How To Monetize your Blog

by Joshua King on November 19, 2011 · 0 comments

in affiliate blogging, Blog Marketing, making money with your blog

Steve Pavlina launched his blog stevepavlina.com Oct 1st, 2004. In this article Steve shares how to monetize your blog, the steps he took to monetize his blog and how he went from $4 dollars a day to over a $1000 a day.

The article on how to monetize your blog is a long read at over 7300 words but well worth the read as it’s filled with specifics on how to monetize your blog, so if you don’t have the time bookmark the page and come back to it when you have time.

Steve ask a very important question;

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?   there are a lot of people that have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blog.  If you think monetizing your blog is evil or anything in that vain then don’t monetize it.

According to Steve he found it important to work out his feeling about monetizing his blog;

If you want to succeed, you must be congruent.  Monetizing your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time.  It should feel genuinely good to earn an income from monetizing your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition for success.  If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.

So it becomes clear according to Steve that you have the right mindset and that you are 100% ok with montezing your blog because should you doubt our end result you want be able to keep going when its needed. You’ll start to find excuses for not posting one day and then a few days will have passed and you still haven’t done anything to monetize your blog.

 

Cheap Tips to Monetize Your Blog

  1. If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it.  If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads.  Don’t just stick a scrawny little ad in a remote corner.
  2. Asking for donations, then really request donations.  Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best.
  3.  If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them.  Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy.  If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it.

Steve say’s that you can reasonably expect that when you begin to monetize your blog, that some people will complain, depending on how you do it.

I launched this site in October 2004. I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005.  There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal.  Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback.  Most of the feedback was surprisingly supportive.  The few complaints I did get, died off within a a week, and the blog began earn income from blogging almost immediately, $53 the first month.  If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year.  Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source.


Can you make a decent income when you monetize your blog?

The simple answer is yes.  After I fully monetize the blog a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home.  I make a good income from having monetized this blog and it’s only 2 years old.  If you have a day job,  you can expect that it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it.


Once you Monetize your blog can anyone do it ?

Steve say no, they can’t.  I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a blog using the dreaded C-word.  But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail.  The tagline for my blog is “Personal Development for Smart People.”  And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), the people that can monetize their blog are minority on this planet.

While most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that a few of you can.  How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart?  Here’s a good rule of thumb:  If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.  If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will.  OK, actually I do.

Steve reminds us that this kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to monetining your blog though;

  You’ll see it in any field, how many Actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves?

It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it.  Talent counts for something, it is skill that matters in if you want to monetize your blog.

You need to apply your intelligence to one particular talent.  And the best words to describe this talent are:  web savvy.

Steve’s Web savvy skills you’ll need to monetize your blog

You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a functional understanding of a variety of web technologies.  these are “key” and will depend on your niche and how you plan to monetize your blog, generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

  • blog publishing
  • HTML/CSS
  • blog comments (and comment spam)
  • RSS/syndication
  • feed aggregators
  • pinging
  • trackbacks
  • full vs. partial feeds
  • blog carnivals (kick start your blog after you monetize your blog)
  • search engines
  • SEO
  • page rank
  • social bookmarking
  • tagging
  • contextual advertising
  • affiliate programs
  • traffic statistics
  • email

Optional:  podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

Steve attributes a  lack of understanding as the major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation.

For example SEO you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO.  To monetize your blog is a balancing act.  You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, and affiliate programs.

It seems that minor decisions have to be taken into consideration for potential viewers. Steve clearly makes it a point to be attractive to his human visitors as well as the search engines.

 I want a title/text that is attractive to my human visitors,  and drive some massive search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads. All this must fits the theme of the blog and encourage linking as well as social bookmarking.

The content of how I monetize my blog must ad genuine value to my visitors.  I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. It’s skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month.

Steve says that missing out on this one skill is will cripple your traffic.  And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand and apply when you monetize your blog.

Your ability to master the list above is what separates the 1% from the 99%.  Both groups may work hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts.  It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds.

Steve recommends that whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, then dive into it long enough to acquire an understanding of it.  To make money when you monetize your blog, it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.”  That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies when you monetize your blog— you just have to be good enough to use them.

Strive to achieve functional knowledge, then move on.  Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work.  I don’t really care.  I can still use them to generate results.  I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

To Monetize your Blog requires you to stay flexible to change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you.  Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities.  You need an entrepreneurial mindset in order to monetize your blog.

Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains.  It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.  Blogging is cheap.  Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal.  Your concern should be missed opportunities.

You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities.  I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.

Steve mentions that The blogosphere changes rapidly and change creates opportunity.

