6 Easy Steps to Learn How to Monetize a Blog and Make it Grow
Last update: 30 August 2023 at 11:56 am
5.00/5Every day, more blogs and websites are being created, and it ends up being a little difficult to make your blog stand out from the crowd and make it as profitable as possible.
The realization that blogs can bring extra income, or even turn into your main source of income, only makes the blogging and content creation market an even more crowded place.
The path to blogging success can be a winding, mysterious road. You’ll find tons of false promises from “blogging gurus” and you’ll run into lots of bloggers who couldn’t find their way and gave up.
Don’t let that be you!
If you stay on the path and you’re passionate about your topic, it is 100% possible to reach your goal and achieve amazing stats on your website. And from the moment you start to monetize your hobby, you will become an entrepreneur – a content entrepreneur.
Getting there, however, requires a lot of patience, care, and work. To help you get there, I’ve compiled some tips that I’ve learned along the way as well as tips I’ve gained from chatting with the vast network of pro-bloggers I’m fortunate to be connected with.
Without further ado, let’s dive into how you can get your blogging journey to the end of the rainbow and find that pot of gold…or monetize your blog – however you want to explain it!
6 Ways to Monetize a Blog
Influencer Marketing
As you build authority via your blog, you’ll start to get inquiries from people asking you to review or promote your products. This is called influencer marketing. But you need to be careful when you get to this point.
It may be tempting to take the money and accept every offer that comes through. Doing this, however, can crush your blog and prevent you from continuing to make money long-term.
Google will recognize spammy content, so be sure any influencer opportunities you accept are promoting content you believe in and aren’t presented in a spammy way.
Leverage your social media channels to promote content as well. You don’t always have to write a product review or make a mention on your website. You can earn a lot of money from making mentions and recommendations on your social media channels as well once you’ve built your blogging authority.
Just be sure that you always disclose that the content you are promoting is sponsored. Failing to do so can get you into a lot of trouble! If you play the influencer game the right way, you can earn a ton of money without jeopardizing your brand or your website.
Sell Digital Products
Another widely used option is the sale of digital products, also known as info products, where the blog in question generates value for its visitors within a specific topic or niche of the market.
Things you could sell in this space include:
- Premium eBooks
- Digital templates and downloads
- Online courses
- Music
- Artwork
- Licenses for digital assets
As you begin to grow your traffic to your website, you can promote these digital products to visitors and encourage them to make a purchase.
To do so, you’ll need to cleverly craft landing pages with well-developed CTAs (call-to-action) that convince your visitors to make a purchase.
The content you sell will tend to be useful content that can help your visitors solve a problem or something that can entertain them. Make sure you know the going market price for such content and don’t over- or under-charge.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a practice where you help other companies sell their products via your website and other channels. You can join affiliate programs across really any industry depending on your niche.
For me, I typically work with companies who sell software platforms that help marketing professionals do things like improve social media efficiency, boost SEO, or host websites.
There are affiliate programs for virtually every niche. If you sell books, book retailers like Amazon offer kickbacks when you promote their books and generate sales.
Retailers offer affiliate money when you promote their clothing, toys, and other items. Software companies are great affiliate options and typically have higher payouts than a lot of other options.
I sign up for these companies’ affiliate marketing programs, and then I actively promote pre-generated links to the affiliate companies’ websites. Each time someone clicks on those affiliate links and buys a product, I earn money.
Whatever your blog topic, there is an affiliate program for you. Be sure to disclose all affiliate links when you add them to your site.
Failing to do so can hurt your site. As long as you properly disclose them, however, you’ll be just fine, and you’ll start reaping the benefits.
Ad Placements
Displaying banner ads on a blog is another handy and super easy way to monetize a blog.
Ad revenue may not be much compared to affiliate marketing, and especially to selling your own courses and info products, but over time it quickly adds up and the ad revenue tends to explode as you scale your blog’s traffic higher and higher.
John Dykstra, is a shining example of how to do affiliating marketing successfully. He has many blogs that are monetized solely with ads, and for him $70 000+/mo is an average result.
And what’s more, graceful, non-obtrusive banner ads monetization can work in line with your affiliate marketing, so you don’t have to worry about one cannibalizing the other. .
For example, take a look at this page (image below). It’s a page that is doubly monetized, with both affiliate links and banner ads present.
And the ads are done gracefully and do not detract from the main content. They actually complement the page and make it better.
Subscription Content
As a way to improve your blog revenue and generate leads, lots of website owners offer paid access to premium content. This is material that goes deeper than the content that lives on the surface of your blog.
