How to Monetize Your Blog (Even With Low Traffic)
How to Monetize Your Blog (Even With Low Traffic)
3 tips for monetizing a blog with low traffic
If your blog gets over 100,000 monthly unique visitors, then yes—it’s relatively easy to monetize and create a nice revenue stream with it.
The real challenge is making money from a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day.
I know that most of my readers have blogs that fall into this category. When I speak to bloggers, I usually ask them how much traffic their blog generates.
The answers usually indicate they have little traffic.
There are different stages to a blog’s life cycle. You can’t compare your new blog to one that’s been around for years.
No matter what stories you’ve read on different blogs, no true success ever happened overnight.
That said, this article will offer writers some tips to monetize their blog, despite having minimal traffic.
1. Affiliate Marketing
One of the most popular methods for monetizing a blog is to leverage affiliate marketing. This is especially useful when you're just starting out and you don't have your own products or services to sell. All you have to do is develop content that will ultimately be in harmony with whatever affiliate offers you plan to push out.
For example, if you're running a fitness blog, you can easily sell affiliate health, weight loss or body building supplements. Since the content is already attracting people that are interested in fitness, selling these types of products helps you to create a near-automated stream of passive income.
Ask yourself honestly: Will your audience benefit from your affiliate’s offer?
Follow in the footsteps of others who do affiliate blogging well. Looping back to Michelle Gardner’s Making Sense of Cents blog, she exclusively promotes money-saving sites she believes in.
Which keeps her on topic and serving her audience’s interest with good quality products or services – the single top reason why consumers trust brands.
There’s no need to inundate your following with useless products that won’t serve them. Beyond being an exercise in futility, doing so runs the risk of losing their trust, hands-down the most lethal biz move you can make.
After all, 63% of customers would only buy from you if they believed you to be authentic and trustworthy.
On top of that, 81% of consumers “must be able to trust the brand to do what is right.” So don’t blow it. You’ve worked hard at building trust among your blog audience.
2. Sell Digital Products
Creating digital products is a great way to profit from your blog. You can effectively sell any type of digital information product on your blog as long as it's relevant to your content.
Digital products can be a combination of videos, downloadable guides, resources, PDFs, software components, SaaS and others. Do your best to create something that helps fill a need or a void. Don't second guess yourself, as you'd be surprised at just how much money you can make by selling digital products on your blog.
Ebooks offer a relatively quick pathway for making money from your blog. Develop an eBook that's aligned with the content of your blog. Non-fiction eBooks are relatively simple to create, and if you're teaching a skill that many people struggle with, it's likely that the eBook will be profitable.
You can easily promote your eBook directly through your blog by creating attractive content that will draw people in, then enticing them with your eBook. You could also build a sales funnel, which is an online marketing term for an automated multi-step sales machine, and sell your eBook on autopilot.
Selling digital downloads is a great way to scale your business without sinking in a ton of time.
Why? Because the majority of your work is done on the front-end. Once you’ve created your digital file and uploaded it to your site, you’ve conquered the uphill portion of the hustle.
For example, I saw a need for custom drop caps characters on Medium.
A ‘drop cap’ or ‘initial’ is a specifically-styled first letter of a block of text that is usually larger and sometimes more ornate than the surrounding letter-forms. Decorative caps increased usability by marking important passages and guiding readers through the text.
So I created some custom graphics that could be easily used by Medium writers:
These were very simple products to create, but they provided a very clear and practical purpose—to make a writer’s Medium articles stand out.
Note: Blogging Guide newsletter subscribers have access to this product as a free bonus!
Digital products can take the form of templates, eBooks, courses, software, custom graphics, checklists, calendars, and much more
But as varied as digital download formats come, there’s one trait they all have in common (which you need to include):
They make your target audience’s life easier.
3. Offer a Coaching Service to Motivated Clients
If you’re looking for a way to start making money within the shortest period of time, become a coach. Giving prospects and customers direct access to products and expertise can be very lucrative and is easy to do.
Data from Disc Insights found that “as a whole, the life coaching industry takes in a yearly revenue of $2 billion.”
Jenni Elliot, founder of TheBlogMaven.com, makes $397 on a one-to-one blogging intensive coaching session. And her students are excited about it, because of the results she helps them achieve.
It doesn’t matter when you started blogging or how much experience you’ve gained in that time — offering a coaching service to motivated clients can bring you money.
Inevitably, your readers will face challenges in life. A coach’s responsibility is to help people manage their challenges, and react in a positive way instead of getting frustrated and giving up.
A lot of top bloggers started out as online coaches. Initially, they struggled to attract regular clients, but they overcame the challenge by reaching out through social media engagement.
The major reason why becoming a coach in your industry can help you earn extra income is because people want to learn new skills, or improve in certain areas.
Coaching services are in demand because of the dramatic results the process can bring.
As an example, after working with Walk of Life Consulting, 98% of clients reported that they thought their CV was more compelling using achievement statements, and 87% said their LinkedIn profile became 5X more effective. Here’s the rest of the statistics:
You can venture into lots of areas as a coach. Life coaching is just one such area, and it’s increasingly popular these days. As a coach, you’ll help people deal constructively with challenges in their personal or professional lives.
For example, if someone is a web developer, she may need a business or personal coach to help her adjust to changes in the web development industry, get the best rates regardless of the recession, and retain clients who will in turn refer others through word of mouth.
So how can you use your blog to promote your coaching services business?
First and foremost, create useful and interesting content on subjects that matter to those clients and prospects. For example, if you offer coaching services to freelance writers, the topics you can cover in your blog posts include:
Content creation and copywriting case studies
Attracting new clients
Generating and capturing leads
Retaining existing clients
Solving issues with difficult or “problem” clients
Branding
When offering coaching services, you need a strong value proposition, because the market is already saturated. Having a strong reason “why” people should prefer you instead of your competitors will give you a necessary edge.
If you’re driven to succeed as a coach, you don’t need to follow dozens and dozens of other coaches in an effort to “learn.” Instead, what you need is to pay more attention to your blog and create high-value content.
After all, you’re the coach. And the only way to prove your expertise is through the content you create on a regular basis. Use blogging to increase your prospects’ success, preferably by including case studies wherever possible.
According to Jeff Molander,
Blogging is most useful when you strive to help [your prospects] believe what they want (what you sell) can actually happen for them on time, on budget and without pain. It removes the fear from buying.
When you become a life, personal, or business coach, you have 3 key jobs:
Teach prospects how to set and attain goals, overcome challenges, or avoid risks in ways they can put to work instantly;
Improve the prospect’s perception about their business and create confidence in them to trust your recommendations and reach their goals; and
Lead customers to constructive, proven processes, encouraging them to ask questions and increase their drive to succeed.
Through investment coaching, Todd R. Tresidder helped Gary Craig, an entrepreneur and former hedge fund owner, to grow his monthly cash flow from $5,000 to $50,000 per month.
Conclusion
At the heart of a blogging is a deep-seated desire to build and nurture an audience.
The harsh truth is this: As a practical matter, you can’t make much money blogging on a self hosted platform (your own blog). You can easily make money by writing on a platform with monetization already built in, such as Medium. But you can make money by using your blog to promote a product or service.
Most beginning bloggers struggle to make a living from their blogging efforts, because they believe that blogging alone was enough to make them money.
That said, you have to be consistent. No real success happens overnight.
Until next time!
Casey
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