In a world, where every blogger researches, discovers and publishes content after doing lot of hard work, the million dollar question is obviously – what’s the most effective way to monetize your blog? How can anyone impress the reader yet benefit from them? Publishing interesting content that can lure the visitors to come back time and again is one of the keys to success in blogging, but how can one make enough money out of it? There are many ways for monetizing a blog; if we think closely, it’s very easy to make money through blogs. Here are 5 simple and effective ways to monetize a blog.
Affiliate Marketing: Easy Way to Monetise a Blog
Firstly, one can take the help of affiliate marketing route to monetise a blog like the one you’re reading through. Newbies are always confused as to how affiliate marketing works, and how they can launch a so-called Amazon affiliate site. Well, to clear the air, there’s nothing specific called an Amazon niche affiliate site, and it’s as simple as simply starting a blog with buying recommendations, and promoting hot-selling products from websites like Amazon, Flipkart or other e-commerce websites like Koovs.com and try to drive the traffic towards those portals. With this, whenever a reader purchases anything from that website, you will be benefited as blog owner, since these websites will give you a certain percentage of money for each purchase. This can be one of the awesome ways to make money by simply recommending good stuff to your readers.
The highest I’ve ever done in a month via an affiliate campaign is about $50k, to give you an idea of the earning potential.
Google Adsense – The Evergreen Choice!
The second way is by joining Google Adsense program and placing Google advertisements on the blog. It’s a myth that ads ruin the user experience – smart ads placements can even make your blog look cool (than being dull and empty) and also help you earn extra money; there are 2 millions+ users using Google Adsense program to get easy extra money out of it, and quite obviously they can’t be fools!
I’ve had many blogs generating $1000+ a month, and a few even crossing $2000 and $3000/mo mark, but Adsense earnings could be little shaky at times, and when one of your star blogs gets hit by a Google update, it’s almost like a stroke attack! So, now i prefer to run 300 micro-niche blogs that can generate just $1/day ($300 x 30 = $9000), rather than 9 blogs generating $1000 a month to minimize the risk.
You should learn how to plan traffic strategies for bloggers to get more organic traffic
to be able to earn well from Adsense or any other method for that matter.
I usually run Adsense on most of my blogs along with affiliate campaigns, and CPM ads. However, it can be terribly poor option for entertainment blogs, job portals, and sites in education niche.
Promote ClickBank CJ & ShareASale Offers
The third way to monetize is to register on Clickbank and just place relevant advertisements on your blog, and this can be a great way to monetise a blog in health niche or relationships (e-books on get your ex back etc)
Likewise, one can also join ShareaSale.com and CJ.com affiliate programs, while Indian bloggers can consider Vcommission. You need to choose the right affiliate program according to the niche of your blog.
CPV Campaigns
You can even run CPV campaigns where you don’t just get paid for conversions, but even traffic, provided min conversion ratio (usually 1%) criteria is met, and this month we’re promoting Koovs CPV with a target of $5000 and CPV of $0.1 which means, we’ll need to drive 50,000 visitors to their landing pages, and ascertain 500 conversions to be able to bag those 5000 bucks in the kitty.
For example, I’m running the Koovs campaign through Vcommission this month on some of the fashion blogs, and it has been converting quite nicely so far ($1000+ in past one week)
Look Around & Find Sponsored Campaigns / Banner Ads
The fourth way is to take a sneak peak at various other blogs in your niche to see the advertisers with deep pockets… Try to get an idea of what other bloggers are doing to make extra money through sponsored posts and special campaigns on their blogs. Pay keen attention to all the small things that the other bloggers do to know the tactics. There are many examples wherein this method can help you find $100-200 worth of extra sponsored posts easily for your blogs, and at times, this trick has even brought me campaign worth thousands of dollars.
CPM Ads Can be Great Way to Supplement Your Earnings
Last, but definitely not the least – fifth way to monetise your blog is to look for CPM campaigns, especially if you’ve got over a million pageviews per month, but under $1000 flowing in through Adsense. This holds good especially for the education and jobs listing portals. You could also join our Bloggers.Desi and Bloggers World marketplace, which is currently running in private beta, and not open to general public, wherein you could list your blog, and your URL would be hidden and just stats would be shown, until the advertiser pays the money.
To give you an idea, pop traffic is usually sold around $2 per 1000 hits, and publishers get around $1.5 on an avg (Rs 100 per 1000 visits), while the banner CPM traffic rates could be as terrible as $0.3 per 1000 visits for Indian publishers, but if you’ve 1M+ page-views coming to your website, it’d easily translate to extra $300 to your kitty.
The Bottom-Line
What’s more – many bloggers are making money by taking the help of e-commerce websites and Google advertisements, but there are countless other ways to make money from your blog. There are many other ways wherein we can monetize like Kontera (text-advertising) and PicMedia (picture advertising). Commonly used techniques are the ways mentioned above. But, what works for a blogger may not work for you necessarily, and you gotta’ do some A/B testing to check what works well for you.
It’s strongly recommended that you try out these 5 effective ways to make money out of your blog, and I haven’t covered advanced stuff like selling newsletter slot, e-books, online courses, private consulting services etc in this post, and would do that in another post shortly. Till then, happy blogging, and if you need help in monetising a blog, feel free to drop in your comments,and give me a quick shout!