One of the draws here is that your site visitors feel like members of an exclusive club when they sign up.
Just make sure the premium content you offer is far more valuable than the everyday content you post without losing the value of the everyday content.
Types of premium content you can offer to subscribers include:
- In-depth reports
- Video courses
- Checklists
- Demos
- Cheat sheets
- …and more
To make a subscription worth someone’s while, they should get access to all your everyday content as well as a bunch of the types of content listed in the bullets above.
You can also add additional articles. For example, maybe site visitors can access 3-5 articles per month for free, but if they want unlimited access, you require a subscription fee.
Sponsored Content
You can also accept sponsored content on your website. If you accept guest posts on your site, you can charge an editorial fee.
The more traffic and the higher authority your site has, the more you can charge. Just be careful not to overload your website with sponsored content, and make sure you add a “sponsored” tag to any links in the content so Google doesn’t start to look down on your site.
Any sponsored content you accept should be content that still adds value for your reader and that is on the same subject as your blog. Again, you don’t want to put your site at risk just to make a few bucks, so be sure to do this the right way.
Guests Posts Expand Your Reach
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of guest posting, let’s get you quickly up to speed here.
What is Guest Posting?
Guest posting is the act of creating blog content and then pitching your content to other publications. If accepted by the publication, your article will be published on the hosting site, often with a link back to your site as well as an author bio to highlight your expertise.
Guest posting is a great way to expand your reach. Each time you earn a published post on another blog, you gain access to that site’s readers.
You also earn credibility, as accepted guest posts are seen as a sign of the authority of your insights since the publishing site felt the article you submitted was sufficiently good enough to share with its readers.
Another benefit is link building. Each time you publish a guest post, as mentioned above, you will have an opportunity to add a link to your own site into the content.
Doing this can help build your link profile, which can be super beneficial for SEO.
How do You Earn Guest Posts?
Getting your guest posts accepted isn’t easy, but it’s totally worth it. There are basically three ways you can earn guest posts.
- Outreach – Create amazing content on your own website, then reach out to other website owners who publish related content on their sites. Make a pitch for why your content would benefit the readers. Let them know why it would benefit their publication as well. And if you have examples of other published content, share links to those examples to show that other sites have accepted your work.
- Pay Someone – There are link building companies out there who have pre-built relationships with blogs across a variety of niche spaces. By working with reputable link building companies, you craft the content (or their team can craft it for you) and then they do the work of getting the content published. If you work with the right companies, you can get some serious value taking this route.
- Build Authority – As you get published and you build authority across the digital world, you’ll start receiving requests from bloggers and website owners asking if you would be interested in writing content for their site. They benefit from getting your “big name” on their site, and you benefit because you reach their audience and grab a nice backlink.
Guest posting is a powerful way to expand the reach of your site and give a boost to your brand. As you grow your authority level, site owners will even begin to offer to pay you for your content.
Not to mention, the traffic that you drive to your site through guest posting will help you boost the presence of any products or other offerings you have on your site that can help increase your blogging revenue.
It Takes Patience to Monetize a Blog
Blogging and content marketing are considered long-term strategies. Don’t expect to wake up to $1 million in your bank account just because you published a handful of interesting articles.
And bury the expectations that your blog will appear on the first page of Google right away, or that your amazing content will lead to thousands of new social media followers by the end of the week.
Profiting from your blog is certainly possible, but you have to be in it for the long-term. Bloggers looking to become an overnight success often fizzle out long before they even see a dime from their efforts.
You need a plan in place to make it happen. What niche will you focus on? How will you consistently create amazing content? What channels will you use to promote your content? What methods will you use to monetize?
Make sure you have answers to all of these questions before you jump in.
If you approach your blog like a business, you will grow it and you will be successful. No business blooms in a day. As they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and neither will your blogging empire be built in a day. So follow your plan and be patient.
If you rush it and you don’t take a careful approach or you aren’t truly passionate about your subject, you’ll just be wasting time.
Don’t Give Up, You Will Reach Your Goal!
Reaching the goal of monetizing your website can take time, but you can do it, just don’t give up. Choose a subject you’re passionate about, and you’re more likely to see it through.
Maintain your focus, and don’t give up when times get tough. Build relationships with other successful bloggers and pay attention to what they do. You can learn a lot.
Blogging is a fun journey. If you follow these tips and do it the right way, you can enjoy tons of success and make some solid money along the way!
