If you are thinking of starting a blog/site or you already have one, making money from it is not too late. There are several ways to monetize a blog. This article will uncover the best strategies for digital content monetization by explaining in detail 5 lucrative ways to make money through blogging.
Note: Blogging is not a get rich quick platform (though luck exists). It takes time to write and publish content before monetization if you don’t have any capital investment. However if you have money to invest, you can start seeing results within a month or two and even with your capital investment, “Time” is required because “Time” is money.
If you are ready to invest a couple of hours per day to make money through blogging with little or no capital investment, let’s go in detail to understand these strategies better.
WHAT IS BLOGGING?
Blogging is an online platform where people can share their thoughts on a regular basis and discover new ideas through writing, photography, video clips and more. WordPress and Blogger are the two most popular platforms for blogging and thousands of blogs are being published on a daily basis. It’s very simple and easy to create a blog when you choose any of the above platform.
WHAT IS BLOG MONETIZATION?
To simplify this question, blog monetization means making money from your site. When you earn income from the content on your blog, that’s monetization.
We assume you know how to create a blog and you are here to learn how to make money blogging. However, if you want to know how to create a blog, click here for details.
5 LUCRATIVE WAYS TO MONETIZE YOUR BLOG
Monetizing your blog has several ways but we will focus on five (5) ways you can make money through blogging.
1. MAKING MONEY THROUGH ADS
Ads is a short form of advertisement, it is the promotion of a product, services or brand in order to attract interest, engagement or sales. And Google AdSense is one of the best networks to monetize your blog or a website. Google AdSense is 90% better than any other CPC advertising programs (feel free to do your research).
Monetizing your blog with Google AdSense is like a dream/goal every new webmaster always aims to achieve. But many failed because they did not understand the basics before applying for Google AdSense.
Here are the tips you to need to apply for Google AdSense:
Quality Content: This simply means writing unique content (not plagiarized), good formatting and making every post or page to be above 600 words. Make sure you design your own images (canva can be a good platform) and structure your blog very well (choose a nice blog theme).
Search Optimization: Make your blog posts or pages searchable by search engines like google, bing, yahoo and a lot more. Here you will have to focus on meta tags like Meta Description which should be around 155 characters and Meta Title which should be around 65 characters including spaces.
Blog Post: There should be enough content before applying for Google AdSense. Based on testimony from bloggers, your AdSense can be approved with just 8 posts. But I think you need to have between 15-30 posts before applying for Adsense (to be on a safer side). And all your posts should have a minimum of 600 words.
Blog/Domain Age: You can apply for Google AdSense and get approval in less than a month and up to 6months depending on your country. Countries like India and China take ‘6’ months before they can apply for Adsense according to Google (“In some locations, including China and India, we require publishers to have owned their sites for 6 months. We’ve taken this step to ensure the quality of our advertising network and protect the interests of our advertiser and existing publishers”).
You can apply for Adsense using your free url from blogger.com (hakbuzzz.blogspot.com) but it will be better to have a custom domain (hakbuzz.com).
Blockage: Check if your blog has been indexed by google. Go to your browser and type “site:yourdomain”. All the indexed posts and pages will be displayed but if the site is blocked, it will display “Your search site:yourdomain” did not match any documents.
You can submit your sitemap to index all posts and pages or you can inspect and submit individuals’ posts and past through Google Search Console.
When your blog is finally approved by google AdSense, you start making money based on your niche and blog traffic.
2. SPONSORED PRODUCTS REVIEWS
You can get paid when writing a sponsored review post. This can be achieved in two ways, the advertiser either contacts you (the blogger) directly, asking you to review a product in a sponsored post or you as the blogger reaches out to potential advertisers who might be interested in buying a review post on your blog (that’s how simple it is to get paid through products reviews).
How do you create product reviews?
In my opinion, a product review is no different from content writing. In product review, the knowledge about the product will make it easier for you to share useful information with other shoppers.
Writing in general is all about sharing your thoughts or opinion about a particular subject. A good product review is based on research, the knowledge about the product and the assessment of its flaws and benefits (“buy and test the product” or “get information from users if you can not afford the product”).
