7 Ways To Monetize Your Blog Traffic

People love blogs. We read them, think about them, use them to promote our brands, and oftentimes blog as a hobby or personal endeavor. Clearly, people are making money blogging, or there wouldn’t be such a heavy appeal—so how are they doing it?

Obviously, you can use content marketing to attract people to your main site. But if all you have is a solid blog that people like to read, how can you turn that traffic and interested audience into a real stream of revenue? It’s simpler than you might think.

The Fundamentals

Before I dig too deep into the methods you can use to convert your loyal blog audience, we need to talk about how you build a successful blog in the first place—and what to do to keep it successful while you pursue these money-making avenues.

So let’s say you haven’t yet built a successful blog—maybe you haven’t started yet or maybe you’ve started a blog but haven’t found your groove. What does it take to do so?

• Choose a valuable niche. Your first step is to find a valuable niche. Yes, you think your subject matter is interesting—otherwise, you wouldn’t be blogging about it—but what do other people think? You need to choose a subject and a focus that will appeal strongly to the greatest number of people, and for that, you’ll need to bear several things in mind. For example, what are your key demographics? What’s important to them? What kind of voice will you use? Not only that, you’ll also need to consider what kind of competition is out there; what angle can you take to differentiate yourself from your competitors?
• Build a professional site. After you’ve got your niche selected, you need to build a professional site—and by that, I’m mostly referring to the design. If you have an ugly or unprofessional-looking design (like the example seen below), you probably aren’t going to get very far. Take your time and build a platform that’s going to complement your writing abilities. Make sure you have a solid, consistent brand throughout; it’s alright to use a template, especially if you’re on a tight budget, but make sure you stand out from the competition in some way.

• Create amazing content. Easy, right? This is the most important step to building a great blog, and it’s also both the easiest to understand and most difficult to execute. What makes content great? It can’t be reduced to any one series of factors; the reality is, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of variables that play into how your content is read and received. Your content needs to be valuable to your audience—meaning practical, informative, or entertaining—unique in some way, detailed, easy to follow, and reliable. And that’s just the start! I detailed some of the elements of high-quality content in this post. If you need help coming up with ideas for content, see 101 Content Ideas For Your Website or Blog.
• Nurture and grow a following. Next up, you need to build an audience and keep that audience growing. Hypothetically, your awesome content should be enough to attract an audience on its own, but the reality is, you’ll probably face difficulty earning those first few thousand regular visitors. You need to go out of your way to promote your content, using channels like social media and other visibility opportunities, and keep your audience members around by responding to their comments and making them feel like they’re actually a part of your blog. For help promoting your content, see Content Unleashed: The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Published Content.
• Foster a community. It’s helpful, though not absolutely necessary, to foster a community around your brand. You’ll already be engaging with your readers to attract and retain them, but you’ll generate even more loyalty by enabling your readers to engage with each other. Some brands do this by offering a forum, or simply by encouraging more discussions in the comments section of each post. However you choose to do it, work actively to keep your community engaged.
• Cultivate loyalty. Finally, try to cultivate loyalty so you don’t lose your audience members to a competing blog or have them trail off in disinterest. There are a number of different ways to do this, such as by offering subscriber perks, like bonus content in email lists, rewards for active participants, or even contests and giveaways. Keep your followers happy, and they’ll stick around indefinitely, so find out what would make them happy and give it to them.

Basic Principles

Assuming you have a high-traffic blog already in place (with at least a few thousand monthly visitors), you’ll be ready to start monetizing. However, before you start choosing your tactics and strategizing your execution, you should know and become familiar with a few basic principles in monetization:

• Prioritize your content. When you decide to make money from your blogging efforts, that can become your primary focus. You’ll get lost in a chase for more money-making opportunities, and the quality or consistency of your content will begin to suffer. Don’t let this happen to you; no matter which path to monetization you choose, you need to keep the quality of your work high and consistent. You won’t be able to make any money if your regular visitors stop coming to your site. All other considerations are secondary.
• Keep it tasteful. Next, consider the fact that any method of making money can be done tastefully or obnoxiously; just as most people are turned off by an aggressive salesman getting in their face about a product, most people are turned away from blogs that try to make money in egregious or tasteless ways. For example, if you cram advertising down your users’ throats, or advertise with companies that conflict with your values, your users could stop visiting your blog out of annoyance or even lost respect. Keep all your methods executed tastefully and appropriately.
• Scale gradually. Next, you’ll want to scale your efforts gradually, for a number of reasons. If you try to do everything at once, you could end up shocking your readers; imagine coming to a website that was once ad-free that’s now chock-full of ads in every corner. You could also compromise your own execution; this is especially true if you’re unfamiliar with the mechanics of running your monetization efforts. Try to do too much, and you’ll only make more mistakes throughout the process.

Now, let’s take a look at a variety of different monetization methods you can use to turn your blog’s traffic into real revenue.

1. Affiliate Marketing

First up, there’s affiliate marketing—a subtle way of advertising a chosen product and earning money from any sales you facilitate.

The Concept

The concept here is pretty simple. You’ll work with an outside partner—usually an eCommerce platform or another online business—and select a product or handful of products to promote on your blog. You’ll be given custom links to the product page, which you can work into your blog in any way you choose (usually this means referencing the product in context on one of your posts). When someone follows that link, they’ll have the option to buy that product. If they do, you’ll earn a percentage of each sale.

There are many variables here; different programs offer different percentage commissions and different perks, and you may even find affiliate deals for service-based industries, or payouts based on traffic instead of conversions.

Pros and Cons

Here are some of the most important pros and cons to know:

• Easy learning curve. First up, the learning curve is extraordinarily easy. Even if you exhaustively research the options available to you, it won’t take you more than a few hours to get started with a program. The only thing you have to do is include links on some of your posts, and those links are given to you straight-up.
• Low accountability. You aren’t responsible for much on an ongoing basis. You can include as many or as few links as you’d like, and you don’t have to alter anything on the product pages themselves. You’re not responsible for anything other than including the links, and you usually don’t have an ongoing relationship to manage.
• Ongoing passive income. Your links will keep earning money as long as people are following them. This makes affiliate links some of your best opportunities to secure passive income in the long term.
• Reputation problems. Unfortunately, there’s a chance using affiliate links could be problematic for your reputation. Posting about a product is sometimes an indication that you’re being compensated to mention it, compromising the honesty and reader-serving nature of your blog.
• Choosing the right products. It also takes some work to find the perfect products; you have to balance high-paying affiliate link opportunities with the necessity of using products that fit your blog’s niche and appeal to your key demographics.