You may be missing out on some easy ways to make money from your content if you are a content writer or small business owner. There are a few ways to make your content work for you financially.
Website monetization pays off
Blogging has become a serious business.
Anyone can make money from blogging, just like any other business venture. As noted by Financial Samurai, an investment banker who became a professional blogger, people don’t give up high-paying jobs unless there’s a good chance of making more money.
Michelle Gardner says that she earns six figures per month from her blog about finance, and has earned over five million dollars in total since she started blogging.
Woah.
BuzzFeed made over $300 million in 2018 from sponsored deals, pay-per-view advertising, and ecommerce sales.
All of those websites took years to build up their readership, credibility, and traffic. This allowed them to be in the top 1% of earners.
But smaller websites can make a good profit too.
A survey conducted by ConvertKit found that, on average, full-time bloggers who have been blogging for a while make an annual income of $54,108. Their average expenses amount to $15,895, leaving them with annual profits of $38,016.
if you want to earn money from a website, you will need to invest time and often money into it, including creating content, driving traffic, and monetizing it.
- Setting up your website
- Creating content for it
- Doing SEO to boost your traffic
- Building an audience on social media
- Growing your email list
- Engaging and cultivating a devoted readership
And only then comes the fun money-making part.
Online Monetization Strategies
If you want to monetize your content, consider implementing a few of these 10 strategies. These strategies can help you turn the time you spend creating content into real financial value.
1. Access the Power of Affiliate Sales
If you expand the readership of your content, you can work with brands that want to sell their products or services to a similar audience. Affiliate marketing is when you agree to promote partner brands on your blog in exchange for a percentage of sales that come from your page. This is a common way to make money from online content. A good marketing content writer can help you add affiliate links without distracting your readers.
If you want to maintain a good relationship with your readers, it’s important to make sure that the products you’re promoting are actually valuable to them. Otherwise, you could end up damaging your company’s reputation. Be careful about which products you choose to promote, and make sure to disclose any affiliate links as advertisements.
As long as you have good content in your area of interest and a loyal following, you can start making money with affiliate marketing. Some of the most popular and successful platforms are:
- The Amazon affiliate program
- eBay’s partner network
- ShareASale
- ClickBank
- Rakuten Marketing
2. Offer Consulting Services
You can further your reach by offering cooking classes and private dinner parties. If you own a successful blog, business, or brand, you have expertise in at least one specialty area. You can share this expertise by offering personalized coaching and consulting sessions to your readers. For example, if you own a catering business, you can offer cooking classes and private dinner parties. This will help you reach a wider audience.
Zoom and Skype cooking classes are a great way to expand your empire. Because consulting is a low-volume enterprise, dedicating just a few hours a week can quickly create another stream of income from your content. You can also get started by utilizing a marketing content writer even when you have only a few hundred followers.
If you enjoy planning events and engaging with people, you should consider hosting conferences and workshops. If you’re comfortable speaking in front of crowds, you could also get paid for public engagements. Search Engine Journal recommends boosting engagement by promoting the talk, posting online videos, and encouraging social shares with a designated hashtag.
3. Turn Existing Content Assets Into E-Books
If you’ve already published a lot online, it’s a good idea to go through all of your online content and group it by topic. Then hire a writer to turn each topic into a short e-book. Even 10 blog posts can be turned into a 10,000-word guide that your readers can use to deal with a problem or learn more about a complex area. In addition, publishing a book will make your brand look more credible. If you want to make money from your writing, you can sell the e-book directly from your website or use a sales platform that is designed for this purpose. Either way, selling 100 copies of an e-book for $12 each will give you a profit of $1,200 from content that you have already created.
This text is discussing the e-book industry and how it is growing. It states that according to Statista, 25% of users have read an e-book in the past month and that the e-book industry will earn a projected $7.895 million in U.S. revenue by 2024. It also states that websites and blogs that publish e-books tend to see a significant increase in their SEO rankings.
