If you head out to your favorite forum and you start to look at the topics with an eye for discussions about blog monetization, you are likely to see a common thread of people wondering a lot about how to monetize their blogs.
It seems simple on the surface. If you go to a popular blog it is easy to see that they are making money from advertising, affiliate product recommendations or reviews, and many times their own products and services.
So the question is “Why are so many people apparently having such a hard time figuring out a successful monetization strategy for their blogs?”
There are two parts to the answer.
1. They haven’t tested properly.
They got into the niche seeing that many people were making money. They figured out some of the products and services and advertising that are working for other bloggers. And they thought they could just pop into the niche and do the same once the traffic started coming.
Then they find out this isn’t always true. And now they start to wonder if there is something wrong with blogging. Even though the road maps in almost every niche are right in front of them via already successful sites, they start to doubt the method rather than their failure to turn their traffic into dollars.
A current, high traffic, high profit blog has done a lot of testing and tracking to find the profit “sweet spot.” This is when their visitors stop just reading and start whipping out wallets, clicking ads, and becoming actively involved with their sites.
Rarely does the first monetization strategy for a new blog work out. Nor does it satisfy the owner for very long. Blogs go through an evolution. If you’ve been a reader here at FTR for even 3-4 months you’ve seen how I change things around constantly in an effort to improve upon my profit sweet spot.
I try different product recommendations, different ad placements for my own products and services, and different advertising schemes to come up with a better profit from the site each month with the traffic I already have. It is a process that never ends as long as you feel as though you are leaving money on the table. Being as profitable as possible without getting in the way of a good visitor experience that is not too loaded with ads, offers, and obnoxious marketing.
2. They are trying too hard to make money right on their blog itself rather than through their blog.
The second part of the answer is that you might not want to be making money directly ON your blog but as a result OF your blog, its popularity, and its great content.
What I mean by this is that blogs are excellent traffic attractors and, properly built and managed, excellent at grabbing search engine traffic.
That alone, with no monetization strategy yet in place, is an amazingly valuable thing. Without traffic there is no monetization to test and improve upon. You can’t make money from your content if your blog isn’t driving any traffic.
And who’s to say that you should have a single ad on your blog other than for your own product or service? Often the biggest money to be made is when you push people to your own products rather than advertisers’ pages for pennies on the dollar.
So, why not use blogging for what it is absolutely best at: attracting and engaging people, link building, disseminating quality information, building a following (readership), and pointing that traffic to one or a small handful of products you own?
The Most Successful ASC Members Are…
At ASC we have people coming in to set up on our system for the sole purpose of getting their current business more traffic. You can only take an ecommerce store so far in the engines and you hit a glass ceiling. (Really THICK glass, I might add!) On top of that you don’t get many links voluntarily from other sites to the degree that good content (linkbait) does on blogs.
Once people hit that ceiling, they have to buy more and more traffic if they want to increase their sales. And, because we’ve tested this hundreds of times, PPC traffic pales in comparison to traffic generated and motivated by a high quality, authoritative blog.
Meaning you have to buy a lot more traffic from PPC to make the same money with less traffic generated by a blog. This is because people who come to a site through a PPC ad have had exactly 5 seconds to learn anything about the people behind the site they are on. All the trust has to be built in another 10-30 seconds, right on the spot, if a sale is going to be made.
Especially if the visitor doesn’t even opt in to your list while they are there (not buying anything). Then you’ve paid for nothing.
Blogs Deliver Credibility And Give You The Time It Takes To Become Trusted
I’m not saying you make more sales with a blog visitor who ends up on your recommended products page or site right off the bat. What a good blog does is engage people in a conversation. You are the leader of that conversation and people get to know whether you are a scam artist or someone who has built a business based on trust, credibility, and respect.
They don’t buy from you faster, but they buy from you more often than with PPC traffic and they are far greater repeat buyers because they are engaged in the ongoing discussion on your blog. You can keep blog traffic closer to you on an ongoing basis than a direct sales site can with it’s one message (buy now, trust me) and a low-performance popup begging for them to join a list.
I have a huge customer base that is also a large part of my regular blog readership. Everything I did to get people here was done only once for 37% of my visitors. I never have to expend time or resources to get that traffic back to the site to buy other products, and I didn’t even spend money to get them in the first place. I simply keep them around by putting up regular, original, quality content they can use.
My feeling, having been on both sides now, is that blogging to generate leads, traffic, rankings, links, and customers is a far better use of a blog than blogging to generate money directly on your blog. i.e. treating your blog itself like a business rather than using the traffic gained from blogging to SUPPORT your business which might be on another site, like your Yahoo Store.
At ASC, our most successful clients are the ones who came to us with an already converting product who have hit the ceiling and want to increase their sales by getting more traffic.
- They already know that their product converts into, say, 2% sales. Meaning 2 out of 100 visitors buy their product.
- They already know what their profit margin is on each sale.
- They know they don’t want to continually pay an SEO firm tens of thousands of dollars for work that will only last as long as the engines stay the same. (Good content is the only SEO tactic that stays the same no matter what the engines choose to focus on to keep spammers out.)
- They are tired of paying Google tens of thousands of dollars for advertising that delivers far lower converting traffic to a static site. Or to an ecommerce site that does nothing to engage visitors or generate repeat visitors other than through low-deliverability email reminders.
These clients know that doubling their traffic is at least doubling their profits. And if the traffic converts better than their old traffic, it will do more than double their profits once they learn how to build an authority site.
So blogs are the absolute best way to get better quality traffic to your offers. (Again, this has been tested not just by us but by many others.) Not necessarily as businesses in and of themselves, although many people are making that work too.
And ASC isn’t the be all and end all solution. It’s my product, but I’m not going to make it seem as though people using WordPress outside of ASC are all failing. (just most of them) People who are technically savvy can take WordPress right out of the box, tweak it with their own methods and plugins, and create a serious authority presence in most niches.
Problem is that most people aren’t technically savvy and appreciate having training and a system that is built for them with programmers who keep up with our market and search engine tests and keep the software pumping traffic.
No matter what blog platform you are using, if you are hitting a wall on making your blog profitable, you might want to test getting rid of Adsense and all the penny arcade distractions that aren’t making you any money and start focusing your content like a magnifying glass on your own products or very good selling affiliate products through great, helpful, complete content and building readership.
I’ll tell you what – it’s certainly making me a lot more money than using blogs as glorified Adsense sites.
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Further Reading Of Great Importance On This Subject…
- Chris Garrett on “Short Term Gain Versus Long Term Value“
- One Man’s Goal on “Does Monetizing Your Blog Cost You Readers?”