How to Monetize a Low-Traffic Blog

With the increasing popularity of blogging as a credible way to make money online, many experienced bloggers tend to over emphasize the real importance of traffic to a blog. Yes, every blog needs traffic, mostly real organic traffic to make money, but you can still make money with your blog even if the inbound traffic is not yet fantastic. If the number of visitors to your blog is still considerably low, do not be discouraged in your blogging efforts, you can still monetize it to make money. To do so, you don’t really need the often recommended monetization strategies like affiliate marketing, paid ads, Google Adsense and a host of others because these methods depend on huge traffic before they make good money for you. Not to worry though! You can still make money from your blog even if it is yet to be hugely popular with a lot of inbound traffic.


 
Here is what works to make money from a low-traffic blog.

Freelance Blogging

You can make money from blogging by blogging for other sites and brands. By doing so, the money you make will not depend directly on the number of visitors you attract daily. You will make money by cooperating directly with brands, agencies, and corporate bodies who are always in search of skillful bloggers to work with. All you need are relevant skillsets such as WordPress, SEO, Social Media and persuasive skills. You must in addition to these skills be able to really understand the audience of any particular brand. If you understand the audience well enough and what it needs, it becomes easier for you to create relevant content that spurs them into action. To be a successful freelance blogger, you can incorporate in your own blog the option to hire you as a freelance blogger. More like an open invitation though! The most popular option however is by registering as an agency on any major freelancing websites, such as Problogger. Apart from making you look more professional, registering as an agency with a freelancing website helps to position you to be well known as an in-demand freelance blogger and not just an ordinary freelancer who may neither have the requisite skills nor experience in blogging.

Virtual Coaching
 
If your blog has limited traffic and you are keen on finding a credible way to make money from blogging, you can look the way of virtual coaching. No matter what niche your blog is involved in, it will not get the desired effect on readers if it does not affect them in one of or all three ways of business, life or personal. Once your blog manages to help provide solutions to its readers along these three ways, it is bound to be effective. It doesn’t really matter the niche of your blog, once it offers online coaching service to motivated consumers, you can make some money. By giving expert advice on your blog through consistent content, you can sell your expertise as a business, life or personal coach. Even if your blog only gets limited traffic, you can still get your expertise to go viral by way of social media channels to attract real patronage and you make money as a result.

Selling Online Courses
 
One other profitable strategy to monetize a low-traffic is to create and sell courses online. If your blog niche has to do with exercises and fitness, you can create and sell “how-to” courses to help people benefit from your knowledge in their own private times and chosen places of convenience for them. Just find any popular area of human need you have the knowledge and you can create and sell courses on it to make money, more particularly now that virtual learning is on the rise. Any course you can create which somehow helps to address and solve major human needs/problems, people will buy it from you online if it is well packaged and presented.


 
Virtual Summit

For many bloggers even those with very low inbound traffic to their blogs, a new way to make money online nowadays is by way of virtual summits. This too is another way of selling expert knowledge online. Because most bloggers already know that Media Influencers usually bring engagement, expansion of reach, and credibility with them, they now use virtual summits to link up with such Influencers with a view building long-lasting relationships. Now, everyone I know always wants to hear directly from the experts. These are people who have made it or are still making it. This is the major selling point of virtual summits. Virtual summits are basically visual contents like short video interviews on any topic of interest with industry experts, celebrities, other bloggers, and business industry experts and so on. Viewers are then given the “opt-in” opportunity to subscribe and watch these videos online over a limited period of time. They need to purchase access pass to view these videos. When the time expires, they will need to purchase more access time to watch more and this costs money which the blogger makes as income. If you choose a good topic of discussion and your experts/influencers are well known, they come along with their own audience which helps you to grow your own audience as well. You can make money by selling your back-end product to this enhanced audience and from the summit subscription fees.

