Are You Clear About Your Blog Monetization Strategy?
Posted in Anatomy of a Blog, Getting Your Feet Wet by DB
Why are you starting a blog? What is the goal for your Blog? Be honest, this is really important. If you are blogging to make money or even make a living from blogging then you have to decide on your blog monetization strategy right from the start. Most of the 100,000 thousand odd blogs that start everyday plan to make money, all but a few succeed and it is the odd blogger or two that blog for the love of it.
Now making money is perfectly fine but as a blogger you should be clear on the path that you and your blog will take. This is very important as this will tell you what to focus on, define your blog audience and the means of optimizing and increasing your blog audience.
To keep things really simple I’m going to categorize them into two main blog monetization strategies.
Making Money indirectly from your blog
This category of blogger blogs extensively about their domain, be it writing, designing, hosting, SEO… you get the picture. The primary goal is to build authority in their chosen field and use that authority to land services and related projects.Â
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Advertisements and affiliate earnings are a small component and not the primary focus. Some might choose not run any ads at all. Just because you don’t see any ads does not mean that the author is not making money from the blog.This by far is the best category to fall into or reason to start a blog. Not only are you building your brand, you are selling yourself everyday to more and more potential clients and as a bonus you also get to make money by selling Ads and pull in affiliate earnings from your blog.
Making money directly from your blog
If you are not promoting a service or skill then you fall into the second category of bloggers. The monetization strategy in this category can be mostly split into the following. Both the following categories are not mutually exclusive. I’m only categorizing them based on the biggest revenue generatorÂ
Making money from affiliate earnings
The main goal here is to earn an income from affiliate earnings. Now you could be blogging about lots of things like gadgets, books or even about being a super affiliate
but the main income is from affiliate earnings. Yes, you do make some money selling ads but is a small portion when compared to your earnings from your affiliate commissions.Â
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If you fall in this category be sure to pick your niche wisely. Read more about picking a niche. ÂMaking money from Ads
Blogging and making money by selling advertisements on your blog. This is by far the most difficult and the most misunderstood. This is the category that nearly 90% of bloggers out there fall into. Trust me folks selling ads is very very difficult because building an audience for this category of blogs is very difficult.
For every Darren Rowse or a Micheal Arrington there is a Alan Johnson. The last I checked none of the ads on his blog were sold. Now Alan could very well sell all his ad inventory and make a lot of money but how many people out there would put in the time that Alan Johnson has in promoting his blog.
There are a million blogs that try for months and give up. You could be a fantastic writer and you could be adding great “value” to your readers
Lastly, if you are starting a blog in those super competitive “How to Blog”, “Make Money” and “Internet Marketing” niches then your job got just a little bit tougher.
Why is it important to categorize yourself? Because each category targets a separate audience/demographic and how you pull in your visitors depends largely on your monetization category. Once you are clear about your blog monetization category you can then work out various strategies to target and increase your blog earnings.
Should you be trying to increase your blog’s readership or page views? Yes, each one is different. Is my blog design appropriate enough for my monetization category? Should I be worried about my RSS subscribers? Should I concentrate on content? I plan to answer some of these questions in my next post.
5 Responses
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March 31st, 2008 at 10:55 pm
[...] I wrote a post asking if you are clear about your monetization strategies for your blog. If you haven’t read it please do read it before proceeding with this [...]
April 1st, 2008 at 9:31 am
Dinesh B,
OK, I choose to make money indirectly from my blog. Consulting.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm
[...] Website Hosting, I’ve been talking about blog monetization and why it is important that you identify your monetization strategy even before you begin blogging. Yesterday I talked about the first category of bloggers that make [...]
April 4th, 2008 at 7:31 am
I’m not sure I agree that you have to choose just one monetization path. I monetize my blog in 2 main ways, affiliate products and my own products. They each do fairly well. But, I usually sell more of my own products than I do affiliate products.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:39 am
@Barry
Hi Barry,
Yes people do have more than one monetization approaches which is healthy. No where have I said that this is not the case. The categories that I’ve listed are based on the primary monetization method.
I’ve pretty much written exactly what you said. Indirect monetization offers you the best of the three options. You sell/market your services or products and always have the option of making money via advertisements and pushing affilate products if you coose to do so.
@Jacob
Good for you. Good luck
cheers,