How to Monetize a Blog
A Comprehensive Guide on How to Monetize your Blog
This blog post will include the history of blogging, techniques for driving traffic to your blog and strategies for monetizing your content.
When it comes to generating revenue from a blog, there are a few different strategies that you can implement.
One of the most effective ways to monetize your blog is by using affiliate marketing strategies, which allow you to generate revenue based on traffic that you drive to particular products or services.
Another popular way to monetize a blog is by placing ads on your site and earning money based on the number of views or clicks that those ads receive.
Before you can start implementing any strategies for monetizing your blog, it’s important to first understand the history of blogging and how it has evolved over time.
In the early days of the internet, blogs were primarily used as an online diary or personal journal, and the content that was posted on these sites was typically very informal and unchanneled.
Over time, however, blogging became more professionalized, with many companies choosing to use a blog as part of their overall marketing strategy.
As the popularity of blogging has grown, so too have the number of different strategies that you can use to monetize your site and drive traffic towards it.
Some effective ways to do this include using social media marketing tactics, writing guest posts on other popular blogs in your industry, and leveraging SEO techniques like keyword research and link-building.
If you’re interested in starting a blog and monetizing it, it’s important to be willing to dedicate the time and resources that are necessary to drive traffic and build your audience.
By focusing on high-quality content creation and implementing effective strategies for driving traffic and engagement, you can start making money from your blog in no time.
Are you on the verge of launching a new business? In need of guidance for your blogging strategy? Engage with us at The Branded Agency, a specialized startup branding agency, to bolster your content marketing strategy and its implementation.
History of Blogging
The history of blogging goes back to the early 90’s, when the first blog was created on Links.net by Justin Hall in 1994. In the early days of blogging, blogs were referred to as “home pages”, which was later changed to “WeBlog” in the late 90’s.
Today, there are over 600 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites; however, the majority of these blogs and websites aren’t very active. As more and more people are spending their time consuming content through podcasts, video and social media, many people wonder if starting a blog is still worthwhile.
Relevance of Blogging Today
Our simple answer to the question “is blogging is still relevant today” is that, while blogging requires time and energy to see a positive impact (i.e., income or traffic), we believe that it can be very beneficial to improve the digital marketing of your brand. Blogs of all sizes can generate significant revenue and traffic to your website, if you are willing to put in the time to learn the strategies and tactics with regards to how to monetize a blog.
How to Monetize a Blog: Strategies and Tactics
In this blog post, we will justify why it’s worth investing your time, energy and effort in creating a high quality blog. Blogging is a long term SEO strategy that has the potential to drive tons of organic traffic to your website over time. Most businesses should incorporate blogging in their digital marketing strategy, as it gives the individual or business an opportunity to be seen as an industry expert. The following sections will provide strategies and tactics that will answer your questions regarding how to monetize a blog.
Blog Content Strategies
If you are planning on starting a new blog, make sure that you take the time to put out high quality and accurate content on a consistent basis.
Blog posts that are 2,000 words or more tend to perform better than shorter blog posts with fewer words. Your goal is to have viewers stay on your website as long as possible, which is why you want to create detailed blog posts that bring value to the reader.
You should aim to publish a new blog post every day, with 20% of your blog posts being long form. If you post a new blog post daily it will provide your readers with an extra reason to frequently visit your website. Your objective should be to have readers incorporate visiting your website/blog into their daily routine. To do so, you should understand your niche audience and write about topics that are valuable to their work-life or lifestyle.
If posting daily is not manageable for you at this time, your objective should be to create and follow a consistent schedule. If you don’t publish on a regular schedule, your viewers won’t know when they should return to your website or if they should return at all.
To summarize, if you are wondering how to monetize a blog, you should start by evaluating or contemplating your blog content strategies. These strategies involve posting high quality long form blogs with at least 2,000 words, on a consistent/regular basis.
Backlink Tactics
When it comes to learning how to monetize a blog, backlink tactics are just as important as your content strategies.
Backlinking is a digital marketing tactic, whereby higher backlinks result in higher organic rankings on search engines. This is because backlinks bring credibility to your blog, justifying the value to readers.
However, just as with blog content, quality trumps quantity when it comes to backlinks. Search engines will weight backlinks differently based on the authority of the domain. So, while it’s difficult to get your links posted/published on well-established domains, it is worth the time and investment in doing so.
You should also include photos in your blog and sharing buttons as it will make it easy for readers to share your blog posts socially. This will help with driving traffic to your blog organically, thus, improving your search engine rankings.
The SEO and backlinking services company Backlinko summarizes the importance of backlinks further on their website.
Keyword Strategies
People who wonder how to monetize a blog often assume that it is a complicated and lengthy process. While successful blogging requires a long-term and planned approach to digital marketing, there are simple strategies that can be implemented to quickly boost traffic and improve your search engine rankings. One of these involves creating and implementing keyword strategies.
It’s important to use SEO tools to help you create a keyword strategy for your blog. Some of these tools we have listed below.
