet all advertisers, ads and offers. That way, your blog doesn’t become associated with anything unsavory. There are many different reputable ad networks available, but quality ones will also look at the quality and traffic of your blog/website. You can also offer direct advertising space to other vendors and website owners. If you have quality blog traffic, other people may contact your on their own about advertising on your blog.
Inserting CPA offers
Here’s where you place a CPA (cost per action) offer on your blog, like Google AdSense (which is where you get paid per click). This is a last resort offer, as you can generally make more money using the other methods mentioned above.
TIP: You can learn more about Google AdSense here: https://www.google.com/adsense/start/.
Next…
Step 2: Select Your Primary Monetization Method
It's time to select your primary monetization method. For example, you might choose to promote affiliate offers, with the intention of switching to your own offers as you create them. In this case, building your prospects email list is even more important so that you can promote your own offers in the future. You can sell ad space, use sponsored ad placement and other relevant monetization methods on your blog. The idea is to find which method gives you the most return. Don't be too rigid with one monetization method.
Step 3: Planning Your Content
Now that you know how you’re going to monetize your blog, you can now plan your content in a way that supports your monetization goals.
For example, if you’re selling affiliate offers, then you’d plan content that includes how-to and tips content (with soft sells embedded), case studies, product reviews and product comparisons.
Another example: if you’re building a list, you’d post a lot of useful content and then point people to your lead page to get your BEST content.
Step 4: Optimize Your Blog For Maximum Profits
Finally, it's time to optimize your blog so that you can get maximum profits for all your hard work and effort. For that you need to test and optimize everything on your blog This includes:
Testing homepage, headlines, calls to action, graphics and other parts of your ads.
Testing different components of your lead capture or optin page.
Testing many different kind of offers strategically and choosing the best performing.
Testing placement of ads on various locations.
Testing article topics, formation, length and headlines.
In other words, test every major component of your blog and ad campaigns to boost response.
Summary
Today, it's easy to monetize your blog with so many options available to you. The main point is to choose one primary monetization and then create content designed to support this method. Don't just randomly post content insert any and all kind of offers which may lose the interest of your prospects on your blog. Instead, every piece of content should be strategically created to help you establish your authority, build trust, impress your readers and presell an offer.