I know you’ve heard about a popular blogger’s million-dollar mansion in Banana Island, Ikoyi, and how she made her money from blogging. Now, you started a blog since you’ve heard it’s an easy way to make cool cash, but you’re not quite sure how to actually make money doing it. Since you already have a blog, you’re now exploring ways to monetise your blog. Of course, who doesn’t want to make money?
More often than not, life is guided by principles and these principles cannot be jump-started especially when you are starting out as a blogger. Blogging has gradually gone from just an online hobby to a full fletched profession. If something has transcended this feat; from a hobby to a profession, then it should bring some monetary value. Therefore, you should look for ways to monetise your blog.
You may have a passion for blogging and might even have some altruistic pursuit. Remember, you are not running a charity organization. You want people to see your blogpost and even share them – which in turn can translate to some monetary value if you know how to monetise your blog. Driving traffic to your blog isn’t easy. It is one thing to drive traffic and another thing to monetise your blog through that traffic.
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How To Monetise Your Blog
Making money through a blog; whether it’s a hobby blog or a business blog is possible. Yes, you can monetise your blog. However, it’s not a get rich quick scheme, it demands a lot of hard work if you want to hit gold. Let’s delve right in:
1.) Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to monetize your blog. However, to be successful, you need to build your list. To build your email list, you can promote your blog updates or create a lead magnet. There are many email marketing tools that you can start with immediately; ConvertKit, Aweber, or InfusionSoft, etc.
Furthermore, one email marketing principle is that, for you to milk out the best from your prospect, you have to build a strong bond and a connection with your readers. You have to give them value and integrate this value by selling your own products or services or through affiliate marketing.
2.) Monetize Your Blog With CPC Or CPM Ads
One of the most common ways to monetize your blog is by people placing ads on your site. There are two popular types of ads:
CPC/PPC (Cost Per Click or Pay Per Click) Ads and CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impression) ads.
Cost Per Click (also called pay per click) ads are usually banners that you place in your content or sidebar. Each time a reader clicks on the ad, you are paid for that click. Clearly, most people might think that adding pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a great way to make lots of money with their blogs. But, unless you have massive amounts of traffic, as in 10,000+ visitors per day or more, the income will be marginal at best.
However, you don’t have to wait until you cross about 100,000 visitors per day. You can decide to negotiate terms with advertisers.
CPM Ads, or “cost per 1,000 impressions,” are ads that pay you a fixed amount of money based on how many people view your ad.
3.) Sell Private Ads
If you have somewhat of reasonable traffic, then you might decide to sell ads organically. As a matter of fact, you might decide to poach advertisers to place add on your blog. Monetising your blog this way helps in boycotting middlemen, just so you can have a direct impact on your rate.
Private ads can come in the form of banners, buttons, or links. Also, you can even make money writing sponsored posts where you write about or give a review of an advertiser’s product or service.
4.) Become An In-Demand Freelance Blogger
One of the best ways to monetise your blog is to hone your skills in the art of blogging. As a highly skilled blogger, you already have the skills to become an in-demand freelance blogger. Some top brands are desperately looking for bloggers with relevant skillsets.
As a professional freelance writer, you can write articles on different topics, emails, landing pages, etc for different sites. If you’re skilled and understand how to segment the audience of a particular blog, you can tailor your content and spur them towards actions.
5.) Create And Sell Online Courses
Another profitable way to monetise your blog is to create and sell online courses, especially if your blog generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day. One very interesting thing about online courses is that you don’t need many leads or customers to make money with your first online course.
If you are not a big blogger on the block, your blog probably receives at least 50 visitors per day. You might need to find out exactly what those visitors want and create a course from your research. The truth is that people like buying online courses, even when they can find the same information for free. People like “convenience.”
Online courses are focused on a specific subject or topic. They’re organized and ready to be put into action. Online courses have a higher perceived value than blog posts. That’s because your target audience can tell how much time you spent creating it.
6.) Make Money With Affiliate Marketing
If you continue to dish out great content, you will build a loyal audience who will trust you. You can then always upsell to this your loyal audience. With affiliate marketing, you can always recommend a product or service to your audience through a special tracking link. The link monitors your metrics and you get a referral commission for every time someone buys through the link.
Many products and services online have affiliate programs that you can join. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing, it’s advisable to start with the products and services you use and trust.
7.) Sell E-books
Blogging exposes you to a plethora of ideas, especially if you’ve been blogging for a while. These ideas if well structured can be transformed into e-books which is a great digital product. Clearly, e-books are relatively simple to write and produce, especially if you’ve been blogging for some time.
After writing your book, you can design a cover using a tool like Canva and create a PDF of your e-book. More so, selling digital products on your blog is easy with the WooCommerce plugin.
8.) Create A Paid Membership Website
If perhaps, selling ads or sponsored posts does not interest you, there are plenty of other ways you can monetise your blog. One of them is by having your audience pay to access certain content or areas of your site. It is not so big a deal, it can be done.
Your most loyal readers are huge fans and may be willing to pay to read more of your work. You can create a members-only area for them to access more in-depth blog posts, downloads, videos, audio content, and more.
Membership sites can be a big-time investment since you must continually create premium content for your paying members. But can be very lucrative because they bring recurring revenue (subscriptions).
See Also: How to start a successful mini-importation business.
9.) Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
Blogpost sponsorship works just like it does in sports, TV shows, or other industries. Basically, a company pays you to represent their product, talk about it, and promote it to your readers. Sponsorship is an alternative way to monetise your blog.
10.) Content Marketing Tool For Your Business
As an entrepreneur, blogging can be a means to an end, and not the end itself. You can monetise your blog by selling physical products on your blog. However, instead of thinking of making money from your blog, think of your blog as a content marketing tool that will drive visitors to your business website.
Furthermore, when it comes to developing a business blog, the possibilities are practically endless. You can sell any type of product, as long as it creates value for your audience. Also, if you already run a business as an entrepreneur you can decide to start a blog to convert loyal customers.
Conclusion:
Monetising your blog can be a daunting task and takes a lot of persistence. However, it will pay off in the long-run if you trust the process.
Remember, you don’t have to use all of these money-making avenues at once. You can study successful bloggers in your niche or industry and mirror what they have done. Over time, you will learn the strategy that works best when you want to monetise your blog.
If you are a blogger and you’re looking at monetising your blog, which of the options will you start with? Let us know in the comment section.
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