5 Easy Ways to Monetize your Blog

To earn money from blogging, you must know what you are doing. It is not enough to consistently churn out good content on your blog. Deliberate steps must be taken to monetize the blog before you can effectively make money from it. That is in addition to doing everything blog-related like networking and content writing. By the time you have a real hang on your blog, it is imperative to constantly and regularly update it, test it, and diligently work it to grow it. That requires some bit of patience and practice though. It is by doing these things you can only expect to have some measure of success with it provided you put in enough time and resources growing the blog. Making money from your blog depends on how it is monetized. Following are some of the most popular monetization ways most bloggers usually adopt to make money. 

 
1. Affiliate Marketing

You can earn money from your blog as an affiliate. It is one popular way bloggers earn commissions paid out by product merchants. The arrangement is quite simple. Bloggers simply place unique links or codes on their content linking products on third party websites of product merchants. If anyone clicks on these links and makes a purchase, the blogger earns a commission from the sale. Quite a simple and effective way to earn money from a blog no doubt!

2. Selling Products

You can list products for sale on your e-commerce store and use your blog to promote them. Once the products are listed for sale, you simply use your blogs as an advertisement tool for the e-commerce store. If you sell your own products, orders are taken directly from your website, payments made and you supply the products yourself. Even if you don’t have your own products to sell yet, you can sell the products of other merchants by way of dropshipping. By this method, orders are taken from your website and the products are supplied by a third party merchant who will be responsible for handling, packaging, shipping and delivery to the buyers. You earn a commission from each sale originating from your blog website.
 
3. Offering Services
 
As a blogger, you can offer various services on your blog. Depending on your skillsets, you can sell your skills profitably online. Such skills as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing and suchlike skills people are interested in and are prepared to pay for. You can also offer writing services, programming services or even Virtual Assistant services to busy Executives. If you have any of such valuable skills, you can through your blog advertise them properly and market yourself as a freelancer. That way, you’ll be able to earn good money from your skills.

4. Advertising

This is one of the most common ways of earning money from blogging. It is also very easy to understand and utilize once your blog is up and running and its readership is growing satisfactorily. You can work with many brands to advertise their products/services on your blog mostly through banner ads, codes or links. It is one easy way to earn money by way of paid commissions once your blog has garnered an audience.

5. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by displaying ads next to your blog content. These ads are served through very unique and specialized codes from Google. With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your blog visitors and even customize the look and feel of ads to match your site. Google AdSense provides a way for bloggers/publishers to earn money from their blog/online content. AdSense works by matching ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products. Since these advertisers pay different prices for different ads, the amount you earn varies. You earn money from AdSense through click-throughs and page views and the rates differ. You can for instance earn up to $1 for 1000 page views. 

8 Website Ideas to Earn Extra Income Online

Worldwide, internet users now top 4.5 billion. Meaning, more and more people are now using the internet for business and sundry activities and they access via websites. For people doing business online, they need websites that attract considerable traffic. Websites with good traffic inflow are well positioned for making money online with the right ideas. What that means is that a decent website can earn a significant income if the ideas are right. It is all a matter of ideas, good ideas and you can earn extra income from your website. In that quest, here are eight tested and proven website ideas that can help you earn extra income online.

1. Start an Affiliate Blog Website

This idea is to simply create targeted content that will drive inbound traffic to your blog website. If you embed affiliate links carefully on the content, any click through these links and a purchase is made earns you some affiliate commission. The more affiliate products you link to and the more of these products that are sold through your links, the more money you earn from your efforts.

2. Create a Recipe Website

If you have culinary skills, you can create a recipe website and earn some income. Thousands of people search online daily for recipes and meal inspirations. If you’re creative enough to come up with some unique recipes, you can share them online through your recipe website. That helps to create awareness and curiosity. If your recipe website starts to get good traffic, you can take the next step to earn money by selling online cooking courses, advertising, or even affiliate marketing to your audience.

