05 Feb Blogging Done Right: Learn to Monetize Your Hobby
There are several ways to monetize your blog, but keep in mind that you need to be patient. Monetizing your blog takes time, but you should never give up since getting good at blogging also takes a lot of time. If you still don’t have a blog of your own, you’ll find a great tutorial on how to create a blog by the guys at MonetizePros. It can be a while until your blog starts making money, but with good planning, direction and some hard work, you will achieve this soon enough. We found some useful information on this website http://firstsiteguide.
PPC or CPM Advertising
PPC or pay per click is where ad networks pay publishers a certain amount of cash for every reader who clicks on their advertisement. Depending on the provider, when you are setting up PPC you will receive a code that you need to insert into your blog, and sometimes it takes time and involves some additional steps to get the approval from the network.
Every professional blogger uses the services of PPC as a primary means of blog monetization. The most widely used PPC ad network is Google AdSense, although there are other options on the market. CPM ad networks are similar to PPC, but instead of clicks, their payment is based on impressions that a certain ad gets, meaning that someone has viewed the ad even if they haven’t clicked on it.
Affiliate Marketing
You can monetize your blog with affiliate marketing, which is based on where a blogger or affiliate gets paid for a service or product that gets sold through their promotional efforts. If you decide on affiliate marketing, you will receive a link to the sales page of the service or product, and you can place it somewhere on your blog in the form of a review or perhaps in your emails or content.
If a viewer buys the service of product you have been promoting, you will gain a commission that can range from 10% to 70% of the whole price. If you do this right, this kind of marketing can become a big source of revenue for you.
Generating Leads
This form of monetization is similar to affiliate marketing, but you don’t have to sell any service or product to earn cash. The only thing you need to do is to generate leads. Let us explain. For example, if you run a travel blog and you have a lead generation partnership with a travel agency, if some of your readers give their information like their email, phone number or name and choose to be contacted by your business partner, you will generate a lead.
In-Text Advertising
In-text advertising can help you generate revenue by converting some of your text on your blog into paid links to services or products. This should not be your primary source of revenue, but if you want to combine this with some other type of blog monetization we’ve mentioned above, you can give it a shot. Be careful when making this decision, because you would have to alienate a few users, mostly because in-text advertising is considered to be a misleading way of advertising.
Selling Services and Products
This can be a great way to make your blogging a little more diverse and make some extra money. It all depends on what your specialty is. If you are blogging about travel, why not create a guide for places you have visited and turn it into an eBook that you can sell for a certain price. Or, if you are blogging about personal development, you can offer to be someone’s life coach, for the right price of course.
These are some of the best ways of monetizing your blog. There are many more, but the best way to achieve profit is to use a combination of two monetizing strategies. You need to always be careful not to sacrifice your blog’s user experience in order to earn a couple of bucks more. These are all good strategies, but do not implement them all at the same time, as there is a big chance that your blog will look like a big mess. Begin with one or two, and once you start earning money, add a couple more into your monetization mix.