4. Provide Premium Content at a Price
If you’re looking to hire a marketing content writer to create long-form, high-quality content, you might want to consider offering it on a membership basis. If you have expertise, skills, or experience in a particular niche, others in that same niche would be willing to pay a premium for access to your knowledge. This could include a series of videos, a tutorial or course, or a subscription-based newsletter.
Premium content can come in the form of digital downloads that are only available once. This type of content can include things like trackers, templates, checklists, and other resources that can help solve a problem or address a pain point for your audience.
Some blogs offer content that can only be accessed by subscribers who pay a monthly or annual fee. This type of subscription provides access to discounts, directories, private discussion boards and forums, podcasts, webinars, course content, and even small group consulting sessions. This model creates the benefit of recurring revenue. Kinsta reported that 46% of online users have at least one premium subscription, so this is a well-established market.
5. Add Ads to Your Site
If you have a blog or website with several thousand readers, you could monetize your content by placing ads on your site. There are a few different payment structures content creators can choose from when it comes to online ads:
- Personal sale: A brand pays you a lump sum to place their ad on your site for a specific amount of time.
- Pay per action: You receive a specified amount whenever someone uses the ad on your site to ask for a quote, purchase a product or complete another action as agreed.
- Cost per mille (CPM): The brand pays you a flat fee every time the ad reaches 1,000 impressions.
- Pay per click (PPC): The brand pays you for every click, which is the model used by Google AdSense.
As with affiliate marketing, do not post unsightly, irrelevant or spammy ads, as this will damage the trust of your audience. Many brands choose to start with PPC ads on Google AdSense, which is a way to advertise on Google by paying per click. After setting up your account, you just add the provided code to your website. The service will select relevant ads and even put them in the ideal spots on your site for user engagement. While banner ads sometimes get a bad rap, they are often the fastest route to a profitable blog, largely because of the hands-off approach. In fact, some marketing content writers start with Google AdSense to create a passive income stream while they work on additional online monetization strategies.
6. Syndicate Your Content
If you have a large following for your blog, you can make money by licensing your content to other sites in your field. With this monetization model, you would receive payment from these publications in exchange for your content. In addition to the profit you could make from this, you would also be able to reach a larger audience. However, you have to be careful with this so that your own site doesn’t drop in the search rankings. Neil Patel has a guide on how to do this without causing that to happen.
7. Request Donations
Currently, many sites are using the Wikipedia model where readers are asked to financially contribute to the site’s content, but it is not required. You can test how receptive your regular readers would be to this by adding calls-to-action for donations through a site like Patreon or PayPal. Those who donate could be given an incentive, such as a sticker advertising your brand or a coupon code for access to your paid resources.
The author gives the example of clinical psychologist and marketing content writer Jordan Peterson to illustrate how to take advantage of this model. Although it is free to sign up for Peterson’s newsletter, he provides a form on his website where readers can choose to make a one-time, monthly, or quarterly donation.
8. Develop Online Courses
If you want to make money from your blog, share your expertise with the world by creating an online course. This can include traditional methods like reading and discussion boards, as well as newer techniques like video conferencing, webinars, and pre-recorded content. To make sure your course is valuable and unique, hire a marketing writer with experience in educational materials. You can also survey your audience or address common client questions to get an idea of what people want.
In 2018, Podia found that the average price for an online course is $182.59. Podia’s survey also found many short courses available for less than $50, as well as extensive learning content starting as high as $1,500 for a single course.
Hosting your own online course is a great way to monetize your writing. WordPress offers courseware plug-ins such as LearnDash and LearnPress, but there are also standalone options if you blog on a different platform.
9. Seek Sponsors
A marketing content writer can create content for sponsors that promote a product. This can include short blog posts, white papers, reviews, podcasts, videos, and multimedia content. Sponsored content is similar to affiliate content, but sponsored content does not rely on clicks to get paid.
