Monetizing a blog is one of today’s hottest trends, but many bloggers are worried about the technical side of it. Read on to see when and how you can monetize your blog even if you’re not interested in investing hours on your monetization.
When should you start thinking about monetizing your blog?
Some people suggest monetizing your blog when you’ve written 30-50 posts. When deciding on how to monetize your blog, you have to keep your audience in mind. Your readers come back to your blog because you are feeding them great, relevant content. They will not continue to read your blog if you suddenly put up flashy banner ads all over your site.
One other important note; don’t expect to make lots money on your blog right away. It takes time to build a converting readership! However, you have to start somewhere, so let’s start!
Disclosure
Remember that as soon as you start monetizing your blog, regardless of the types of compensation, you must include a disclosure statement on your blog – and you can’t hide it.
Test the waters
Test your market. Check how other bloggers in your niche are monetizing their blogs.
Adsense
This might be one of the easiest ways to put ads on to your blog, but ask yourself; when was the last time you clicked on a Google ad on the sidebar of a blog? With that in mind, Google is always coming up with new ideas and formatting to make it easier to use their ads system and to get more people to click on their ads. For more information on AdSense, check out Googleadchoices.org
There are alternatives to Adsense. Here is a great list of alternatives ad programs.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. (Read more on Wikipedia.)
If your readers look forward to your recommendations and reviews of products and services, affiliate marketing is for you. Many studies have shown that you get more clicks and purchases from a link that is inside your content than from a sidebar advertisement.
You can join numerous affiliate-marketing programs.
There are benefits of using affiliate marketing and there are downsides, too. The biggest challenge with affiliate marketing is the back-office of most affiliate programs. The signup, the product search, the input of information into the feed, can all be very complicated, time consuming, and not user friendly. Now you can save hours spent in affiliate program back offices by using one WordPress Plugin.
In the first blog of this series, we suggested that WordPress is one of the best, if not the best platforms to use for your blog. PalTip has created a WordPress plugin that cuts out all of the back office horror and makes affiliate marketing as easy as one click!
All you have to do is download the plugin and install it. When writing your blog, make sure you include the link to the product,** (in more than one location) and when you click to publish the post the plugin goes to work and changes your link to a personalized PalTip affiliate link.
Here is an example of how it works, from a blog on coffee:
“My favorite beverage, as you all know, is coffee! Coffee, good good coffee. ……..
Recently I was introduced to a private barista. He knew exactly how I like my coffee throughout the day. In the morning, I enjoy a full Arabica in the morning, and later, I enjoy a smooth Kona, and in the evening, a decaf chocolaty pleasure. It was love at first sight. Let me introduce you to my personal barista, and my new favorite coffee maker, the The Keurig B60.
All I had to do was copy and paste the original link into the blog post and when I published it, the link was transformed into an affiliate link automatically.
(In both places; in the picture and the coffee maker link)
This is an easy, fast, and profitable way to use affiliate marketing in your blog.
Banner Space
Selling banners on a website or blog has always been a good way to monetize. There are several possibilities for doing this. Probably the easiest is to join a banner ad network. The systems will keep track of your earnings and placement of the ad. If you sign up for a pay-per-click agreement you can make between 0.5 -.80 cents a click. To make money this way, you must have heavy traffic on your site.
If you are selling the banner space on your own, you can sell it per impression, per click, or per time period. You have control over this! When deciding on the costs of these spaces, the following should be taken into consideration.
- The position of the ad – if it is “above the fold,” it is worth more.
- Horizontal banners are easier to read so they should be priced higher.
- If you’re in a certain niche – your advertising space is more valuable to advertisers than if you were an “all about everything” site.
- In addition, remember size! Big banners are more expensive than smaller ones.
Final Tip
Don’t overdo it! Don’t fill up your pages and posts with so many banner ads and affiliate ads that your visitors can’t find the real content that you have worked so hard on. You will lose traffic and probably won’t make very much money.
Be subtle. Be creative!
If you have any tips on monetizing your blog, please share them with us.
**the link must be from one of the over 2500 PalTip partner sites.
