There are many ways to monetize a blog, yet there are some fundamental steps you need to consider before thinking about monetization. In this article, we’re going to look at some of the key foundational principles and then look at a number of ways you can make money from your blog.
1. CREATE VALUE
The first and most important point is that you need to create value in terms of the content you create. The lifeblood of your blog is reader engagement, and people are only going to engage in your content if it creates value to their lives. Therefore, the focus needs to be more on “quality” than quantity.
The more value you create, the more people will be drawn to your blog, and ultimately be open to purchasing things from you when you do monetize your blog. Sometimes, people are so focused on link building that they forget to provide value to their audience in the content they create.
A further aspect you want to consider is online proofing, as if your content has spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, it starts to chip away at the value and credibility of your content.
2. BE RELEVANT
The best way to create value is to be relevant to your target audience. In this sense, you want to be writing about things your specific audience are interested in – trying to keep things within a niche focus, meaning your content should be a deep dive rather than a bunch of generic principles you can find littered all over the internet.
Relevance is the magic sauce when it comes to content marketing – as when you are relevant people gravitate toward you as an authority source, and tell their friends about you, on the basis if you are relevant to them you are likely to be relevant to their friends too.
3. OWN YOUR NICHE
Often, broad topics are very crowded, as an example, if you were to look at all the stay at home, earn an extra income, and mommy blogs on the internet you will find endless competitors that are all battling with each other to be found by Google.
To rank high in a general category like this will take some serious effort, time and money.
However, if you go a little more niche, meaning you are tailoring your content to a specific audience; for instance, rather than talking about fitness – you might want to consider talking about a specific type of fitness or person. It could be as loosely linked as fitness inspiration for women or as specific as fitness inspiration for women looking to reduce their waist size.
The more niche you focus, the more relevant you become, so whilst it might feel limiting to only focus on “reducing your waist size” your blog will be much more appealing to this specific audience, and as the audience is sizeable, you don’t need to worry about not getting traffic.
In this sense, the more niche you are, the more easy it will be for people to find your content and the more valuable your content will be on the basis of relevance. It also means that when it comes to partnering with advertisers, you have a much more relevant and targeted audience – meaning they are likely to be attracted more to a niche blog than a generic blog; presuming the traffic is still high.
In essence, it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.
Now that we’ve looked at the three key principles in terms of the pre-requisites of making money from your blog, let’s now take a look at the ways you can monetize your blog.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
The most popular way to make money from a blog is via affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where you recommend a product or service and provide a link where you can purchase that product or service.
One of the best sources for information when it comes to affiliate marketing is a blog called Smart Passive Income. On this blog, you will find a huge amount of free resources that can help you create passive income, particularly through the channel of affiliate marketing.
ADVERTISING
Perhaps, one of the simplest ways to make money from your blog is to simply display third party adverts. This way, you will make revenue each time a user clicks on the advert or each time it’s displayed to a user (depending on whether you’re working on a CPC and CPM basis).
The challenge with this, however, is that you don’t want your blog to become littered with advertisements. Indeed, some websites are so full of advertising that the value delivered to the user is negated, as the content is diluted to the point it just feels like a heap of adverts rather than relevant valuable content.
CREATE A COURSE
If you invest the time into creating a course that your subscribers can follow, you can reap a huge reward on your time investment, as this is one of the most popular high-profit ways to generate big bucks from your blog.
A good example, is to consider someone who has a blog all about helping startup businesses; if they were to create a relevant course (e.g. how to pitch to investors) they could sell this course and make passive income from the revenue derived.
If you think about it, the course itself doesn’t cost much to make and the cost of business is very low. You simply need to advertise the course and pay the payment processing fee – other than that, it’s pure profit. Of course, if you decide to promote the course via affiliate marketing, the affiliate is likely to expect a 50% commission, so this is something to bear in mind, but with such low costs – it’s still a very high profit model.
SELL PHYSICAL PRODUCTS
The alternative to digital products such as courses, it to sell physical products. The challenge with this, is that the cost is much higher, for instance when you consider the manufacturing cost and delivery cost compared to a digital product such as an online course – you can see why so many people prefer the digital model, however, for some people, selling creative crafts or nutritional supplements can be a much more relevant way to make money from their blog.