If you have a sponsors for your blog post, you must disclose it to your readers. This will help you stay in line with FTC regulations and remain a reliable source of information for your readers. Having sponsors for your content can be very beneficial for your brand. In 2019, companies spent around $6.5 billion dollars on sponsored content. This is a 41% increase from 2018.
The Fitnancials blog areas of content monetization is by sponsored content. In 2020, they reported that their sponsored content earns them $3,000 per month on average. The publisher recommends that content creators charge at least $250 for every sponsored post; high-traffic influencers report earnings of $3,000 to $5,000 for an average sponsored post. Fitnancials highlights the importance of reaching out to target brands directly as an online monetization strategy, as well as using sponsorship sites such as Social Stars, Pollinate, IZEA and Clever.
10. Sell Your Blog
What are your thoughts on moving to a new niche or expanding your current one? If you’re looking for ideas on how to make money from your writing, why not try selling your blog? If your blog has great content, a good reputation and ranking on search engines, and a sizeable number of followers, you can sell it to someone else in the industry who wants all the benefits of blogging without having to put in the work themselves. When done correctly, flipping a website can result in a five-figure income, provided you have impressive numbers for social media followers, conversion rates, search engine placement, traffic and ratio of revenue to expenses. The specific niche you’re in will also affect the value of your website.
4 website monetization strategies to drop in 2021
It can be tempting to take the easy way out when it comes to making money from your website or blog, but complex monetization strategies like creating an e-course can be more rewarding in the long run.
But if your goal is to make a full-time income from your website, don’t bother with the next 4 strategies.
1. Display ads
Blog ads can be a great way to earn some extra money, with there being such a wide variety of ad networks to choose from.
Spoiler: They don’t.
It’s not very profitable to put up banners on your blog.
Here’s why:
- 25% of internet users use ad blocking software, meaning they don’t see your ads.
- To earn $100,000 with Google AdSense, you need to have approximately 20,000 daily website visitors (plus 25% more to make up for those using ad blockers).
- Most people have mixed feelings about online ads.
According to Vieo Design, 91% of people find today’s ads more intrusive than 2–3 years ago and 79% feel that retargeting ads are getting too obnoxious and creepy.
Ads don’t improve the value of your blog.
They don’t improve your brand, and some people might not like them. Also, most bloggers don’t get much return from using them.
2. Selling links
You won’t be penalized by search engines if you clearly state that a post is sponsored and include a do-follow link to your website. However, offering to include a do-follow link to someone’s website in exchange for money is a sure way to get penalized.
The Google Web Spam team has repeatedly warned bloggers not to sell backlinks or participate in any other type of link scheme.
3. Infolinks
Infolinks is still mentioned as one of the popular ways to monetize your blog, even though the posts are from early 2000s.
This in-text advertising network was popular in the past and paid cash whenever a user clicked on a mildly relevant ad.
4. RSS feed ads
Ads that are displayed through RSS feeds should no longer be used as a method of monetization.
Although maintaining an RSS feed on your website may make it look cluttered, there are only a few people who read them these days. advertisements on RSS feeds may not make a real impact.
Audience comes first, monetization second
Your website audience is your most valuable asset.
Monetizing your blog will only be successful if you have taken the time to grow your readership and establish your reputation online. Creating a user-friendly website is the first step. Publishing value-packed blog posts regularly and setting up a newsletter are also important. Another crucial aspect is engaging with your early readers by answering their comments, emails, and messages on social media. Only when you have built a rapport with your readership should you look into one of the monetization strategies on this list.
Do you need to apply every strategy listed? Nope.
If you want to earn more money, you can add more income streams to your mix and see how your audience responds to them.
For example, as a freelancer, you can use your website to sell your services or coaching programs. You can also create an online course or retreat for your coaching clients. You can also create a product, like a contract template, or monetize your newsletter.
Try out different methods and see what works best. Once you find something that works, do more of it. Get rid of what isn’t working. That’s how you can make your website earn money.
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