How to monetize your blog
If you are a blogger, or an aspiring blogger, then this article will help you a great deal. Whether you have been in the blogging industry for a long time or you are starting out, making money from what you enjoy doing acts like a nice motivator to your daily activities.
There are many ways to squeeze the cash out of your blog but we will focus on the ones that are simple to achieve but still very effective in delivering positive results. Before I dive into the meaty part of this article, I would like you to first hold your horses and answer this simple question.
“Do you own a blog already?”
If your answer to this question was a big NO, I highly recommend you start off by checking out my previous post on Easy steps to start a successful blog. However, if your answer was yes then go ahead and read on.
Let’s start off by putting down a list of the different ways of earning from your blog/website and latter look at them in details.
- Affiliate Marketing
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Sell Ad Space.
- Sell Your Own Digital Product
- Accept Donations from visitors.
- Accept sponsored posts & articles
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves revenue sharing. Let’s say you have a product, you can increase your sales by offering incentives to promoters through an affiliate program. For our case we have no product and want to make money from our blogs. So what do we do? We can promote a product that we feel has value and earn from the sales that we make through an affiliate program.
Examples of sites that you can get tones of products to promote include:
E-commerce websites such as amazon and e-bay for physical goods
Affiliate websites such as: Warriorplus or Commission Junction to promote books, services, software etc.
Pay Per Click Advertising
In this type of advert, you will be required to display ads on your website alongside relevant content. As the name suggests, this method of making money online will earn you cash only when your visitors click on the sponsored ads. You can decide to display these ads on your blog in form of links, banners, pop-up, and pop-under etc.
In order for you to earn you will first have to sign up on a publishing network. Here are two publish networks that you can start with:
Sell Ad Space
Yes. You can sell Ad space on your website. But before that, there are a number of things that you need to understand before you start selling your ad space. First make sure that you understand your audience and what intrigues them most. Secondly, you need to have a nice number of daily visitors. Anything above 700 visitors daily is good for a start. You can price your ad space depending on the quality of your audience. For example you can decide to price it at $3 per 1000 visits.
So how do you get companies to place ads on your blog? Approach blog owners who are in the same niche as you and let them know of your offers to advertise them on your site. Also you should make sure that your website has high quality content that attracts high quality visitors.
Sell your own digital product
The simplest and fastest way to come up with a digital product is by compiling all your blog posts into an e-book. Arrange them in a logical manner and then put a price on your work.
Another way to come up with a digital product is to sell themes or software or web-plugins. This option will definitely require you to have some programming skills.
The advantage of selling your own product on your website is that you will cut out the middle man and scoop all the profit all for yourself. However you will need a lot of input and devotion in order for you to come up with an appealing product for your audience.
Accept donations from visitors
If you offer your audience high quality content or even service online for free, you can request them to donate on your website. Especially if you receive a ton of visitors, you can expect a handsome amount from your visitors’ donations. These donations can go a long way in catering for the expense of good web hosting or research or services you offer.
PayPal offers an easy way to set up a donation button on your website. You can check out this article on how to set up a donation button on your website.
Accept donations from visitors
Accept sponsored post and articles
It is also known as Native advertising. Sponsored posts are slightly similar to product reviews. In sponsored posts, companies that are related to your niche will pay you to have their links included in your post. This will be possible only if you have a big quality audience. Mostly, companies are the ones that reach out to bloggers for sponsored articles but that does not hinder you from reaching out to them as well so long as you believe your website has full potential.
That’s it on how to make money from your website. However there are many other ways. I consider these the simplest yet effective ways for you to make money from you blog. If you have more ways, feel free to include them in the comments section or any feedback you might have.
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