Private Label Rights, PLRs

What really attracts bloggers to selling PLR products is because they save themselves the drudgery and stress of having to create the products/content afresh. Even if your expertise is very limited on any field, you can easily repackage the works of an expert in the field and place under your own label before selling. Basically, PLR products are pre-written content that you can claim as your own without incurring any legal action from plagiarism. It is one clever way to leverage other people’s products and use it to create your own products even if your expert knowledge in the field is severely limited. You can use PLR articles to write a Kindle book related to any important topic of your choosing then sell the book from your blog. On the alternative, if you want to improve the readership and popularity of your blog, you can also use PLR articles to generate content for it. If you want to make money with PLR products, you must take cognizance of these three major attributes. Firstly, they must be published in limited circulation. Secondly, they must be written by a reputable and well known author. Thirdly, they must have been recently developed. It is only PLR products with these attributes that can help you to easily make money online.
 

14 Tips to Reinvent Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Even if you are experienced in affiliate marketing, there are times you get stuck in a rot. That is the time your business needs reinventing. The quickest way out is to expand your knowledge about the business and to review your routine practices. By expanding your knowledge about affiliate marketing, you stand to benefit immensely from expert tips. Whatsoever tips/information you learn from experts, no matter how little can be applied to reinvent your affiliate marketing business for better results.

These here tips are strongly recommended by many expert marketers if you want to reinvent your affiliate marketing business.

1. Sell More Big Ticket Products

Characteristically, affiliate marketers invest the same amount of efforts to sell all products no matter how small. It thus makes good marketing sense to sell more of big ticket products that bring in bigger commissions and revenues. If you target the right audience with big ticket products, your business tends to make more money as a result.


 
2. Never Pay to Join Affiliate Programs

Most high-commissions-paying and rewarding affiliate programs are free to join. Many train you free and provide free tools for you to do the business. It is mostly scam affiliate programs that demand money from affiliates. The reason you must be weary of affiliate programs that demand fees to join. It is thus advisable never to pay to join any affiliate marketing program. When any affiliate program demands that you pay a “membership fee” or “training costs”, it is more than likely just a scam. What they are mainly after is to simply take your money and that is it. Good and reputable affiliate marketing programs are free because the product merchant companies earn most of their revenues from the traffic and sales their partner affiliates manage to send their way.

3. Market Only Products Related to Your Website Niche
 
If you have managed to build some good audience/followers over time, it shows the audience shares same interest in the business niche you have identified with. It is thus easy for you to promote special products of mutual interest to such audience. It pays therefore to simply pick affiliate programs that are related to the general topic/niche of your website. When readers visit your website, it is only because they like and identify with the content. They generally see your subject matter as helping to solve problems related to their needs. As a marketer, if you choose the right ads targeted at such audience, you can succeed better at marketing to them and making more sales as a result.

4. Use long-tail keywords

With the help of Google’s free keyword tool, you can search for relevant long-tail keywords to help promote your affiliate marketing products. Such keywords tend to lend some form of uniqueness to the product you are marketing which is what tends to make it stand out on Search Engines. They help to give it some bit of advantage over its competitors thereby enhancing its ranking on Search Engines. When the product manages to get higher Search Engine rankings, it gets searched better and more frequently. The product attracts more inbound traffic and better patronage as a result.

5. Be Open and Honest With Your Readers

Online business marketing thrives on trust and honesty engenders trust. No good marketer ever wants to be caught in the web of dishonesty. By being open and honest with your readers, you can build trust more quickly. Many affiliate marketers have since discovered that it doesn’t really pay to be dishonest. Your readers are more likely to believe and click on your ads if they have a very good cause to believe you as an honest affiliate marketer.

6. Borrow Ideas from Other Affiliate Marketers

It helps in affiliate marketing to always study and even follow the activities of other affiliate marketers. That is with a view to knowing what to do well and how they do it. Doing so enables you to borrow and adopt good and workable ideas from other affiliate marketers particularly those in the same business niche you are. You can easily get useful ideas and information if you visit your competitor’s website/blog and subscribe to their newsletters. Doing so can help you to regularly analyze how and what they do best that enables them to get good traffic, leads and sales. That is how to get good information on which marketing techniques work best for others and how you can best use same and even improve on the techniques to make more sales. 


