Four Ways to Monetize Your Blog
Blogging can be many things to many bloggers. For one, it’s an avenue to write about something of personal interest. Utilizing Google metrics and social media are two excellent ways to get traffic cranking to your blog.
Now you want to make money from it.
Content monetization comes in many forms and many of the sites you visit on a regular basis monetize their content. News sites like The New York Times gradually incorporated a pay wall into their monetization system, while others, like BuzzFeed and The Washington Post, use strategies like native advertising and paid content to earn income streams.
But, what about smaller websites and individual bloggers?
There are plenty of options out there, and the good news is that bloggers with a strong stream of visitors have more resources than ever to earn revenue from their blog.
Let’s look at four ways to monetize your blog.
Affiliate Marketing
Over the years, affiliate marketing has become an increasingly popular way to make money from a website or blog. You can start by finding a product you genuinely like and would recommend to your audience.
Affiliate marketing then relies on you endorsing the product and promoting it honestly and creatively on your website. If the product or service resonates with your visitors, they’ll click on the affiliate link on your blog and make purchases of that product, while you get a split of the sale price.
Smart Passive Income provides an excellent overview of the in’s and out’s of affiliate marketing.
Selling ad space
Incorporating Google’s AdSense on your blog is just one way to make money from online advertisements.
Another is to simply sell your own ad space directly to companies looking to sponsor different blogs. For example, you can come up with a price for each space or page. In the beginning, you might want to sell a page for a certain amount of dollars per day, but as you get more traffic and crank out more content, you may want to sell sidebar banners for a fixed price per day.
This will be adjusted for the homepage and individual content pages. Typically your financial quotes to advertisers will be determined per one thousand impressions (CPM) on a page. So, for example, you might see it as: $10 per CPM. If your blog is garnering 100,000 visits a month, that ad price for that page or banner can translate into $1,000.
ConnectPal
ConnectPal has become one of the most popular content marketplaces. Anyone can create a subscription-based business in less than 60 seconds through this service. ConnectPal is for any person, group, or business that has an audience or wants to grow an audience.
A ConnectPal page is like a profile page on any social network, but with a distinction: you can charge visitors to access the content on your ConnectPal page. In this way, ConnectPal empowers bloggers to monetize their content in a simple way with no startup costs whatsoever.
As a blogger, creating your own ConnectPal page means you can take advantage of an entirely brand new revenue stream. It also means you can use your ConnectPal page to feature content from your blog, while also directing more visitors to your website.
Flip your site
Not very well known, but a quite legitimate avenue for making money from your site is to simply flip it. There are plenty of other websites out there looking to capitalize on what you’ve created.
It can be lucrative.
For example, if your website is making $500 per month through selling ad space, you might be able to sell the site for $5,000 – $10,000. Check out the options and shop around before taking this path.
Flippa, We Buy Websites and FEinternational are a few. If you’re looking to make a quick dollar on a turnaround, this is a good path. If you’re looking for the long haul, you don’t want to sell your blog or site at all. But this is an option in an emergency.
