14 Ways to Monetize a Blog

Building and maintaining a blog is an important content marketing tactic for any business. However, a blog can do more than improve lead generation and brand awareness for a company. In fact, there are a variety of methods a business can implement to monetize a blog. See a higher return on investment on your content marketing efforts by learning how to use your blog to add to your bottom line.

Affiliate Marketing

Programs such as Amazon Associates, ClickBank, and Commission Junction offer businesses the opportunity to capitalize on this type of performance-based marketing. Affiliate marketing requires you to link to products or services sold through a company’s affiliate program. Every time a reader clicks on the link and makes a purchase, your organization receives a portion of the profits.

To successfully incorporate affiliate marketing into your blog:

• Only promote products/services relevant to your target audience.
• Only link to products/services you’ve used and would recommend.
• Always include a disclaimer, so you don’t mislead your readers.   

Further Education

Readers rely on your blog as a source of information. They trust you to provide them with data, insights, and knowledge they would not find anywhere else. Since you have positioned yourself as an expert in your field, users will be interested in learning more from you. Selling further education opportunities is an easy way to monetize your blog. Depending on the time and resources available, you can produce webinar courses, live workshops, or eBooks.  

Paid Advertising

There are several methods for hosting ads directly on your blog that can generate additional income for your business. These strategies are most successful for blogs already receiving high levels of traffic.

• Pay per click (PPC) advertising: With Google Adsense, contextual ads populate your blog. You receive a small fee (which add up for a long period of time) every time a user clicks on one of the ads.   
• Cost per mile (CPM) advertising: Instead of getting paid per click, CPM advertising pays you for the number of page views your blog receives.   
• In-text ads: Sign up with an in-text advertising provider so you can host advertisements placed within the text of your blog posts. Most of these programs will pay each time the ad is clicked on by a user.
• Advertising widgets: Designed to be easily added to any website, these widgets are a combination of affiliate marketing, PPC advertising, and in-text ads.  
• Sell space: Rather than using a third-party service, you can directly sell space on your site to advertisers.  

Consulting Services

As an expert in your field, your readers would pay you to weigh in on their businesses. Promote these services within the copy of your blog posts as well as creating your own site ads offering your consulting services. It’s even worth writing a blog post that details your consulting services and sending out an email to your list about them.

Sponsored Content

By creating additional pages on your site that you link to in your blog, you can sell space to other companies who want to promote specific information. For example, you can build a job board on your site and charge businesses who want to post their available positions on the page. Also, you can create an industry-specific directory and collect a fee for every organization that wants to be listed there.

You can also write dedicated product reviews sponsored by the company that makes the item. Of course, you’ll want to include a disclaimer, so readers have all the information. Similar to affiliate marketing, you would only want to choose products or services you use and recommend.

Premium Content

Create premium content that blog readers would pay to readers. For instance, you can set up a gated membership site that users have to pay to access. Sweeten the deal by sending out exclusive content to your premium members on a weekly basis. You can also create high-quality premium content, such as tutorials or guides, and sell those through your blog.

Before you can monetize your blog, you have to create content people want to consume. That means building an eye-catching blog site and generating unique, interesting, and relevant posts on a regular basis. For those businesses needing expert guidance on blogging, contact Proactive WP today!