Target Keywords
Yost
Ubersuggest
Surfer SEO
Google Trends or Keyword Planner
In terms of targeting keywords throughout your blog post, we recommend using your title and a keyword/phrase at least 10 times naturally throughout your post. To demonstrate this in action, count the amount of times that we have used “how to monetize a blog” and “digital marketing” throughout this post. However, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing as it may negatively impact your blog post.
If the blogging platform that you are using is WordPress, you can use an SEO tool called Yost to assist you with your keyword strategy.
Another great SEO tool that you can use to analyze your competitors’ keyword strategies and get an idea of search volume for target keywords is Ubersuggest. For more on Ubersuggest, you can visit our blog post Free Marketing Plan Template.
Surfer SEO is another useful tool that will allow you to quickly see search volume and related keywords. You can start using Surfer SEO by conducting a Google search and downloading their Chrome app.
Last but certainly not least, you can use Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and many other SEO tools to assist you with creating and implementing keyword strategies.
Monetization Strategies and Tactics
So far this post has provided the initial strategies and tactics that we recommend to individuals or businesses that don’t know how to monetize a blog. These involve organic approaches that can be incorporated in your digital marketing efforts, such as backlink tactics, blog content and keyword strategies. By using these methods, you will become a well-established blogger and you can then begin to incorporate monetization strategies and tactics to generate revenue and drive traffic through blogging.
Write Sponsored Posts
Incorporate Ads
Sell Digital or Physical Products
Become an Affiliate Marketing
Become a Brand Ambassador
The process of writing sponsored posts, incorporating ads, becoming an affiliate marketer and/or brand ambassador is a two-way street. You may be approached by businesses that are targeting your niche audience; you might reach out to brands that complement your content and writing style; or you may utilize a combination of the two. Whatever the case, you should consider the value that you are providing the partner company, in terms of the return on investment for their digital marketing efforts. They may ask for your monthly views or expect a conversion rate in order to maintain the collaboration. In other words, you should always be diligent and professional when engaging in these types of monetization strategies.
Another approach that you can take to monetization is to sell digital or physical products. Currently, e-books and digital printables are a trendy category that require little to no monetary investment on your part. They can be a very positive digital marketing strategy in terms of generating revenue and driving traffic.
If you’re looking for more information about e-books and digital printables, you should visit the article How to Sell Digital Printables Online by The Balance Small Business.
How Much Money You Can Make from Blogging
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork when it comes to how to monetize a blog by providing some strategies and tactics, you may wonder how much money you can make from blogging.
For well-established blogs with significant viewership, we described some of these monetization strategies in the above section. The easiest and most common of these strategies is to allow Google to show ads on your website. Ad space comes in many forms; you can offer banner ads, advertorials and other forms of website advertisement. Another easy and common method is to sign up for an affiliate membership with Amazon and post affiliate product links on your blog.
By engaging in these monetization strategies you will begin to generate revenue and drive traffic, which brings us to how much money you can make from blogging.
This is dependent on a few different factors:
What industry is your blog associated with?
How much traffic does your blog generate?
What countries is your traffic primarily coming from?
For optimal monetization, you should implement the strategies and tactics that we’ve provided, and you may want to consider geotargeting or writing about topics that are related to a specific industry.
Research shows that top bloggers in their niche make up to $500,000 per month, while small and medium sized blogs in their niche make $2,000-$25,000 per month.
In other words, (as we stated in the beginning) blogging can be a very profitable and valuable digital marketing strategy for individuals and businesses.
Examples of Monetized Blogs
Gizmodo
Gizmodo has a niche audience of technology-related enthusiasts. They provide a wide-range of articles, from technology reviews to news-worthy topics. Their monetization strategy is primarily ad-based and they generate over $300,000 a month in revenue. While not all bloggers will be this successful, you get an idea as to the amount of content that is produced and how investing time and effort can pay off in a huge way.
By Sophia Lee
By Sophia Lee is a great example of a blog that was created by an individual that used tips and tricks within the blogging industry to transform her hobby into a profitable business. Her content focuses on lifestyle sectors like home decor, cleaning and others, and she has 100,000+ regular visitors. She is also very open about her income as a blogger; she will send her income reports to you if you provide your email. Her latest report showed over $40,000/month in revenue. She has monetized her blog through ad content, affiliate marketing and selling digital printables.
The Minimalists
The Minimalists is a blog created by two individuals, who promote minimalism. While their approach to blogging may appear to be more “minimal” than most that have built a successful blog, they emphasize quality over quantity and see the result of this by their high search engine ranking and monetization. They still incorporate all of the strategies and tactics that successful bloggers use; the difference is that they know their target audience and they bring value to these readers accordingly (through a minimal approach that keeps readers coming back). Their primary method of monetization is through their podcasts, films, books, and additional resources.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding as to how to monetize a blog and will start incorporating the digital marketing strategies and tactics as stated in this article!
