“Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you’re ready or not, to put this plan into action.”
– Napoleon Hill
Three weeks ago I published the first post in my “Blog Business Plan” series: “35 Creative Ways to Market Your Blog”. For our purposes, marketing is about drawing traffic to your blog and getting visitors to do what you want them to: whether it’s hiring you, clicking on your affiliate links and buying the products you promote, buying information products you’ve created, and so on. Today I’m publishing the second part of this series: how to monetize your blog. Keep in mind while creating your blog business plan that the main element that will determine whether or not your monetization strategy is successful is how much traffic you get to your blog.
Create Valuable Content
Once again, your focus should be on creating great content. People search the internet looking for information to solve their problems. If you provide valuable content that helps them do this, they’ll be much more inclined to buy the products that you recommend and to click on your links in order to help support your site.
Have Realistic Expectations
StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004. By April 2005–about six months after it was launched–Steve was averaging $4.12 a day in income from his blog. As of the 3rd of May 2006, his blog was making over $200 a day, and by October 29, 2006 it was making over $1000 a day. (Source). I hesitate to use Steve’s figures because he’s an extraordinarily successful blogger, but at least his figures show that everyone starts out small.
In addition, Darren Rowse from Problogger wrote a great article on keeping expectations in check in terms of what it takes to make money blogging here.
Affiliate Programs
One way to monetize your blog is to refer visitors from your blog to a merchant’s web site. A merchant is anyone who sells products or services online. Merchants from affiliate programs range in size from small businesses–and even individuals– to Fortune 500 companies. Depending on the terms of the affiliate program, you earn a commission if the visitor you refer makes a purchase, completes a lead form, or downloads software.
The key when it comes to affiliate programs is to promote quality products and services that are related to your blog’s niche, and that you can genuinely recommend. I personally only promote affiliate products that I use and consider to be great products.
There are three ways to find merchants with affiliate programs:
1. Join an affiliate network.
2. Search online for affiliate programs.
3. Go directly to a merchant’s website.
An affiliate network is a trusted third party company that handles all of the transactions between affiliates and merchants. There are dozens of affiliate networks out there. Some of the biggest are:
The best way to find out if a particular merchant has an affiliate program is to visit their website. Most merchants with an affiliate program place a link somewhere on their web site titled “Affiliates” or “Partners”.
As an example of choosing an affiliate program to join, this blog is in the life improvement niche, with an emphasis on productivity, creativity and simplicity. One of my affiliate programs is “The Silva Life System”, which helps people learn to meditate, increase their focus and concentration, boost their creativity, and augment their brain power. This product fits in nicely with the content I provide on this blog. In addition, I use the Silva Method and am very satisfied with the results I’ve gotten, so I gladly recommend it to others.
Pay Per Click Affiliates
There are also affiliate programs in which you get paid every time someone clicks on a link. Some of the most popular are:
Apparently Darren Rowse does quite well with Adsense and Chitika, as he writes in this article: “How I Make Money Blogging”.
Amazon’s Associates Program
If you join Amazon’s Associates Program you can link to them every time you mention a book on your blog–as well as other products that are available on Amazon–and earn a commission anytime someone buys from Amazon after entering their site through your link.
The Affiliate Masters Course
The Affiliate Masters Course is a fabulous resource which you can download for free by clicking here. The basic formula that they provide is the following:
- Create content that people are searching for and that will pull in targeted traffic (by building search engine optimized pages).
- Pre-sell your visitors so that they click on your recommendations with an open attitude (you pre-sell by providing valuable content).
- Generate income through those pre-sold visitors using the low-risk affiliate model as a primary or secondary source of income.
Although the course is mainly directed toward making money with web sites, it can be adapted to blog monetization as well.
Create Your Own Information Products
Bloggers can leverage their expertise in the area they blog about by creating their own information products, such as e-books, teleseminars, online courses, and so on, and selling them to their readers.
Naomi Dunford from Itty Biz has created ebooks that have sold quite well. In fact, she wrote a four part series on creating e-books; the first part of the series is titled: “How to Make $12,246 in a Day, Part One: Finding and Wooing the Market for your E-book”. Michael Martine from Remarkablogger offered a Wordpress SEO teleseminar in October of last year, which has now become part of a new product he’s selling: Wordpress SEO Secrets.
The Importance of Traffic for Monetization
If you calculate your conversion rate–the number of site visits that result in a sale or other call to action–you can determine how much traffic you’ll need in order to meet your monetization goals. For example, let’s say you want to make $1000 a month from your blog; you’re promoting a product that sells for $20; and you earn a commission of $5 for each product you sell. You therefore need to sell 200 units of the product each month in order to reach your goal of making $1000 a month online.
If you’re getting 500 visitors a day and are selling one unit of the product a day, then you can calculate that if you got 100,000 visitors a month you would be selling 200 units a month. It’s now a matter of revisiting the different ways of getting traffic to your site in order to determine which ones you’ll focus on and creating a traffic strategy to drive 100,000 visitors to your site a month.
Conclusion
There are many other blog monetization methods in addition to the ones described above, such as selling advertising space on your blog, having a “tip jar” so that people can make donations to your blog, and some people even sell their blogs. Set a realistic goal of how much money you want to make from your blog, create a strategy to draw lots of traffic to your blog, learn as much as you can about the most effective way to make money by using that strategy, and use trial and error until you find the best mix for your blog.
Editor’s Note: I was accepted into the 9Rules Blog Network. 
photo credit: Arturo de Albornoz
Recommended Product:
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Visit the Silva Life System web site and get a free course on the basics of the Silva Life System, which includes their famous 30 minute guided meditation.
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