Blogging Article by:Roy Werner Karlsen
Ok this is it!
If you are like most people, this is the ultimate level of what you want to achieve for your blog...
Monetization!
I hope by now you can see the path that I've been leading you along. It's been a path where I've helped you understand all the essential building blocks, the foundations, for setting yourself up with a really powerful income-generating blog.
Like I said on previous occasions... it's no use trying to monetize your blog unless you have first been able to provide some excellent value over the long term, built up some nice traffic, and also a nice consistent following of keen fans.
Only after this, are you able to start making a decent income from your blogging activities.
It's different for everyone, but as an example of one of the blogs I'm currently working on, www.freemagiclive.com, my emphasis there has been to create an extreme amount of value upfront for a whole 6 month period, to generate a consistent stream of traffic, and to build a nice and solid fan base of rabid fans.
From my point of view, the blog now is finally ready to get monetized only now after 6 months!
But of course, your path be very different to mine. It may only take you one month, or even 3 months to get to a similar stage. It all depends on the kind of niche you are in, the kind of content you are creating, and how well you can connect with the people inside you niche.
So, if it's already been 4 months, and you have not made a cent from your efforts yet, that may be ok. If you're like me, and only want to start monetizing your blog after 6 months, after you've built up some nice content, and a nice following, that's fine.
But the bottom line is that you really try to provide massive value up front first, BEFORE you even start to think about monetizing your blog.
I'm hammering this into you, because it's absolutely critical to your success as a blogger... at least for the method of blogging that Yaro and I are teaching.
So, with that out of the way, lets get into the meat of todays's lesson...
There are 2 main models for monetizing your blog...
1. The easy, but lower leverage model
2. And the hard, but more profitable model
Lets first have a look at...
-------------------------------------------------- 1. The Easy, But Lower Leverage Model --------------------------------------------------
The basic premise of the easy model, is that you sell advertising space on your blog, a bit like a magazine does with advertisements inside their pages.
If you know how to get traffic to your blog, it's simply a matter of letting other businesses now about it and getting them to advertise their products and services on your site.
And of course, there are a number of different ways of doing this. Let's take a look at 3 easy methods:
-------------------------------------------------- a. Contextual Advertising --------------------------------------------------
One of the easiest and fastest ways for setting up ads on your site is to use something like Google Adsense, which is one method of contextual advertising.
Setting up something like this could literally take you about 30 minutes to get set up and ready to start making an income (sometimes there is a 48 hr time lag between signing up and your ads going live).
All you have to do, is sign up to the Google Adsense program and then put the right code on your blog to start displaying ads from other people on your website.
While this is one of the easiest, and fastest ways of setting up ads on your site, it's certainly not the most profitable way. But it's simple and easy and may be a good starting point for you just to get a feel for it.
There are other similar services around, but basically, they all work on the same premise: you provide the traffic, and they automatically provide the links to advertisers on your site.
Here's the page for signing up for the Google Adsense program:
https://www.google.com/adsense/
Other similar services include:
- Yahoo's Publisher Network
- Chitika
- WidgetBucks
Let's now take look at the next level up from this...
-------------------------------------------------- b. Banner advertising --------------------------------------------------
This is another easy tactic to implement on your blog. It's by adding banners on your blog, and embedding in them, your unique affiliate link to someone else's product.
Every time someone clicks on the banner on your blog, they'll get taken to the advertisers website, and if they purchase their product, you'll get paid a commission.
How to do this you ask?
It's easy when you use a cool little plugin known as Max Banner Ads plugin. You can download it from here:
http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mba/
Just as in the first strategy, this method can work really well if you get a lot of traffic to your blog already.
While it's a great strategy to implement in any case, it's still not the best way to leverage your blog for monetization. More on this soon.
Ok, next up is...
-------------------------------------------------- c. Doing Product Reviews And Getting Paid For Them --------------------------------------------------
This strategy is a bit more labour intensive, but it can provide you with a more secure level of income.
The way it works is that you get paid for doing a detailed review about a specific product, and then posting it on your blog.
There are many different services that will pay you a set fee per review. Here are some of the services that you could use:
- http://www.ReviewMe.com
- http://www.SponsoredReviews.com
- http://www.PayPerPost.com
But, of course, you can also approach product owners and ask them for a fee to write a review for their product. This is a bit of a hit and miss strategy as you may find it difficult to find someone willing to pay you some cash to do a review on their product.
But if you're keen, you can go to a place like www.ClickBank.com and search for appropriate products there and then contact the product owners.
But my recommendation is to just use the above services for this.
Next up is my favorite monetization strategy for the magazine model, because it requires the least amount of effort for the greatest return...
-------------------------------------------------- d. Sell Ad Space On Your Blog For A Monthly Fee --------------------------------------------------
For this, it's key that you already have an established stream of traffic to your blog. And the more traffic you have, the more you can charge.
Essentially, what you do here, is get other people to pay you a monthly fee for the privilege of advertising their product or service or website on your blog.
