Blogs are not only vital to building a loyal following, they can be a solid and measurable piece of your company’s bottom line revenue. From working as a tool to get cross promotions with complimentary companies or even through direct sales and building a customer base, there are numerous ways to make money off of the content you create.
Here are 5 ways that you can monetize your blog while not taking away from or enhancing your site’s user experience.
1. Monetize your social media icons.
Everyone has social sharing icons on their blog. If you don’t then you need to think about adding them not only to get your site into the social world, but to generate social triggers and ranking signals for SEO. With certain sharing buttons and most plugins for Twitter sharing, you can alter the settings so that after a post is shared it says to follow you or to follow someone else. The option that isn’t used as much with many of these plugins is that you can set it to also follow another account. This other follow is great because you can sell the space on a share basis, on a monthly basis or even use it as a bargaining tool to get a complimentary company to promote you to their newsletter list or add you to their blog’s sharing button if they have a similar amount of monthly or by post shares.
2. Using your RSS Feed.
A lot of people still get RSS feeds and use readers. This is almost always a missed opportunity. Google Adsense has a tool where you can have Adsense Ads show within your RSS feed so you can monetize them. (The tool may be disappearing soon from a rumor I heard.) Another option is to monetize the page where people can find the feed by placing static spaces for banners and one final one is to feed ads through it if you can program or code it. All of these are great ways to drive impressions, click throughs and if you are being paid on a rev. sharing basis hopefully sales.
3. Your newsletter (but not just inside it).
Newsletters are great places to monetize your blog. You have multiple spaces on a newsletter that people do take advantage of, but what about the other aspects of your newsletter that sit there blank. When a person signs up or joins, does the window close? Can you set it to redirect after 20 seconds to your homepage or the page that they signed up from, or do you show them a screen that says success?
All of these are places that you can show ads, sell space or use for partnerships. Your double opting emails, confirmation emails and other auto responders or communications are usually left without any forms of ads either. These are great places to have people follow you and to share relevant ads and products with. Think about what is an open opportunity that can add value to your readers and how you can incorporate a monetization strategy for these missed opportunities.
4. Using your current posts.
Almost every blog uses a video or rich media at some point in their existence. It could be one from YouTube or even one that you created. These videos could be huge traffic drivers and sales generators. Viewbix.com is a tool I use on my own blogs and websites.
It lets me take the videos that I would share anyways and add custom skins with clickable, trackable and measurable calls to action. You can add on more than 20+ apps that enable people to interact with the video and not having to leave it including signing up for your newsletter/s, shopping lists, store locations, coupon feeds, image and video feeds, Skype calls through the video and a lot more. The tool gets even better.
When a Viewbix.com player is shared on a social media site like Facebook or Twitter, the functionality remains intact (except for Google Maps on Facebook) so as people are watching on Facebook or Twitter they can sign up for your newsletter, shop through your links, schedule appointments, view entire properties or images, multiple videos and more. They also have new SEO features, a way to send and play the video through email as well as a million other whistles and bells like Galleries and Analytics.
Viewbix.com has both free and paid plans starting under $10.00 per month. The free plans don’t have all of the features and apps but still have enough to get you going and help you fall in love with the product. The above link is my tracking and affiliate link.
5. Using Affiliate links the smart way.
Everyone has probably tried Affiliate links at one point or another. The problem is that most programs are poorly managed or not set up for value adding partners like bloggers and companies to have success. Here is a short checklist of things to look at before you join or promote an affiliate program and add them to your site.
- Google url + coupons – If any of the coupon sites that show up are active Affiliates, do not promote the program. When the reader sees a coupon code box, looks for a coupon in a search engine and clicks their link, you probably just lost your sale since they have now set their Affiliate Cookie and more than likely replaced yours.
- Look for trademark bidders – If you see trademark bidding on the main trademarks, urls and misspellings, avoid it. If it is at the end of the transaction like url or trademark + coupons, specials, deals, Black Friday sale, etc… run. This isn’t worth the risk. If the person doesn’t shop right away or types in the brand or url after comparing and clicks the trademark bid, your Affiliate cookie may now be replaced since you are not the last click.
- Do they have leaks – A leak is something that takes you off of the Merchant’s site. It includes links to other sites, Adsense, pick up at a store, phone numbers without some sort of phone tracking, etc… If the person leaves the site, you don’t make money because there is no transaction.
- Attentive managers – If the manager is non-responsive when things are good, if you don’t get paid, the site goes down or program goes offline, they probably won’t respond when you really need them. You should also test their knowledge. If they cannot name 5 or 10 adware applications and why they don’t work with each specifically, do not work with them. If they use EPC or other misleading metrics as a sales pitch, they probably do not know what they are talking about and you should not work with them.
- Multiple networks – If the merchant is on multiple networks, you never know who is going to come in at the last minute or from which network. Even if they have a leap frog commission structure set up with a network like 'ShareASale' that offers a lot of content site and Blogger protection (as an example, here is my share a sale tracking/affiliate link http://bit.ly/AdamAffiliate), if the last click came from a different network, you probably still will not get credit for the sale.
Monetizing your blog is very easy to do and there are almost always missed opportunities. Some people stop with Adsense or throw a random banner on their site. Other’s sell ad space but don’t realize all of the missed opportunities. By taking the tools you pay for like newsletters, the creative you use like video and also thinking about blank spaces in your social icons, emails and confirmation pages, you can potentially drive more traffic, gain more impressions and hopefully make more money!
