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5 simple yet effective blog monetization tips to increase your revenue

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What are some of the most proven ways to monetize a blog that are always doable? These are our blog monetization tips that we’ve checked and implemented, follow them and start earning more.

One of the most often questions asked on Google is „how to make money blogging“ more than 90 billion results! And, even Google Trends shows steady interest over the past five years:

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For many people, blogging is not only a way to improve the family budget but also the main source of income to be. So, how does one monetize a blog nowadays?

Back in a day, the easiest way to monetize a blog was to have an AdSense account and let Google put its ads to your blog. You know, the usual passive income way of getting some income. And it was all fine, the payouts were nice, and it all worked well. Today is a slightly different situation. With so many blogs and content creators out there, those income rates have gone down, and it isn’t as lucrative as it once was. So, what do we need to do to improve our profits with blogging?

Money flows in the direction of value. Ucheugo

First of all, there is no secret recipe or a trick that will explain to you how to monetize a blog today. You need to work for it, just as you work to create compelling content for your readers. To earn money from your blog, you need to invest the same amount of time in strategy, promotion and more, as you invest in writing blog posts.

How to monetize a blog?

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The first thing when it comes to blog monetization is, you need to think about it from the start. That means that it needs to be incorporated in the very beginning of the creative process, before starting a blog. You know, in the phase of deciding on a niche and topics to cover. This is where you think about a business model of your blog. Once you set it all up, then and only then you can start learning about blog monetization tips and ways to implement them. That is if you want to succeed with it; as one old saying goes: you can’t build a high building on a weak foundation. After all, you have to be good at something to be able to make money out of it.

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No, not the right way 🙂

So, now that we’ve covered the basics let me share what I learned. Unlike the Fight club, I’m happy to talk about blog monetization tips, both mine and from my colleagues. Read, learn from them and do let me know how far they helped you.

5 main blog monetization tips

#1 Be consistent

One of the main tips that go a long way. No mystery there, if you want to gain profit off your blog, you need to be consistently present. Be active, do your research, write regularly and make sure to be on the people’s minds. No success comes overnight, but if you are patient and determined enough, it will happen. Think of the end goal – which shouldn’t be the money itself but the value you provide.

#2 Listen and deliver value

Talking about the value… Find out where your target audience is and go there. Listen to their conversation, try to find what it is they like, what bothers them, what answers they are searching for… Then think of the ways to provide all that with your blogging. That way, the next time they search for something – you’ll come up as a solution! With the use of some proper On-SEO tips as well, that is.

#3 Have focus and a strategy

Decide what it is you want to achieve with your blog, what type of topics you want to cover and in what way to provide value to your audience. These are the basics needed to have a solid structure for monetizing your blog. Without it, your blogging is no more than a hobby. True story, since this is the way I did it with my blog. There are several ways you can go with your blog to make money, and I’ll explain them in more details.

– Affiliate marketing

Type of blogging that is based on building quality content that is a base for your profit. You can start a pretty lucrative affiliate marketing business with WordPress if you focus, decide on the niche you’re familiar with and connect with the right affiliate network. This type of blogging for money is done in a way where you write to promote specific products or services and get a commission for every purchase of your recommendation. For more details on how to start, read our post How to start affiliate marketing business with WordPress.

– Brand ambassador

A very lucrative type of blogging that isn’t explicitly reserved for beauty/fashion/lifestyle industries anymore. Just as the old way of advertising and marketing is declining, more and more brands realize the power of personalization and micro influencing. Step aside billboards and TV ads and hello bloggers! People nowadays have more trust in what other people say than in brands and corporations themselves. If you are an authority blogger in your niche, you can easily become a brand ambassador for a brand or a company that is aligned with your messages and things you do. One of the great examples I can think of that comes from the WordPress ecosystem is Cris Lema. Just one look at his blog will give you a taste of every tip I’m describing here. This is a guy who literally wrote his way up to money blogging success. 🙂

– Native advertising aka sponsored posts

Whether it’s a review for a premium WordPress theme or plugin, or an online course or a product, these are all the things that bring money to your blog. This type of content is right for engaging with your target audience which generates more traffic and more money. Set yourself as an authority about a topic or industry you are passionate about, that you know much about and reach out to companies and offer to write sponsored posts for them. Like I described earlier, people trust more their peers than brands and this might be your chance to take.

– Services

If you are good at what you do, you can offer your services through your blog. Freelance writing, ebooks, coaching webinars or whatever is you do outside of your blog. Use blog as a tool to showcase your knowledge and expertise, connect with the people who would prospect from it and you got yourself a win-win situation!

#4 Promote your blog and yourself

Social Media is a powerful channel to use to both listen to your audience and promote your blog to them. Use the channels where your audience is to connect with them, let them get to know and trust you and start building a relationship. That way, you’ll engage in the more personal way. Also, the connection with the community will open the door to promote yourself and what you do.

#5 Use the right tools

Having good and reliable tools is essential as having a consistent blog. It is what sets you up from the competition and helps you be more productive, value worthy and what, ultimately, help you improve your income. Starting from choosing the right platform for your blog. A platform that is user-friendly, reliable, secure, fast and optimizes to your every need. If it sounds like I’m describing WordPress – you’re right! WordPress is all that and more – a real right hand or a partner to your blog with its variety of themes and plugins that can transform your blog to a real money-making machine. And we all need that because the platform itself should match the quality of blog content. Otherwise, you might end up on the back of Google’s search results, and you don’t want that. This would be the time to introduce you to our Premium quality Themes here at Meks, check them out, we might have just the one you’re looking for.

