If you’re planning to launch a new blog as a business venture, you’ll need to come up with ways to monetize the blog. There are many traditional ways to monetize your blog from selling your products/services, marketing affiliate offers, and selling advertising space. However, not all of these approaches may be viable for your situations. To help you get some more ideas, here are five additional ways to make money off your blog.
1. Market Services You Have Control Over
If you’re like many bloggers that don’t like to hand over your readers to another company to affiliate offers, look for services that give you more control. For example, reseller hosting services can be rebranded to your blog’s visual identity. You also manage the reseller hosting accounts and can provide a better service than the parent company. Another option is to establish a network of partnerships that are handpicked yourself.
For example, if you are running a blog about digital marketing, you can choose to form partnerships with web designers, SEO experts, paid advertising account managers, and so forth. You won’t be giving away your readers to a third party affiliate marketing platform where you cannot confirm the quality of the services your blog readers will get.
2. Sell Leads to Businesses that Need Them
You don’t always have to sell a product/service or market an affiliate offer on your blog. One great way to make money from your new blog is to sell leads to businesses that need them. For example, it might be a good idea to partner up with a local roofing company if you run a home improvement blog. This is a great partnership since both parties share the same target audience and readers that are looking for a roofing company will be interested.
You can simply place an ad that asks readers to submit their information to get a roofing job quote. This approach can be very lucrative since you are getting paid per lead as opposed to per sale. If you find that you are seeing good results, you may even want to set up a partnership with a couple of companies to get a percentage of the sale as this may be more profitable.
3. Monetize with Adsense
If you’ve just launched a new blog, you’ll have trouble finding advertisers to buy your blog’s ad space. Until you develop a strong audience and have established yourself in your market or industry, you can simply monetize with Adsense. Adsense ads are dynamic ads that show ads based on the content of the page. So if an article on your page is about dog grooming, Google’s ads will display ads based around that keyword so that it’s targeted to your readers.
Monetizing with Adsense isn’t a matter of simply copying and pasting the code and watching the money flow through. You’ll want to test different ad placement and different sized ads. Keeping track of the metrics and testing new approaches will help you optimize your campaign and maximize earnings. There are similar monetization solutions out there but many publishers report that Adsense is the best performing network.
4. Sell Sponsored Blog Posts
This approach can be a little controversial to many people. However, this is a monetization strategy that can work well as long as you don’t overdo it. Many businesses and bloggers want to get visibility in front of the right audience. To them, sponsored blog posts offers a great opportunity to get their message out without using pushy ads.
If you decide to accept sponsored blog posts, you may want to request that the blog posts are content focused rather than full out ads. With this request, your readers won’t be inundated with posts that are constantly asking them to make a purchase. If you want to take extra measures, it’s best to let your readers know that it’s a sponsored post by adding a notice that it’s sponsored. Believe it or not, this doesn’t mean that a post will be ignored as many will still read it if the post offers some kind of value.
5. Offer Premium Content
A freemium model is something that is used by many bloggers. The majority of their content is available for free but the best posts are usually hidden behind a paywall. You can opt to do this on a post basis but the model that works best is to get your readers to subscribe to a membership program for monthly access. By doing this, you don’t have to try to get readers to constantly make a purchase decision every time you post freemium content.
Remember that this will only work if you prove that your regular content delivers a lot of value. You want your readers to think “if the free content is this good, then the premium content should be a lot better.” Some other things you can add to this are access to a private forum, membership site, or monthly group coaching calls. The bottom line is that the premium blog model works as many blogs are using it successfully.
Those are five different money-making methods that you can use for your new blog. You don’t always have to go the normal route when it comes to monetizing your blog. These approaches can be just as profitable, if not more profitable than traditional methods.