3. Establish a Travel Website

Yeah, the human race is always on the move. That means endless travels. If you enjoy traveling and you like to travel, you can capitalize on something you love doing to earn money. You can take beautiful scenic and destinations photographs; graphically tell stories about the trials and tribulations you’ve experienced in your journeys. Such content will attract an audience with interest in travels to your website. When your following begins to grow, you’ll be able to collaborate with different travel products for sponsored content to earn money. You can promote affiliate products related to travels and earn commissions. In addition, you can sell your photos online as prints; contact various destinations or hotels for discounted or free reservations, and lots more.

4. Create an eCommerce Store

You can significantly increase your potential to earn considerable income online by creating an eCommerce store since more and more shoppers are now going online to make purchases. That comes down to about 65% of all internet users. Now, that’s a very huge market out there. An eCommerce store will help you to get a foot into this huge market at very limited costs and you’ll be able to attract international shoppers as well. If you choose, you can sell your own products and ship them directly to buyers. Alternatively and as a good way to save up on costs, you can implement a dropshipping program. Through it, you can sell products without bothering about warehousing and shipping. The products manufacturers will be responsible for shipping these products directly from their warehouses to the buyers.

5. Start a Personal Blog

A personal blog is content marketing in which anyone who knows something useful that others will like to read can start writing about it. What that means is that you can blog on virtually any niche. The idea is to create readable, engaging, and exciting content that attracts people back to your platform.  As your blog following starts to grow, then you can consider monetizing it. This you can do in many creative ways such as sponsored content, affiliate marketing, advertising, or through Google AdSense. The higher your website traffic, the more advertisers are willing to pay for placements on your blog and the more money you earn from the blog.

6. Build a Job Website

Ever heard of Jobberman.com? Yeah, that’s a great job website. Millions of people worldwide are online daily searching for jobs, any jobs. Having a job website is one great way you can earn cool income online. The approach is simple and straight forward. You can decide to post available jobs to your website and you earn residual income every time someone visits the site.  Or, you can decide to connect job seekers to jobs as a recruiter and you earn on fees. If you have a well-designed job website, you can create a membership page that allows detailed profile creation. This can include resumes, job preferences, personal information, and more. To build website traffic fairly quickly, it is advisable to consider keeping profile registration free, along with a personalized platform for fees paying members. You can make the site more attractive by including early access to job postings, salary insights, and on-going career tips as part of the content.

7. Build a Humor Website

No doubt most people like humor, real humor that helps to brighten their days in a world full of endless struggles and stress. A humor website can become very popular very quickly for this reason. Humor is a very delicate subject matter though. Make sure that the content you post isn’t protected by copyright to avoid being barred from search engine results. Be careful not to engage in humor that denigrates race, ethnicity or religion. These are no go areas. When launching your humor-based content, you can carefully search online for various types of humor and determine which niche you’d like to cover. As your following grows, you can then consider monetization by way of paid ads and automated ads campaign such as Google Adsense.

8. Develop a Review Platform

Most online users particularly on social media like to share personal experiences with restaurants, hotels, resorts, golf courses, businesses, and local travels/destinations. A review website can help interested people connect local establishments with considerable website traffic. You can earn income on a review website by offering highlighted locations, top search placement, and preferred business packages. As your membership grows, your earnings grow in tandem.

Wrapping Up

These eight website ideas may not be the only income earning ideas from a website but they’re certainly some of the easiest to implement to earn income. They all have great long-term earning potentials. What is common to all of them is good content which must be shared regularly and consistently to attract traffic. Your website visitors are the traffic and no visitor returns to a website if there’s nothing interesting on the website either to read or view frequently. To earn money online with website ideas, you’ve got to be very patient. A website takes quality time to establish authority and recurring traffic because it must contend with great competition which the internet is notorious for.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

Due to the prevailing pandemic, millions of people now appear to have lost their businesses and means of livelihoods. Many people now face grossly reduced incomes or no incomes at all. It is simply natural to expect such people to look for alternative ways of survival. Many now think rightly of website monetization and making money online. As a result, the internet seems increasingly very attractive at the moment. It is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times. Taking your small business online and exploring all avenues to have the site monetized has become a very attractive prospect. If you are thinking that way as well here is what works. If you are able to create a good website, offer for sale an excellent product or service from the site, you too can make money online. Next step is how to promote your website successfully online to attract good traffic. This website traffic is what you really need to earn money by way of monetization. The following are very popular ways to monetize your website for that purpose.

