Written By: Farhan Musavi
A complete
list with descriptions of each method will run to the length of a book. So in
this article I’ll discuss only five ways how you can start generating money
from your blog.
2) Google AdSense
3) Private ad sales
4) Amazon affiliate marketing
5) Selling your e-book
Farhan Musavi founded Major Journal to share with others
whatever he learned in his three years of blogging and writing career. Get his
free book Concision: A No-Grammar Guide to Good
Writing.
I know at
least six dozen ways how blogs make money. And I’m no expert.
Let that
sink in.
Yes there
are at least six dozen ways how your blog can make money.
Image courtesy of Daniel Chang at Flickr |
If you are
curious about other methods or have any questions, just drop in a comment
below. I’ll make sure to reply.
Let’s get
the obvious stuff out of the way first.
None of the
methods of monetizing a blog will work if you have no traffic.
The advice
many amateur bloggers give is keep building your blog and one day an audience
will come. That’s wrong.
Build an
audience and opportunity will come. That’s the correct advice.
Anyways,
let’s begin.
1) Freelance writing
How can I
ignore freelance writing when I’m writing for a freelance writing blog?
You can use
your blog to
a) showcase your writing skills; and
b) get increased visibility thus
acquiring more clients for freelance writing.
Besides,
when applying for a freelance writing gig, it looks far more professional to
send potential clients links to articles you’ve published on your blog
instead of sending Word files as attachments.
And if those
published articles would have received a lot of comments and social media
shares, good for you. That tells the client that you can write articles that
resonate with readers.
One quick
tip. If you want to acquire clients through your blog, create a Hire Me page
and put it in a prominent position. Don’t assume prospective clients will
understand you are available for work without a Hire Me page.
2) Google AdSense
This is one
of the most popular methods to monetize a blog. And though for some reasons I
haven’t tried it ever, I’ve heard good things about it from other bloggers.
I just did a
Google search for “books on writing” and I was displayed the following page.
As you can
see, apart from the search results, I was also displayed some banner ads and
text ads.
If I click
on them, Google will get a commission.
Now Google
allows website owners to put these same ads on their websites/blogs. When
people click on them, Google will share their commission with the site owner.
This programme
is known as Google AdSense.
The average click through rate (CTR) of display ads is
0.1%. And one click
generates $0.5 on average.
This means
if your blog gets 1,000 impressions per day, only one person is going to click
on the ad and you’ll make $0.5. That’s $15 per month.
This may
sound meager but note this is the revenue from only one ad. The more ads you
publish the more money you can make.
3) Private ad sales
Private ad
sales are different from the AdSense kind of ads because here you—the blog owner—will set the terms.
With AdSense
type of ads you have to just accept their terms and conditions and then publish
their ad code on your site. Then you have to wait to earn a minimum amount before
they can write you a cheque.
However in
private ad sales you are in charge.
Most
bloggers selling private ad spaces charge a fixed amount of money on a per
month basis. This means, for example, that you’ll earn money even if nobody
clicks on the ads.
Also, you
can ask for an upfront fee. Or charge a 50% advance. Tell advertisers to pay
through PayPal or online bank transfer. Or do whatever suits you.
I know it
sounds quite comfortable but I reiterate that you’ll only be able to get
advertisers if you are getting a lot of traffic.
Ad rates for
private ad sales depend upon a lot of factors and thus vary a lot between
blogs. However it’s typical to charge $1.5 for 1,000 impressions for a 125 X
125 (pixels) ad in the top side bar.
Note this is
three times more revenue than a typical Google AdSense ad.
To put it
another way if your blog gets 1,000 page impressions a day you can charge $45
per month for the ad described above.
Not bad, I
would say.
4) Amazon affiliate marketing
Register on
Amazon’s website for an affiliate account. Select some products from their
store you would like to promote. Generate and grab the HTML code from their
system. Paste it onto your blog.
If a reader
clicks on that link—technically known
as an affiliate link—and buys something from Amazon, you’ll get a commission.
This is known as Amazon affiliate marketing.
For an
example, see my article on recommended books on writing. All links to Amazon there are
affiliate links.
Now before
you inundate your blog with hundreds of affiliate links, know a few things.
Recommend
only the products you yourself have used or trust. Recommending bad products
will jeopardize your reputation and your readers won’t trust you even when you
will promote the good ones.
Use products
relevant to your niche. An affiliate link to a three piece suit from a book
blog won’t just look cheesy, but will also project you in a negative light.
Your readers will think you are too desperate to make money out of them, which
is not good for your brand.
5) Selling your e-book
As a freelance
writer you may have self-published an e-book. Or plan to do so one day.
Did you know
that apart from selling it on websites like Amazon and Flipkart, you can sell
it directly from your own blog?
Why would
you want to sell from your blog? Because you’ll make more money.
Amazon
normally pays the author 70% of the selling price and keeps the remaining 30%.
Other merchants offer similar rates.
But if you
sell the e-book directly from your site you can keep up to 95% in royalties.
The
remaining 5% will be charged by the system, the tool, you’ll use to handle transactions
through your blog.
There are
many such tools available in the market with different payment structures.
One popular
option is E-junkie which charges you a flat $5 per
month fee for files less than 50 MB.
To give you
an idea of space measures, the PDF version of my 60 page e-book has a file size of only 0.725 MB. So
50 MB is more than enough for e-book sales.
I hope I’ve
given you enough material to think about.
I’ll be
hanging around in the comments below so feel free to say or ask anything.
About the author:
Thank you for accepting my guest post.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed writing it. :)