It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them.  Don’t hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting or miss out. Everyday you don’t implement them, you’re losing money.  Don’t ever miss opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

According to Steve  the rapid rate of change of web technologies, is even more rapid than 2 years ago.  The rate of change is accelerating.  Steve says that for you to monetize your blog you need to stay current;

Almost every week now I learn something new or fancsinatin that when your monetize your blog could potentially lead to big changes down the road.

Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself.  But I learned to love this insane pace.  If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too.  People who only do this part-time will be very confused.  If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up.

Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a blogger.  This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea.  Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous.  Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy after you have monetized your blog?

Steve says that most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blog.  They put things together with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money.

While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim.  Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.

Take a time to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your blog.  If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income.  You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is.  An initial target goal for monetizing my blogwas $3000 per month.

It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher.

I reached that level 15 months after launching the site. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain.  It’s a lot more secure than a regular job.  No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones.

Steve recommends  generating income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales or a combination.  However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing.

I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy.  I only update it about once a year and review it once a month.  It helps me stay focused on where I’m headed.  It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.

Steve recommend that you use this summary when you monetize your blog and develop a philosophy when you need to make design decisions for your blog.

Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that.  Funnel people towards an order form or place ads your blog?

Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches.  Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you and design your blog around that

To monetize your blog research how various successful bloggers generated income.

Once you Monetize your Blog its Traffic, traffic, traffic time!

Assuming you have taken on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.

Just to throw out some figures, last month this blog received over 1 million visitors and over 2 million page views, triple what it was just half a year ago.

Why is traffic so important?  Because for most methods of online income generation, your ability to earn an income is a direct function of traffic.  If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income.

In Steve’s opinion you can bugger up almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic it’s hard to fail.  Sufficient traffic a realistic goal and your primary job is to get traffic from as many sources as you can;

When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge.  If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed.  So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months.  I just focused on traffic building.  Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan.

 

Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation.  More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you.  It also means that you’re helping more people.

In Steves experience the higher traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic blogs.

On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews.

Earlier this year Steve was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers.  Journalists are find him by doing Google searches on specific topics.

These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out.  Popular sites have a serious advantage.  The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.

If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site.  And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.

How Steve builds traffic to his blog

Traffic is so crucial, how  you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?

I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there:  How to Build a High Traffic Blog.

That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors. There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll share with your readers today;

Blog Carnivals.  Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know).  Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche.  Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free.

Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form.  Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

Steve says that in his early traffic-building days he would  use blog carnivals once a week It helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month.

You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog.  Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss.  Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff.

You can pick up hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start.

Steve says that if your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong?  Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right.

Again, making mistakes is not the issue.  Missing opportunities is.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE.  It’s just not true.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site.  Nothing.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links.  Nothing.  I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever.

Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site.  In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout.  come back, regardless of what they say publicly.

According to Steve most mature people understand it’s ok for a blogger to earn income from his/her work.

This article alone took 2 days of writing and editing.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work.  If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything.

The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it.  For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site.

The podcasts are all ad-free.  I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.  More income = better service.

At the time of this writing Steve talks about how his blog is very ad-heavy.

Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it:  “You know, Steve.  Your web site seems to contain a lot of ads.”  Of course I’m aware of it.  I’m the one who put the ads there.

There’s a reason. They’re effective!  People keep clicking on them.  If they weren’t, I’d would have removed them right away and try something else.

Steve does avoid putting up ads that he finds personally annoying when I including pop-ups and stuff that flies across your screen.

Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.

I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads.  First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free.  I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

Multiple streams of income

Steve says don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Think multiple streams of income.  On his blog he uses six different sources to create income.

  1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
  2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
  3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
  4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
  5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare
  6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Steve did mention that if you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date its likey that the list will change. He said he frequently experiments with different streams.

Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too.  Every stream generates more than $100/month.

My second biggest income stream is actually donations.  My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too.  It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal.  So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish.

I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.

Monetize your blogAutomated income

With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated.  I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.

I love automated income.  This blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers.  And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.

Blogging software and hardware

I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it.  Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface.  And you can’t beat its price — free.

Comments or no comments

When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled.  As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting.  Some days there were more than 100 comments.  I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort.  It became clear that with continued traffic growth I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell.

The topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion.  Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate.  With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane.

But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors).  That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off

To finish this article you  can visit his blog at stevepavlina.com  We welcome your feedback and comments. Visit the SEO Blog Guy for more information, articles and resources.

Steve Pavlina launched his blog stevepavlina.com Oct 1st, 2004. In this article Steve shares how to monetize your blog, the steps he took to monetize his blog and how he went from $4 dollars a day to over a $1000 a day.

 

 

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