You’ve put in 100 hours of work on your blog, got approved by AdSense and still after a month, are looking at a mere $50 in AdSense earning. Disappointed? Sure, anyone would be. Read on to understand the highest paying techniques to monetize your blog and start making a real income online.
Start Selling Your Services
Money Generation Potential: Very High. Difficulty Level : High.
I know that you’re thinking ‘I am a blogger, I write about stuff – I don’t have anything to sell. This technique isn’t for me.’. Well, you don’t have anything to sell because you haven’t tried selling anything. Successful bloggers are experts at their topic – most of them like Neil Patel, Yaro Starak and the folks from CopyBlogger make thousands of dollars a month selling courses on their specific areas of expertise. Some of them also sell their services to corporates and agencies.
If you are an established expert on SEO and have proven yourself in the field, then there are a lot of companies who will pay top dollar for having you help with their SEO. Many times, these bloggers are also invited to give talks and are handsomely paid for those too. Most of these services are full margin services (100% of the revenue is profit).
Those who haven’t reached the guru status in their field can also sell. Some sell e-books which are repackaged versions of the most important content on their own sites. E-Books are also extremely high margin products. These are usually priced between $5-$10 and selling even 10 a day can net you $1500-$3000 a month.
Others sell T-Shirts, Caps, Mugs and other items with logos and quotes from their blog. These too, offer decent margins and usually readers who have gotten value from your blog or find the content really interesting may consider buying these from you.
Affiliate Marketing – Sell Other’s Products and Services
Money Generation Potential: High. Difficulty Level : Moderate.
This blog monetization route is followed by most bloggers who have crossed the beginner stage and who haven’t reached the guru stage.
This is for those who write well about a particular topic and have quite a few dedicated readers. You’ve built trust with your readers and they are happy to keep coming to your blog to read great content. That trust makes you the ideal person to help them make a buying decision in the area of your expertise.
You then promote good products to them through your blog which they can buy from websites that you have partnered with. Once they click on the product link from your blog and buy the product, you get a commission for that sale. You can make anything from $1 to $200 in commissions per sale.
The size of the affiliate marketing is estimated at $5 billion. Most of the tracking is automated. All you need to do is register with sellers or affiliate networks, get the products’ affiliate links and start promoting the products through your website. Pat Flyn from Smart Passive Income claims to make $100,000 a month through affiliate sales.
Direct Advertising or Brand Promotion
Money Generation Potential: Moderate. Difficulty Level : Moderate.
If you have a good number of targeted visitors with common interests, then you can get paid by companies directly to show their ads or to promote their brand to your users. This is different from affiliate marketing as you are not selling anything and are not being paid per sale. This is better than selling your ad space to a general ad network since you are getting a direct payment from the advertiser which will always be higher since you are offering them targeted traffic.
Through this blog monetization method, you can make between $5-$20 per 1000 unique visitors depending on your blog niche. Challenges lie in reaching out to the correct advertisers. If your blog has more than 30K visitors a month, you can list it on BuySellAds, a site which helps bloggers get direct advertisers.
Ad Network Advertising
Money Generation Potential: Low. Difficulty Level : Low.
Running ads through an Ad Network like Adsense or Media.net is the easiest way to monetize your traffic but the monetization rate is extremely low. Some bloggers find it tough to get their Adsense account approved and then optimized. You typically make $1-$2 per 1000 visitors and need fairly high traffic to earn a decent income. Make sure you optimize how you monetize through Adsense. Some helpful resources are Google Adsense tips and this article on How many AdSense units should you place on a page. You can also join a network like Bloginati that pays you for putting up sponsored posts and writing product reviews.
This completes our roundup of the top blog monetization techniques. Which technique do you use to monetize your blog and how has it worked for you? We would love to hear your thoughts through the comments section below.
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Hi Varun,
Many newbie bloggers just start out with their new blog without having much knowledge about it. Thanks for sharing this wonderful post with us. 🙂
You have mentioned all the points which are required to monetize the blog in best way.
Getting it right when it comes to Monetizing is a tough nut to crack, Thanks for sharing.
In my view don’t bother monetizing unless you have a lot of traffic already. Focus on reader page time then Monetize your blog
John. A lot of bloggers and websites fail because they don’t have a monetization strategy planned in the early stages of starting their blog. If your strategy is in place, then you can focus on writing content and attracting readers according to that strategy too. For example, if you are keen on using affiliate marketing as a monetization method for your mobile based site, then you are better off writing more product reviews and comparisons as compared to ‘tips and tricks’ articles.