The difference between an amateur blog and a professional blog is that a professional blog is set up to earn money. As such, all the content published on the blog is well thought out, with the goal of making money from the site visitors.
But how do you transform your blog into one that makes money?
Today, we will review the top five ways to convert your blog into a profit-pulling machine.
These ways are:
- Memberships
- Info Products
- Affiliate marketing
- Advertising
- Online courses
By the end of this article, you would have made a choice of which of these five monetization methods to go after, and also get an idea of how they work.
Memberships
By far, this is probably the most lucrative way to transform your blog to make profits. In a membership site, you charge your clients money on a monthly basis. In exchange, they can access premium content that non-members cannot see.
What is premium content? Premium content is either carefully written blog posts or videos. These videos are tutorials that help the members learn something new. They are not your usual product review or product comparison types of blogs and videos.
If you want to launch a membership site, you must know as early as now that you have to be actively engaged. Your members will expect new content every month, and this means you have to produce new valuable materials on a regular basis.
How much can you charge? It depends. There are blogs that charge at least $30 per month. In return, these blogs churn out a ton of content to satisfy their readers.
Before you launch a membership site. Make sure that you have your content strategy planned out for an entire year. Prepare content that is good for the next three months, and then launch. This way, your new members have content to consume while you are making new ones.
Info Products
An info product can be an eBook or a digital tool. Anything that gives information to the user is an info-product. However, the blogging industry usually recognizes digital downloads and eBooks as info products.
An eBook for a blog is mostly instructional in nature. Think of books like “Complete Idiot’s Guide…” or “XXX for Dummies” and you get an idea what kind of book you can sell.
Not all people are comfortable watching videos to learn, and there are still many who prefer to have a book. This is the kind of market you want for your eBook.
The other type of info product you can sell is what is called a digital tool. A good example is MS Excel reporting sheets that bloggers can use to track their progress. Many people in the world need a template where they can input data and analyze their performance.
The issue with apps is that they cannot be as easily customized. MS Excel or spreadsheet is better because the user can make changes, provided that he knows how to use the software. A digital download like this can sell for at least $4.99. If you sell a thousand copies, then you just made a lot of profit from one product.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a passive income source. Here, you sell or promote another company’s products or services, and then earn a commission if you make a sale.
To get started with affiliate marketing, you have to register for an affiliate program. There is a ton of affiliate programs out there, and you have to choose those that are relevant to your niche. Some affiliate programs require that you have a website, and some require that your blog is related to their niche.
After the registration and once you are approved, you will receive your affiliate link. This is the link that you need to use in your blog pages inside anchor texts or banner ads. If your site visitor clicks on this link, the merchant’s computer would know that it is you who referred this customer.
Now, there is a thing in affiliate marketing called a cookie. A cookie is an identification code, which stays inside the customer’s computer browser after clicking your affiliate link. Most of the time, the cookie will stay active for 30 days.
What does this mean? In the next 30 days, the merchant’s computer knows that this customer is your referral. If this customer makes a purchase within that 30-day period, the commission goes to you. Once the 30 days is over, you will not get a commission anymore.
Advertising
Many bloggers rely on Google to post ads on their websites. What they do not realize is that there are many advertising syndicates that offer higher advertising payouts than Google AdSense.
However, these ad networks have some strict requirements. In Google, you can register for adsense and place ads on your blogs even if you do not have a lot of traffic. What Google simply requires is that your blog is not dealing with something illegal and that the content of your blog is not spam.
Other advertising networks require that you have at least 30,000 page views in a month. They want to make sure that they are placing their ads on premium websites only.
No one knows how much Google really pays in ads. But if you check out others like Ezoic, you can earn as little as $5 per thousand page views, or even up to $25 per 1,000 page views.
If you are consistently average 50,000 page views in a month and your advertising pays $20 per 1,000 page views, you can easily earn $1,000 per month!
Online Courses
An online course is great if you are comfortable making videos. Just think of it as being a teacher, but this is done online, and it is a recorded course. This is going to take many months or even a year to create, considering that you need a lot of teaching materials like screenshots and free toolkits.
But once you create your video, this can also be one of the best methods to monetize. People are learners, and they will pay a premium fee to improve their skills.
Before you start creating your course, you have to understand the pain points and the challenges of your target market. You also need to take courses yourself just so you have a point of comparison.
After that, you have to write your own course syllabus. What do you want your students to learn step by step? This course syllabus will help you organize what you have to record, and how you will break apart your course into modules.
Since it is a video course, you need to invest in a good video editing tool like Camtasia. You cannot rely on free editing software because they have a lot of limitations.
Summary
These five ways to transform your blog into a profit-pulling one are the easiest and the most common ways to earn money. Each monetization method has its own set of challenges, and you have to prepare really well to combat these challenges.
Advertising and affiliate marketing are the most passive, and it is highly recommended that you start with both. The other three are active ways to transform your blog to earn money, and they require longer planning and execution.
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