Writing a product review.
Introduction: Outside the hook needed for every introduction, provide a clear picture of the product under review (functionality and benefits).
Description: This is where you will provide customers with basic information about the product. This information may include the product brand name, price, model number, demographics and a lot more.
Weigh the product: No product is perfectly okay and no product is 100% bad. At this stage of your writing, itemize the pros and cons of the product.
Compare and Contrast: Any marketable product without competitor’s has no potential buyers. This is where you will need to compare the product to other similar products in the market.
Pinpoint Audience: You need to describe to your reader those who will benefit the most from the product and this will help them to decide whether the product is right for them or not.
Here you will talk about how easy (simple) or difficult the product is to use.
Conclusion: Before publishing your review, your conclusion alone needs about 60% of your efforts on the overall review. A lot of readers visit your conclusion before deciding to read the entire content and your introduction needs to attract them to continue reading. What you need here is to summarize the product flaws, benefits, whether the product lives up to expectations and add your opinion about the product.
Preview, Edit and Publish.
3. AFFILIATE MARKETING
Almost every blogger uses this means to make cool cash online. Affiliate marketing is all about promoting someone else’s products and whenever a customer buys that product through your referral link, you earn commission for every time customers buy after clicking your link.
How to make money from blogging through affiliate marketing
With these simple steps, you can make money through your blog by promoting other people’s products.
- Find affiliate programs to join
- Create great content
- Drive traffic to your affiliate site
Step 1: Find affiliate programs to join
To apply for affiliate programs, you need to search for programs that are related to your blog niche. This will make it easier for your audience to access products in your niche without having to search elsewhere.
Types of affiliate programs
1. High-paying, high-volume affiliate programs: These are affiliate programs for products/services with high sales volume, which also pay high commissions.
This type of affiliate program has a high competition rate and beginners will hardly make a sale.
An example of this affiliate program is credit cards.
Almost everyone needs a credit card, and most people stay with the company for several years (sometimes even decades!)
These types of products attract affiliate marketers with lots of expertise and deep pockets. Some of these marketers use spamming tactics that you may not be able to compete with.
I won’t go any deeper into this, I Just want you to be aware that these programs exist.
2. High-paying, low-volume affiliate programs: These are affiliate programs for niche products/services with high payouts and low sales volume.
For example, if you refer about 80 customers to ConvertKit’s affiliate program, they pay almost $700 per month. However, they have a limited pool of buyers.
There is also more competition for this kind of affiliate programs because of the high commissions. Since you’re probably just starting affiliate marketing, it’ll be quite challenging to make a meaningful amount of money competing against skilled marketers with deep pockets.
3. Low-paying, high-volume affiliate programs: These are affiliate programs for products/services with low payouts but high sales volume.
For example, PS games. So many people play PS, but the average cost of a game should be around $50, and affiliate commissions are usually in the single digits. This means you’ll earn $2–$3 per sale if you’re lucky.
Take Amazon’s affiliate program for example; You can earn up to 10% commissions on almost anything Amazon sells. And also you often get commissions on the entire value of the purchase rather than just the product you recommended. To make these types of affiliate programs successful, you’ll need lots of traffic (keep reading we will talk about how to get traffic).
Which affiliate programs should I join?
This decision depends on your niche and level of expertise.
If consumers are your target, you’ll likely go for an affiliate model with the low commissions and higher sales volume.
If you’re going after a business audience, you’ll likely go for the second model: high-paying and low volume. The popular programs here are for software and web hosting-related products.
Examples are;
The best way to find these affiliate programs is with a Google search (example: If you want to search for ‘best software affiliate program”). It only takes a quick Google search to find an application form for a program like this.
However, if you know of any product you’d really like to promote without a public affiliate program, you need to reach out to the company and ask if they would be willing to build an affiliate relationship with you.
Step 2: Create great content
If you want your affiliate site to be successful, you need to create great content for each product (if possible) where your affiliate links fit naturally.
In affiliate marketing, content needs to be about providing solutions. So go the extra mile to make sure your content solves the visitor’s problem by purchasing the product and testing it (customers reviews and forums can also help) or sign up for a free trial if you are promoting services in order to know more about it.
