Monetizing A Blog – How To Make More Money By Doing Less
A question that I see asked so many times is “What is the best way to monetize my blog?”
The answer of course is that there are literally dozens of ways to monetize a blog. But finding the best way will take some testing.
Monetizing a blog is not just about placing as many adverts on your theme as you can. It’s also not about stuffing affiliate links in all your blog posts.
So What Is It About?
What it is about is finding what appeals most to your readers. For instance, if your blog doesn’t get many return visitors, then placing Google Adsense on it probably won’t affect your blog as people don’t tend to come back anyway. So at least you earn money when they leave if they click on your ads.
But if you have a blog that does have return visitors and people like to read your content, then you really don’t want to lose them by showing them an advert and making them go to another site. So Adsense wouldn’t be a good fit.
What would be better in this instance is having a private members area or premium newsletter and charging a small monthly fee to your readers. They will pay it because they already like reading your posts and by having secret content that isn’t available anywhere else, makes it even more appealing.
Focus On One Method At A Time
Monetizing a blog can be far more effective if you only focus on one method. Whether it be paid advertising, textual advertising, affiliate marketing or a paid membership site. But you won’t know until you start testing things out for yourself.
That is why it is important to carefully monitor your stats. Look at whether your traffic levels are increasing or decreasing. Look at how long people are staying on your blog for. Look at whether they are new visitors or return visitors. You can get all this information by just installing Google Analytics on your blog for free.
Test out one monetization method and see what the results are in terms of your earnings and impact to your blog. If the stats remain similar and you make money, then that would be considered a positive monetization method. Then try another one and rinse and repeat.
I very rarely use more than 3-4 monetization methods on my blogs because all the extra work involved doesn’t usually pay off.
Enjoy Your Blogging!
Tony