How to monetize your blog successfully but without utilizing ads? There are some awesome ways and we are glad to share them!
If you are successfully running a blog, or if you are only getting started, a question that has surely crossed your mind is: what you can do in order to start making money off it? While in the past the easiest and most effective solution would have been to start hosting ads, recent years and the oversaturation of internet content has made monetizing through adds a waste of time.
Not only do they have the potential to undermine the goals of your blog, risk your reputation or even make you give up the control of your content, they also don’t make you a lot of money. Studies show that the average click-through rate of online ads is only around 0.1%, which is ludicrously low. This means that the only way to make advertising work is to have a very high amount of traffic, and the worst part is, once you have a lot of traffic, there are a lot more effective ways to monetize your blog. So, to help you out, let’s take a look at a few ways to monetize your blog without utilizing ads.
Get into affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the preferred way for bloggers to monetize their blogs as it’s one of the easiest ways to turn your blog into your business. In short, affiliate marketing is the promotion of other people’s products through the content you generate on your blog.
In return for promoting their product, the business you partner with will offer you a commission on the products they sell through you. This is done by sharing a modified link to their products, which is able to track the number of direct sales resulting from your recommendations. The commissions you earn will vary depending on the type of product, with physical products having commissions of about 5% and digital one’s going as high as 75%.
The great part about affiliate marketing is that it allows you to share and recommend the products you use and love, meaning you don’t have to come up with fake stories or make yourself use any products you don’t enjoy. The most common way to implement affiliate marketing into your blog is by writing review posts about specific products you are using or by creating lists of products you can’t go without and include the one you are promoting there.
While these are some of the most common types of content people use for affiliate marketing, it’s important to remember that you can do whatever you think would yield the best results from your audience.
After all, you surely have a grasp of what they enjoy and what they don’t, so try to use that to your advantage in order to get the most out of affiliate marketing.
Sell products through your blog
Once you’ve established an audience, a further step you can take in order to start earning money from your blog is by directly selling your products through it. You will, of course, first have to gain a reputation as a person who knows how to help people deal with a particular type of problem in order to get people to buy what you are offering them.
Having done that, you can start selling a wide range of products, from books to digital tools regarding that subject. This will, however, mean that you will have to put in extra time in order to develop your products, but the effort will definitely pay off. Alternatively, you can just turn your blog into a full-time e-commerce store as you will already have a developed audience.
To do this, you will have to take the steps necessary to turn your blog into an online store, which will require you to find a suitable partner to help you out. One of the most reliable ways to do this is by looking for a digital creative agency that will guide you through the whole process, offering you tools as well as strategies that will allow you to get the most out of your online store
Start a membership program
There are unquestionably people in your audience who love the content you are offering and are willing to support you by doing more than just viewing and sharing it. You can utilize this to your advantage by offering a monthly subscription and starting a membership site, which is by far the most reliable way to make money off your blog.
However, just making them a premium member of your community won’t be enough. You will have to provide them with additional incentives in order to make them feel appreciated, but also to get other people to join. Things such as premium content, a place for discussion, answering their question or even discounts if you are selling products through your blogs, can all be great ways to get people to subscribe.
In conclusion – how to monetize your blog without help from the ads?
Getting to the point where you can make a decent amount of money from your blog is no small task. It will be hard at first and it may take some time for the money to really start coming through. With that being said, be persistent, work hard and push through the initial difficulties. The rewards of your hard work will start to become ever more visible.