Step 3: Drive traffic to your affiliate links site
Now that your content is up and running, The next step is to get more audiences to read it, so as to get more clicks on your affiliate links.
Here are three traffic strategies to consider:
i. Paid traffic
This is where you pay in order to get traffic to your website/blog. The advantage of paid traffic is the instant traffic you get the moment you start paying and it is the best way to sell products quickly.
However, once you stop paying for ads, your traffic will stop. And secondly, running ads will eat up your profits if you don’t know much about paid ads.
Generally, paid ads are a great traffic strategy if you’re into high-paying affiliate programs.
But if you’re completely new to online marketing, paid ads might not be a great idea when you are working with lower commission programs like Amazon.
ii. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimizing website/blog pages to rank high in search engines like Google.
For as long as you can rank high in search engines for your keywords, you will be getting consistent and passive traffic.
Basically, SEO is all about understanding what your target customers are searching for (customers need);
Creating content around those needs (blog posts, product pages, etc.);
Taking care of the “technical” stuff (which includes link building) to push these pages higher in the search engines.
iii. Build an email list
Email lists allow you to communicate with your potential customers (readers) anytime.
Use emails to tell fans about new content and keep them coming back to your site for more. This will increase your affiliate clicks and sales.
You can also send affiliate email promotions to your list directly:
To build an email list, you will need to persuade the readers on your site to sign up for a newsletter. That means you must be offering something valuable.
You can find all kind of products to promote from:
4. PHYSICAL OR DIGITAL PRODUCT OFFERINGS
Online has become a hub for every kind of product you need and people no longer rely on magazines, newspaper and television ads to gather information about the products or services they buy.
If you have any physical products to sell, you can use your blog to promote all your product but if you don't have any physical product, you can learn good craft work through YouTube videos and start selling your product.
Digital products on the hand are computer based and can be in the form of software, e-book, internet radio, downloadable music, videos and a lot more. The good thing about digital products is the low overhead cost, high profit margin, product flexibility, potential to automate and you don’t need to be a programmer to create your own marketable digital products. Almost every field of business has online tools. You can buy an online tools from codecanyon, host it, publish the tools and when someone wants to make use it, they will pay by subscribing for your tools.
You can buy tools as low as $10 in codecanyon (depending on the tool), get free $100 for cloud hosting with DigitalOcean (if you don’t have much to invest), install your script, publish your tool, drive traffic and start making money from subscription. With a total of $100 you can start a SAAS business (including, the script, domain and hosting). Learn how to install any php script from codecanyon.
5. COACHING
If you have any experience in any field, you can advertise your skills (you don't need to be an expert) as a service in your blog and support learners or clients in achieving professional goals by providing training and guidance (paid webinar). This method can make you a reasonable amount of money within the shortest period of time.
A blog-based paid webinar can be in the form of a workshop, presentation or lecture that is hosted in real-time using a video conferencing software like zoom meeting or Gmail meeting. Apart from monetizing your seminar, webinar is a great way to create a distinctive bond with your blog audience.
It doesn’t matter when you started blogging or how much experience you’ve acquired in that time – offering a coaching service to motivate clients can bring in money. This can also help you get more visitors to your blog, build visitors confidence and make sales to other services and products rendering in your blog.
CONGRATULATIONS
You now know how to make money through blogging. And there’s still a lot more you can add to your blogging like dropshipping, freelancing, brand partnership, ebook, online courses.
However, with the detailed explanation on how to make money in your blog through Ads, Affiliate Programs, Sponsored products reviews, Coaching and offering products and services, It’s time to turn your passion to an ATM.
Whether you experiment with one of these ideas discussed earlier or a combination of them, you’ll improve your chances of turning your blog into a money making machine.
Procrastination has deprived us of what we would have achieved years back. Many of us do not execute what we learn and those that decide to start are always eager to make money within a blink of an eye. Passion, goals, determination and consistency is the key to successful online business. Take Action!!!
Hope these were helpful?
If you need more clarification, comment below or contact us at support@hakbuzz.com.
May your content provide the best solution to your readers.
Cheers!!!
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