You can have different options of course, with different pricing points.
The most important thing here is that you can convince your prospective advertisers that you have enough traffic to support the price that you are asking for.
And the best way to do this, is to provide your prospective advertisers with the exact statistics of your blog traffic.
For a great example of this strategy, have a look at Yaro's advertising page here:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/advertise/
Of course, the higher your traffic numbers, the more you can charge advertisers for the privilege of advertising on your blog.
An easy rule of thumb in the industry is to look at your daily unique visits and divide by 10 to give you a monthly charge rate.
For example, if you're getting 500 unique visits a day to your blog, you can charge $50 per advertiser on your blog - roughly. But it also depends a little on the kind of niche you're in as well.
That's it for the easy, but lower leverage model. Let's now move onto the hard, but more profitable model...
-------------------------------------------------- 2. The Hard, But More Profitable Model --------------------------------------------------
If you really want to skyrocket the profitability of your blog, this is the model you want to go for.
Yes, it does take more effort to get it to work, but it's totally worth it if you can pull it off well.
There are at least two avenues you can take here:
a. Selling other people's products (affiliate marketing)...
b. And developing and selling your own products...
Let's look at each of these two strategies now...
-------------------------------------------------- a. Selling Other People's Products --------------------------------------------------
This is one of the easiest ways of taking your blog's income level to the next level.
But it's only easy once you've already built up a loyal following. And for that...
... ok, ok... I won't tell you again. I think I've drilled this into you enough now.
Now this is key:
For this (and also the next) strategy to work well, you need your own email list. Sure, if you have lots of traffic to your blog you may already get some good results, but with an email list, the number of people who buy from you will just be increased manifold.
Yaro and I have had some of our most successful campaigns by sending out a handful of well crafted emails to our email lists.
Let's have a look at an example to give you an idea of what is possible with this.
Say you have an email subscriber base of around 10,000 people. If you send out an email, around 20% of them are likely to click on your link which equals 2,000 people.
Then, of those 2,000 people, say 3% may buy the product from you, which equals 60 sales.
If the product price is 47, and you got 50% of the profits (because you're an affiliate), you will have made 1,410 bucks from your little email promo.
Not bad for sending out just one email!
Of course, this is only an example and results could vary greatly for this, but there are a number of things you can do to increase your conversion rates to make this a reality.
So, where do you find products to promote?
The best one we've found so far is ClickBank.
They are the largest digital provider on the net, and they've really made the whole process very easy. All you have to do, is sign up for your own account that does not even cost anything, and then you can start promoting other people's products.
You can sign up for your own account here:
http://www.ClickBank.com
Other methods or other places you can go to find affiliate products are:
- http://www.PayDotCom.com
- http://www.cj.com
- http://www.Azoogle.com
Ok, let's now move onto the final monetization strategy for your blog... this is the ultimate one...
-------------------------------------------------- b. Developing And Selling Your Own Products --------------------------------------------------
Developing and selling your own products is definitely the most profitable thing you'll ever do for your blog.
So, once again, the idea here is that you use your blog to help you get traffic and build your email list, and then you promote your new products on your blog and also to the people on your email list.
This is an extremely powerful way of marketing.
And the reason for this is because you've used your blog to help build your list. And what this has done, is create a very strong relationship and bond with the people on your email list.
And remember the equation:
Big List + Great Relationship = High Income
It's as simple as that.
So, the only next challenge is to create your own products.
There are at least three kinds of products you can create:
- Text based products
- Audio based products
- Video based products
Text is the easiest to create, but has the least perceived value. Audio is a little harder to create, but has a higher perceived value. And of course, video products are harder again to create, but they provide a MUCH higher perceived value.
Nowadays, Yaro and I normally use text based products as the stuff we give away for free, and then create video products based on those text products, that we then sell for a premium.
If you're just getting started with this, I recommend you go for the text option first, build up your confidence with selling things online, get an income set up, and then move onto the more advanced product creation strategies.
Inside another course, I may teach you how to create your very own digital products, and then how to sell them properly using online marketing strategies.
But with the tools and strategies I've already explained to you inside this course, you should now have a pretty good idea of how you can go about creating your own digital products that you can market on your blog and to the people on your email list.
This is how Yaro and I have made most our income online. So, it's a really beautiful model.
That concludes everything I have to say about this mini course. You should now have absolutely everything you need to help you set up your blog, create amazingly powerful content, get massive amounts of traffic, and then start monetizing like crazy.
I really hope you've enjoyed this mini course and that you've found it very helpful indeed. I've really poured my heart and soul into these lessons and I've even considered to sell them instead of making them available at no cost. That's how valuable I think they are, because in some respects, I did not hold anything back.
So, all you have to do now, is take these lessons step-by-step, and start implementing your very own successful blog.
These very same lessons have worked for Yaro, myself, and many many other people as well. And I can't see why they won't work for you as well!
But it does take effort :)
Here's to your blogging success!
Roy Werner Karlsen
Become A Blogger
Part 7 of 7
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar