6 Tips to Earning Additional Money From Your New Blog
Have you started a new blog recently? If so, it can really be
hard to generate revenue in the beginning. It can take a long time to generate
consistent traffic to your blog and build your readership. But that doesn’t
mean that you can’t make some decent money along the way. Here are a few tips
on how to earn more money even if your blog is new.
Tip #1: Create a Funnel for Your Affiliate Offer
You’ve probably signed up for a few affiliate programs and have placed pictures
and links to various products and services on your blog. Even with these
placements, it can be really hard to generate sales for your affiliate offers.
That’s why it helps to create a marketing funnel for your offers and get
visitors to sign up to the funnel using an incentive driven email sign up
form.
What exactly is a marketing funnel? A marketing funnel is a follow up series
that’s designed to move a lead from a prospect to a customer. The follow up
series usually involves a process of educating prospects, engaging them, adding
value in various ways, and ultimately selling. A marketing funnel will almost
always perform better than ads because you’re building a relationship, adding
value, and engaging them multiple times.
Tip #2: Sell Ads on Your Blog
If you’re getting a decent amount of traffic to your blog, then you should try
selling ads on your blog. While there are programs like Google Adsense where
you get paid whenever a visitor clicks on an ad, the earnings can be low for
sites that don’t get a lot of traffic. You can start by putting a sponsorship
spot to let your visitors know that they can purchase an ad on your blog.
You can also approach different website owners to see if they’d be interested
in buying a monthly ad on your blog. In some markets, the cost of buying an ad
on a blog results in traffic that’s cheaper than other channels like pay per
click. If somebody does take you up on the offer, it could lead revenue for many
months to come.
Tip #3: Sell Digital Products
If you have a good idea for an information product, you should consider selling
a digital product on your blog. The great thing about digital products is that
it doesn’t consume any of your time, you get to keep almost all of the profits,
and it costs basically nothing but some time to create. Research related blogs
to see what kinds of digital products (eBooks, video courses, audio interviews)
they’re selling to start getting some ideas.
An alternative way to sell information is to sell access to premium posts.
These posts can be sold anywhere from $10 to $20. It often helps to set up
these posts by first publishing a high quality blog post that’s designed to
have multiple parts. Readers will be impressed by the quality of the content
and many will opt to purchase the premium post for the rest of the
series.
Tip #4: Sell Your Services
If you don’t have your own product to sell and your affiliate offers are not
performing well, it might be a good idea to offer your services. While many
services in the business industry involve taking on business and marketing
tasks/projects for clients, you don’t necessarily need to have a special skill
to make money from selling services. You can simply offer coaching or
consulting services.
There are many examples of food and health blogs where the blogger offers a
free consultation to get their diet and health issues on track. If you feel
like your target audience can really benefit from your help and advice, try selling
your services to see how many people take you up on your offer. You may be
surprised by the results.
Tip #5: Promote Services that Result in Residual Earnings
One of the best ways to make good money from only a few sales is to promote
services that pay you on a residual basis. This can be anything from a social
media marketing platform, email marketing platform, an invoice/account service,
to a reseller hosting where you sell various hosting packages. If possible, you
want to go with services like a reseller hosting account since you get to
keep most of the profits.
Obviously, the above examples may not necessarily be targeted for your blog’s
audience. But if you look around, you’ll find that there are many different
residual based products and services you can promote as an affiliate. For
example, there are monthly gift packages, special monthly niche products, and
subscriptions to a private membership sites. If you look hard enough, you’ll
likely find a great residual based product or service to promote to your
audience.
Tip #6: Write Sponsored Posts
Many brands are looking for bloggers and influencers to
spread the word about their products and services. A good way to earn some
extra money is to sell sponsored posts on your blog. Instead of making your
post a shameless promotion for the advertiser, you can offer to review their
product or service. This allows you to present the product or service in a
non-biased manner and keep your credibility.
Again, it’s not enough to advertise that you’re offering sponsored posts.
You’ll want to reach out to brands with big budgets that have products and
services that are targeted to your audience. You’ll also want to test their
affiliate program to see if you’d make more as an affiliate as opposed to
earning through the sponsorship fees.
These six tips should help you start making more money from your blog even if
it hasn’t been long since you’ve launched it. These tactics do not require you
to spend a single dime on advertising to generate traffic. It’s all about
getting the most value out of the platform you are building for yourself. Try
experimenting with various tactics along the way and you’ll eventually find a
combination of tactics to maximize your blog earnings.