Monetizing Blog

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs.  If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.

If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first.  If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine.  If you think it’s evil, fine.  But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path.  If you want to succeed, you must be congruent.  Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time.  It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.  If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.  If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful:  How Selfish Are You?  It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.

If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it.  If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads.  Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere.  If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations.  Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best.  If you’re going to sell products, then reallysell them.  Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy.  If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it.  Don’t take a half-assed approach.  Either be full-assed or no-assed.

You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it.  I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005.  There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal.  Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback.  Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive.  Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month.  If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005Adsense revenue figures earlier this year.  Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source.  More on that later…

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely.  At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home.  I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler.  If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it.  I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t.  I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word.  But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail.  The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for SmartPeople.”  And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet.  So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can.  How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart?  Here’s a good rule of thumb:  If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.

If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will.  OK, actually I do.

This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though.  You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry.  What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves?  It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it.  Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence.  But that just gets you in the door.  You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent.  And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are:  web savvy.

If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some.  But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice:  Don’t quit your day job.

Web savvy

What do I mean by web savvy?  You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies.  What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization.  But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• blog comments (and comment spam)
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• pings
• trackbacks
• full vs. partial feeds
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
• search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• page rank
• social bookmarking
• tagging
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• traffic statistics
• email

Optional:  podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.

I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness.  If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet.  Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.

If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list.  Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies.  Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into.  You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.

A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation.  For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well.  But you can’t consider each technology in isolation.  You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them.  Monetizing a blog is a balancing act.  You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others.  Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant.  In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration.  I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking.  And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors.  I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs.  Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones.  It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month.  Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic.  And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.

This sort of knowledge

"If an individual is looking to monetize their blog, I would make a strong case for affiliate marketing as the best avenue for doing so," says Josh Waldron, founder of creative design firm Studio JWAL LLC. "Blogs with quality content attract loyal readers. Since readers benefit from the content offered, they grow to trust the authors of that content over time. Consequently, an author's blog posts are a logical place to promote relevant products and services without compromising the integrity of the content."

Here are four quick steps to monetizing your blog through affiliate marketing.

1. Choose Relevant Affiliate Programs

Affiliate ads pay per action, which means that readers will need to click on the ad and then either sign up or register for something, or make a purchase before you get paid for the action. The more relevant the ad is to your content, the higher the likelihood visitors will click on the ad and perform the desired action.

So, what type of affiliate program will provide the most relevant ads for your blog? If you're focused on a particular topic, you will want to join affiliates specifically associated with your content. For example, if you have a photography site, you might apply to be an affiliate with a camera equipment dealer.

Many bloggers start with Amazon Associates since Amazon sells millions of diverse products that are likely to be a fit for most bloggers. Amazon pays commissions of 4% to 15%, depending on volume and product type.

To find other targeted affiliate programs, check out popular affiliate clearinghouse sites such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, and ShareASale. All three offer access to thousands of affiliate programs, but you must apply separately to each one.

While you should choose programs related to your content, you don't have to feel restricted to stick too closely to your niche, says marketing consultant Dennis Duty. Think about what other types of products your audience might be interested in.

"Perhaps your Halo audience would enjoy other FPS games as well," says Duty.

2. Consider an Affiliate Aggregator Service

If your blog topics are more diverse, you might consider a program such asVigLink, which automates access to more than 30,000 affiliate programs and monetizes the links on your site for you.

For example, if a blogger is writing about a new pair of shoes they found on Zappos, instead of having to sign up with the Zappos affiliate program directly, they can work with VigLink, which will automatically append the affiliate code to the link and pay the blogger their earned commissions. While VigLink typically keeps 25% for this service, the company claims that because of their size, they "often negotiate higher commissions that more than cover our share," says Oliver Deighton, vice president of marketing at VigLink.

In addition to automatically monetizing existing links, VigLink can also optionally insert new, ordinary links where none existed before. For example, if a blogger mentions a product, brand or store, they don't have to worry about linking it themselves: VigLink will take care of that with its link insertion technology, which optimizes for both user experience and revenue.

"For most websites, link insertion lifts VigLink revenue by more than 90%," adds Deighton.

Deighton notes that while any blogger can try VigLink, bloggers will find the most success if their content is geared toward commerce.

"Hobbies, fashion, tech gear, deals and savings are all topics that naturally lead to spending; religion, food, raising children are less ideal," adds Deighton.

3. Create Content That Sells

Many bloggers will actually write reviews of products with affiliate marketing in mind.

"The power of a blog is that it's easy to aggregate a lot of loyal fans for niche topics. This lends itself to making recommendations and providing affiliate links to those recommendations," says Chris Conrey, a partner at digital marketing company Vuurr.com. But just throwing out links to products with no rhyme or reason will result in a quick exit by visitors, writes Lynn Truong, Editor-in-Chief ofWise Bread, a popular personal finance site.

"Think of affiliate ads as additional resources that complement your content," says Truong. "Don't put up a list of your favorite books, hoping people will click on the affiliate link and purchase the books just because you listed them. Take some time to write a detailed review, and use affiliate ads to point them in the right direction if they decide to act on your information."

4. Integrate Affiliate Links Appropriately

If you do add affiliate links to your site, make sure you maintain a balance between monetization and user experience, suggests web designer Kevin Spence.

One way to do this is to keep the majority of your content ad-free.

"What I would recommend to people is to think of 5-10 great pages that you could use to promote affiliate offers related to your niche. Then link to those money pages from your sidebar, footer or somewhere else that will give them a lot of visibility from the other pages on your site. Keep the rest of your site ad-free," says Spence. "The goal is not to monetize every page, but for every page to be a potential gateway to monetization."