The only 2 ways to monetize your blog (Part 2)

November 19th, 2007 · 3 Comments · Tags: Blogging & RSS · Internet Marketing · SEO Copywriting

In part 1 of this quick glance at blog monetization we talked about earning cash directly from your blog’s content. While I still think that monetizing a blog through its content is the more effective strategy in the long run, there is one sad fact to consider…

That the majority of the visitors who land on your blog will not take the time or consideration to read your delicious content.

The average visitor is in a hurry and will only click around to find what he or she came looking for - and that may not always be within your blog. For that reason alone, you must also consider a few different approaches at making money; which brings us directly into the second general strategy to monetize your blog:

Strategy #2) Monetizing your blog’s traffic

This strategy focuses on both the gross of your visitors (the non-readers) and on the few readers who have finished consuming your content and are about to click away from your blog. And just like with blog content monetization, this second strategy has different tactics and approaches which can be summed up in the following:

Selling products or services
Another way to sell products on your blog is to use banners or ads. Simply by showing a good image-based ad, you can redirect the traffic to one of your product pages or to an entirely different website that you’re promoting as an affiliate.

This is probably the easiest way to start earning some quick revenue from your blogging efforts. And when done correctly it is also the method that will drive the largest percentage of your blog’s income. I have tried many different monetization strategies for this blog and the biggest money-makers for me are still those “Copywriting courses” links you see in the side bar.

Using an ad space broker
This is one of the most common techniques in blog monetization, and the king of online ad brokers is the infamous Google AdSense program. Through it, you can select the types of advertising you want to accept in your blog (style and sizes) and Google will serve ads that are relevant to the content on that particular page. When a visitor clicks on one of those ads, you’ll get a fraction of what the advertiser paid for that click.

From AdBrite to Chitika mini-malls and from AdEngage to LinkWorth, ad brokers come in all shapes, sizes and flavors. The decision in selecting which one(s) to use should be based on you target audience and on the type of ads you feel comfortable showing in your blog.

Selling advertising space directly
The other way to sell ad space on your site is to do it directly. Many popular blogs have been moving away from ad brokers and offering the space to advertisers directly. In short, if it’s their oven that’s being used to cook the clicks, they are eating the entire pie themselves instead of getting just a slice.

Selling advertising directly can be very profitable, but it can also be a drag to manage. I only recommend going this way when you have the content creation part of your blogging business totally under control. It will then be up to you if you want to sell the advertising on a per-click, per-impression or on a fixed rate per day, week or month.

Monetizing your blog’s RSS feed
Your blog has one extra channel of content delivery: its RSS feed. If you consider that only a portion of your blog readers are actually visiting your website, while the rest only read your posts using their newsreader or aggregator software, you’ll quickly figure out that if you want to advertise effectively to your entire audience you should also publish the ads in your RSS feed.

Again, this can be done directly (using a WordPress plugin like Fedafi) or through an ad broker like FeedBurner. If you are still not doing so, this is yet another blog monetization method you can test quickly and easily.

Donations
Accepting donations through PayPal is a common practice among bloggers. Some blog publishers call these donations “tips” from readers for the content they write, others have given the donations a spin and ask their readers to “buy a beer” or “buy a coffee” for them.

While this is a good way to make a few extra dollars, the “donations” method will work particularly well if you are blogging for a human interest cause. I’ve seen blogs that raise tens of thousands of dollars a month in donations… so don’t discard this monetization tactic until you’ve tried it.