1. Selling a Product/Service

Having a great product or service to sell online is one very positive way to earn money online. If you are selling your own product or service, all the sales revenue accrue to you. At minimal investment of cash, the ROI is usually very attractive if you are selling your own product or service online. Just think out of the box, create a product or service that easily solves problems for many people and wham, you are in business. Draw inspiration from your passion and talent to create a solution by way of a product or a service, and make things simple, you’ll get customers in no time.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model of linking merchants to consumers and you get paid commissions for your efforts. If you promote affiliate links from your website and purchases are made via those links, you get paid. That simply means earning commissions from promoting and selling merchants’ products to your website visitors. This becomes simpler and better paying if you sign up for the programs of large e-commerce affiliate sites like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba. When you sign-up for their programs, you will then have access to products’ links to promote on your website. Include these links in the content you write to recommend various e-commerce products you feel like promoting on your website. When people click on these links and purchase any products, you earn a percentage commission from the sales. It is as simple as that.

3. Membership Fees

Charging membership fees is one sure way to earn from your website. To qualify for such fees, the info you put out from your website must be highly informative, authoritative, exclusive and in very high demand. Good content suitable for membership on websites include market research findings, webinars, or podcasts. If you create such content, you can then ask your website visitors who desperately need the info to pay a fee before having access to the content. That way, you make money steadily for as long as your content is in demand. 

4. Sponsored Posts

After you launch your website, you must promote it vigorously to grow traffic and audience. When the audience is big enough, you can reach out to bigger marketing businesses that operate in the same niche you are to find out if they are interested in your website traffic. If they show interest, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. You can offer to include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site. If they realize that they are getting traffic from your efforts, you can then cut a sponsorship deal with them. That simply means steady money and income.

5. Website Traffic Reselling

As a successful marketer, you can actually resell your website traffic if it is huge and steady. If your website traffic gets to such high level, say in the thousands, you can then decide to join platforms like Google Ads or Ezoic by applying to them to place advertisements on your website. Google Adsense is particularly very popular at this and the code they give you to insert on your website is very efficient in calculating the “views” and “hits” on the ads they run on your website. That is what determines what they pay you as a publisher of these ads. It is only when your website traffic sees or clicks on the ads that you are entitled to be paid. Alternatively, you can reach out to marketers, merchants and other advertisers directly. By displaying their banners and links on your website, you are helping them to advertise their products or services. You earn money from these efforts through the clicks that emanate from your website.

How to Blog Like a Pro

Do you know something others don’t know? Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you express yourself well in writing? Great if you do. You can be a blogger and a good one at that just like the Pros. Now, how badly do you want to blog like a Pro? Simple! Just do exactly what Pros do. The good news is, Pros don’t do anything much different from what other bloggers do. They only manage to do better and differently same things other bloggers do in blogosphere. That is what makes them Pros. Here is how you too can get started if you want to blog like a Pro:

#1 Decide on a Domain Name

You may ask what’s in a name. In blogging, the answer is a lot. This is more so when your domain name will automatically become your brand name. In choosing a name, don’t go with the Joneses unless you want to struggle for recognition over a long time. You may even be crowded out easily if you are not lucky. You must make this choice very carefully because your web success may directly depend on it when search engines come to recognize it. Any name which resonates with your chosen niche always gets better results. AnyName.com is ok provided it is brandable and memorable. It must align with what you’ve decided for your brand recognition and it is available for web registration. 


 
#2 Carefully Choose Your Blog Niche

If you want to blog like Pro, you must carefully choose a niche and stick with it over the long haul. Your blog can not grow if it is not known for something unique to it even if it is just one thing. That is the reason you should not go for something too general like blogging for food or fitness. You can settle for a unique type of food or for some brand of fitness unique to pregnant women, to athletes or the elderly. These unique types of niches are likely to earn you recognition faster than general niches. Any niche you choose must be a combination of your talent, passion and marketing opportunity if you want to blog like Pro. 

