One of the biggest concerns people have about their blogs is how to make money. That’s fair. It’s reasonable to want to get paid for your time!
Yet this is one of the biggest challenges for most bloggers. You may have noticed, I spend time focusing on sales strategy, because that’s my foundation. The thing I like about sales is the simplicity of it. If you follow the rules and work hard, you get paid. Period.
Making Money from Your Blog is Not Black and White
Many people are convinced there are only two types of blogs out there:
- Low traffic blogs that live out their days in obscurity, making no money.
- High traffic blogs that enjoy high income, tons of comments, etc.
It’s not black and white. Yes, there are these two kinds of blogs. No doubt. But there are also many types in between, including my favorite…low to mid-traffic blogs that make a high income. They quietly make a killing. To me, this is ideal.
If you want to be a well-known blogger, get several hundred thousand visitors a month, etc…go for it. I’ll be honest with you…that’s not my forte. If you were to look at the back end of my sites, you’d not find a single one that gets more than 10-20k page views a month. But they are profitable. And they are duplicable. They offer a range of valuable services to highly targeted customers. To me, traffic is over rated. It’s all about quality. That’s my focus.
Success Hides a Multitude of Sins
It’s easy to make money with a blog that gets a ton of traffic. Sort of. As the saying goes, “Success hides a multitude of sins”. In other words, if you have traffic pouring in every day, it’s hard to not make some money. Unfortunately most bloggers are not in the “more traffic than I know what to do with” club.
This isn’t to say that even high traffic sites don’t need to optimize and carefully watch what they’re doing. They do. And please don’t assume, as we’re so often tempted, that a site that’s getting a lot of traffic is doing well financially. It’s just not a safe assumption to make.
Running a business on any level is a lot of work. But many A-list bloggers out there are still giving the old stand-by advice when it comes to making money with you blog. And it all boils down to putting ads on your site. This just isn’t a good solution for most bloggers.
There are various types of ad services and various techniques to optimize them, and I won’t argue that advertising isn’t a good way to make money, but unless you’re getting mad traffic, you can optimize your ads all day long, and you’re still going to be making $5 a day.
Sales Basics are Where to Start!
If you want to monetize your blog, and you don’t have a ton of traffic, here are a few very simple ideas to keep in mind that will help you monetize your blog. After implementing these basics, there are many ways to tweak and optimize what you do, and I will be going over these principles in later posts, so make sure to bookmark this page or subscribe, so you can get the following posts on this topic as well!
Make sure your visitors know what you do! This may seem like a complete no-brainer, but when I’m working, I come across blogs left and right that offer great, helpful information, but I don’t see any products or services offered in any clear way.
If you want to make money with your blog, make sure you’re following these basics to start:
- Do you have a clearly visible services page?
- Where is your “products” or “shopping” page?
- Do you tell your buyers about what you do on occasion and why they should buy from you?
- Do your blog posts occasionally mention your services, products, etc?
- Do you email your list with offers from time to time?
- Have you asked your visitors point blank if they are interested in what you’re selling? This is easy to do with a simple survey from Survey Monkey, and it accomplishes two very valuable things. One, it tells your visitors what you’re selling. Two, it helps you gauge whether you’re offering something people want to buy or if you need to make changes to what you’re selling.
I’m just sayin…there are a ton of bloggers saying they want to make money…and there are also a ton of blogs that have no clear offerings. I believe this is because many, many bloggers are still trying to figure out a way to get more traffic and make money with advertising.
Forget SEO, forget page rank, forget traffic…learn how to sell, and address these sales basics! More tips in more detail will follow in future post… but don’t forget the basics will always work! Remember, if you’re making no money with 1k visitors, you’re going to easily make 100 times that much when you get 100k visitors. Do the math 
If you want to get your blog kicked into the next gear, I encourage you to hire me for a consult. In one hour, we can erase months of the learning curve and get down to business, so you can do what you love and start actually getting paid to do it!
Are you struggling to make money with your blog or website? Tell me what you’re struggling with, and I’ll make sure answers are included in future posts!
Comments(4)