How to Monetize a Blog
The Internet is full of success stories of various bloggers who managed to monetize their blog so perfectly that it became their full-time job or even made them a fortune. But the bitter truth is that a hundred unsuccessful bloggers stay behind the one blogging star. Success in this business is elusive, the trends are everchanging, and it is incredibly hard to stay on top of the tide. Surely, you can support a steady flow of new readers with the paid likes and watches (there are a lot of services doing that, the most popular ones are listed at Crowdfire review), but it will be a short-term boost. As great as these services are, they can’t substitute the genuine interest of your readers.
But there is always a silver lining. If you don’t have the goal to make a living via blogging, but write about what you truly love, success and fame may be a very pleasant surprise. Give your blog a test drive, make it a hobby first, getting pleasure just from the very process of writing. Use some simple tips from the top bloggers given in this guide, weave them naturally into your blogging style, and you may wake up famous one morning without pushing yourself to your limits. Then, after you have a steady ground as a blogger, you may develop your blog into a full-fledged portal and create a new business from what you have.
We hope that this article will help you sort things out and find something that will be useful for your personal style and idea!
Get referrals
Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com gets most of his income (and traffic) from referrals. He has more than five hundred active links. Another big part of his traffic comes from the integration with social media, especially with Twitter, where he has more than 112 thousand followers.
His blog is dedicated to a specific narrow niche of passive income that makes monetizing both easier and his profession. But Pat’s methods can be used by everyone else, disregarding their topics. He creates original content such as podcasts or lectures. This content stimulates the other sites to set links while reposting this content, thus increasing the traffic dramatically.
Use ad placements
Grace Bonney, the author of Design*Sponge, one of the most famous home blogs with a history of more than a decade, started monetizing from ad placements. “I thought it was a nice way to pay for my groceries”, – she said. But gradually, when her blog started to grow, her advertisements started to bring her much more income, proportionally to the constantly growing audience.
Grace says that she was asked to place an advertisement when her blog grew up enough to be noticed by the manufacturers. It is possibly another lesson we can use: the moment you get an ad offer is a turning point in your blogging career when you may start to see your blog as a source of income.
Use your blog as a launchpad for your other services
April Bowles-Olin from Blacksburg Belle is an entrepreneur consultant. She uses blogging as her self-promotion, monetizing her blog in an unconventional (for a blogger) way, but in a much more understandable one. She started writing about her job, her experience, and interesting cases on her job and, as she said: “Within a few months, I had hundreds of readers. People who otherwise wouldn’t know anything about me or what I offer”.
Monetization shouldn’t always be direct. Sometimes, broadening your audience and promoting your services via articles, podcasts, and posts may bring you much more than any possible advertising or referral program. Use your expertise to create the unique content that may be useful both for your colleagues and your potential clients (even if you’ll have two entirely different sections of your blog for that), ask for leaving a link to your site while reposting, and enjoy your new readers!
Create something extra and sell it via your blog
Kat Kinsman of TastingTable is the author of yet another award-winning cooking blog that won the Best Food Website award in 2011. Now it is one of the most popular English-speaking cooking blogs in the world. But becoming famous as a food blogger brought her only part of her income. The rest is a bit surprising.
Kat Kinsman is also an author of a totally unrelated but very interesting book, “Hi, Anxiety.” Her popularity as an author enhances her blogging experience by making her more famous, but her blog also contributes a lot to the book sales. People Google her name, see her book, learn her story, and buy the book too, adding a bit more to her royalty. The same story happens with her resource talks and other events where she participates as a famous food blogger.
Get good search rates
It is not the direct way of monetizing, but getting good ranks of the different search engines boosts your blog and makes it more visible both for the potential partners and the audience. The story of John Lee Dumas and his blog Eofire shows that his high Alexa rank contributes a lot to his overall success. Further analysis shows that podcasts form the best part of his blog in the audience’s eyes and bring him the maximum rank.
Feeling the trends and understanding what is now considered the most useful by the audience may be the question of your popularity. The ranks are created from the reaction of the people, so, by doing what they like more, you may greatly enhance the audience flow to the pages of your blog.
There are many ways to monetize a blog; some of them are direct, for example, ad placing or referral links. Some are more subtle, such as enhancing the sales of unrelated products with your blog popularity. But they mostly mean the same thing: do what your audience likes, produce unique and useful content, and it will create a steady basis for your future income. The ad givers will contact you, the showrunners may invite you to be their guests, and the publishers may show that they are interested in your books.
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