#3 Get a Custom Logo

You may choose to get professionals to design a unique logo for you with a little fee or you go for free themes available in the WordPress repository. Either way, what matters is to get a unique logo which fits the niche theme you’ve chosen. A unique logo adds to your professionalism too. You must therefore be careful to settle for a design that is not excessively colorful and distracting. It must easily appeal to the eye and good for readability and page load speed both of which can help the SEO of your blog.

#4 Install a Self-Hosted Blog

You can easily have access to many blogging platforms on the web but some are free while some are not. The platforms that are not free may require that you pay a small rental fee monthly, quarterly or annually. The choice is yours to make. Free blog platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. appear to be most popular with many bloggers. However, there is some snag with many of the free platforms. Most of them do not allow commercial use of their platforms. Some others will not allow you to own your web-property. For these reasons, most Pros prefer to register and host their own domains with reputable Domain Hosts even at a premium.

#5 Write and Publish Your First Content

This is where what you know and are passionate about will come to the fore. Just relax, collect your thoughts and start writing something great. Be ready for the long haul because blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. The rules are no that strict, but always ensure the information you are giving out is authentic, rich, personal and unique enough for other persons to be interested in reading it. Your success as a blogger is heavily dependent on how much of rich, informative and educative information you can give out about your chosen niche in a prolonged basis. That is where your knowledge and expertise really come to the fore. It is this knowledge/information that helps you to acquire loyal readership and followership. Before making the first post on your content, be sure that your “About Me” page is carefully written out to tell readers who you are and what you can do and have done in the past. Most people always want to know who exactly they are dealing with before reading blog posts.

#6 Adopt a Good SEO Strategy

This stage involves some technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you adopt a good SEO strategy because how the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent there by search engines. Simply put, SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is a unique way of playing around with and positioning keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.


 
#7 Install Web Analytics
 
Analytics are very helpful in measuring results, carrying out research and even spying on other bloggers. Google Analytics is most preferable here but be sure you configure its search console as well. It is simple to deploy and use. Just sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. After signing up, Google will send you a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your blog you need to track and measure their performance. Once your Google Analytics is in place, you can daily track the number of visitors, to which page, sources of the traffic and even the countries and geographical regions of the world the traffic is coming from. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. Through it, you will also be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site. It gives you the right information you really need to rejig your SEO strategy from time to time depending on your blog readers’ behavior online.

#8 Install Essential Plugins

As soon as your blog is up and running, it becomes a very valuable web property which you must protect and enhance its functionality. That is when you need to install some essential and useful plugins. You may get some plugins free and you may have to pay for some others. What you use depends on what you aim to achieve or get from your blog. Here are some of the most popular plugins with bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that have links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. They get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Helps to back up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox.

#9 Get Your Blog on Social Media

As most marketers now know, social media is the place to be. This is because of the huge popularity of social media and the ease of sharing information and interaction. One blog can go viral in minutes via sharing to hundreds of thousands of persons all over the internet. As soon as you start publishing, just get your blog on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. That helps to put your blog before a very huge audience where you can easily source customers from the “likes” and “followers” you get on these platforms. If you do so, you will notice from your Google Analytics dashboard that your first set of visitors will be coming in good numbers from social media sites.

#10 Monetize your Blog

Yeah, this is the icing on the cake. Pro bloggers get to make real good money from their blogs when they monetize them. Some Forbes Research Results indicate that many Pro bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some posting much higher figures. That is good money no doubt. For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. Display ads as monetized with Google Adsense is readily one of the easiest ways to make money with your blog. But, there are many others which Pros have learned to combine into making multiple streams of income. It is also possible to earn money through Pay-Per-View, PPV, Pay-Per-Click, PPC and direct product ads on your website if your blog has become sufficiently popular by way of good traffic inflow. Other methods include, selling E-books, Lessons, Lectures, How-to videos, Webinars and many other electronic products which you can create yourself, advertise on your blog and sell to buyers online.