 
7. Use Free Shipping to Deliver Products

Free shipping remains a very attractive advertising gimmick which works wonders for marketers. This is because it touches on reducing costs for buyers, the reason buyers like it. As a marketer, you can use free shipping/delivery as a major incentive to entice your customers. If however your own business lacks adequate financial resources to ship products free of charge, you can consider offering combined shipping to save your customers’ money and positively drive sales. For this reason, if you are designing an internet marketing campaign or mailer, you must remember to include the very important phrase “Free Shipping” in the subject line of the e-mail message. That phrase alone at times may be all it takes to get your message recipient to open the message and the message reaches and impacts its target as expected.

8. Research Products Vendors Thoroughly
 
A good research study always helps marketers to gather very useful information and data about product merchants and vendors. It is about the most reliable way to detect and avoid vendors who may be running some scams in the name of business. Such scams may include cheating affiliates out of commissions, underpaying commissions, dodging commissions payment altogether and even promoting non available or fake products. There are quite a few vendors out there online running disreputable businesses and many unsuspecting persons sometimes fall victims. You cannot be too careful in thoroughly checking out the persons you want to do business with online if you want to avoid scammers.

9. Learn From Evergreen Blog Posts

In blogging business, evergreen blogs are immensely valuable to any affiliate marketing business. You can look back to detect the content you’ve posted in the past that continues to attract good traffic. Next is to identify and keep track of the keywords you used in the content. When making new posts, you can insert affiliate links which are appropriate for the topic then reuse the keywords from the earlier popular post to help drive more traffic to your website/blog. That is one great way to get more traffic and even clickthroughs.

10. Create and Use Marketing Videos Generously

Visual content marketing materials like videos are often very good for inbound traffic and even clickthroughs. If you can create a series of videos showing expert demonstrations or how-to’s, or some other content which people will want to watch, it helps to attract traffic. It is easy to embed these videos with your affiliate links and you get hits through reviews and referrals. That is good for inbound traffic.

11. Promote More Products with High Demand
 
Of course, in marketing parlance, the more popular a product is, the more it is in demand. There are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate products out there which affiliates can freely promote. It is advisable however to choose and promote only products that resonate with your readers. These are the kinds of products that usually get your site’s readers to come back over and over because there is something about your site that resonates with them. That shows popularity about what you are promoting from your site. Your personal and genuine recommendation of products easily gets the attention of your readers because of the trust they already have in you. Converting them to buyers becomes a natural consequence of such efforts. 


 
12. Promote Only Links of High Quality Products

Yes indeed! High quality products are almost always in very high demand. It therefore makes good marketing sense to only add your promotional links to products you know are high quality if you want to make better sales. Because your readers already have some trust in you, they will rely on your judgement if you let them know you’ve done the legwork for them by vetting inferior products and only bringing them the very best. For more credibility, be sure you check sales pages before adding your promotional link to products. The essence is to be sure these sales pages are also attesting to the high quality of such products. Similar effects too as choosing to promote only those products and companies that have built good and solid reputations which are well known!

13. Build a Credible E-Mail List

A credible e-mail list may take some time to build but the effort is well worth it since the list serves as a very valuable marketing asset that is lasting and durable.  When readers stop by your site and visit your affiliate link, you only get one chance to make a sale. But by adding readers consistently to your e-mail list, you get unlimited chances to send follow-up broadcasts and e-mails telling your readers/customers about your products. You also get the chance to send specific ads about specific products to specific e-mail recipients. You get better chances of making multiple and repeated sales as a result.

14. Choose and Use Only a Unique Domain Name

Because of the vastness, depth and peculiarity of the internet, uniqueness is a very good asset. Uniqueness means identity which if good has unlimited rewards for your business. Therefore, when you are developing your affiliate marketing website, you must remember to register a relative and unique domain name with a reliable hosting service. Your domain name should reflect on the products/services you will be offering and the business niche of the site. When Search Engines highlight and pick on this information, it helps to get readers looking for information on such products to your website. By registering such unique domain name with a reliable hosting service, it stands the chance of getting picked up easily by all the major Search Engines. That is good for unlimited inbound organic traffic.