Email marketing

This isn’t a new method and indeed isn’t dying, as many think. Email marketing still is one of the best ways or tools to use to monetize a blog. How you ask? Start a regular newsletter containing your blog updates and relevant information from your niche industry, make it interesting and compelling. Once you get people’s attention, you can use newsletters as a way to promote whatever it is you’re selling through your blog. Create value to sell value, build a good newsletter and people will come back to your blog and perform an action you want them to.

Google’s set of tools

Google Analytics and Google Search Console, the go-to tools that no blog or site should be without. A powerful tool that provides you with detailed data on your traffic and helps you optimize your blog’s visibility. The data they provide gives you detailed info on your visitors, what they like and don’t like, how they interact with the content, help you improve your performance and be more. All this will help you understand what your blog needs to be more visible and what type of content works best for your visitors. That way, you will make better content, drive more traffic and become more relevant to brands and companies for future projects. In case you’re not familiar with how to set up Google Search Console, MOZ made a great tutorial about it. As for adding Google Analytics to WordPress, here’s ours 🙂

Google Trends is another excellent tool that helps you track topics that are trending which can inspire you to write about something people want to read about. Use it and see how to implement the data it provides.

Facebook Pixel

Pretty useful tool to optimize and track conversions from your Facebook ads, to build and manage targeted audiences for upcoming ads and to retarget the existing ones with your content/products/services. How does it work? By placing a piece of code, you get from Facebook Ads Manager to your blog which will activate cookies to track your visitors once they come to you. That way you can manage your promotion to the right people as well as target the ones that come to you through organic search as well.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a great tool for driving traffic to your blog. Use it to drive pinners to your blog where you sell them your products or services, whatever the model you use, that is. How? Every image on this Social network comes with the link to the original source so when people click on it – they come to your blog. Pinterest is a great lead generation tool if you use the right images and visuals, meaning 2:3 ratio, with the on-point information. Make sure that the images you create for Pinterest are inviting and informational and that they are connected with the posts that have strong CTA. That way, you are one step closer to converting that visitor to your customer. Nice, right?

Upbeat calculator

A quick and easy tool that calculate a rough estimate of how much your blog could be making in both display and native advertising. You enter two information: monthly pageviews and select your primary content category and click to see the result.

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Those results come with the explanation, and all serve as a useful way to help you set up your prices.

Blog monetization plugins

In the end, I wanted to share with you several WordPress plugins that can further help you in increasing income from blogging. Let me know if it’s any of the ones you use and do share some others I haven’t mention.

Ad Inserter

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This is a free WordPress management plugin that helps you add and manage ads on your blog. It supports various kind of ads:

With it, you can manage your ads and place them within the posts, or in the sidebar, before or after comments, wherever you want them to be. Moreover, you can decide who can see those ads, enable or disable them on specific areas or posts on your blog, choose to show them in the RSS feed… Overall, it’s a handy all-in-one ads management tool worth checking out.

Pro version comes with many more features like advanced ads, ad statistics, impression and click tracking, geotargeting… as well as with technical support for all your questions and doubts. The price starts from $20 for personal use on 2 sites.

Corner Ad

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Pretty non-invasive way to display ads on your blog and not bother anyone who doesn’t like them. Corner Ad is a free WordPress plugin that displays animation ads in the corner of your blog. And, if a visitor is interested, by hovering over it, it opens a full-size ad imitating a page flip. Something different from what we all are used to, right? 🙂 Apart from ads, you can use this plugin for any sort of announcements too like ebook promotions, webinar schedule, landing page intro and more.

Premium version has more features like multiple ads support, audio file implementation in the background, number of click for ads measurement and that type of things. The price for the premium version is $25 and includes 60 days of technical support.

Easy Ads Widget 

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One of our free plugins that lets you display an unlimited number of ads inside the WordPress widget. Furthermore, you can customize those ads to suit every need your blog has, from custom sizes, reordering, setting up the number of ads per view and more. You want to randomize ads? Check. Show them as rotate/slide ads? Check. Just download it for free and start customizing ads to showcase them in the best possible way.

Insert Post Ads

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Cool way to showcase ads within specific posts. This free plugin does just that, allows you to insert post ads after a specified number of paragraphs automatically. All you need to do is enter advert code and decide where you want the ad to show:

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A new feature of this plugin is vi stories ads as an affiliate model of business where you can insert video ads as well.

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Wrapping up

What’s common to all these blog monetization tips? Every one of them points out that you need to know what you’re doing in order to make money blogging. Without proper knowledge or experience, neither one tip or tool or advice will drive you to that blogging income increase. Professional blogging is and should always start with the niche or industry you are familiar with. Furthermore, you should have passion about it or to come from the industry you’re working in. Only then you can expect these and any other tips to start working. Just as in any other type of business.

5 best blog monetization tips 2018 edition

Share your thoughts on these tips in the comment section and feel free to add some of yours, too!

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Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.

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