Why isn’t my blog profitable?

Jim Blogger loves fitness. He was a jock growing up and he never gained his “freshman 15” in college, where he majored in journalism and minored in sports medicine. Now he teaches weightlifting classes at the local gym, and writes a fitness blog with really good articles. But he has a problem: Even though he has great articles, he doesn’t make that much money from his blog.

Sound like anyone we know?

Like Jim, most bloggers are like come from writing backgrounds or were interested in their niche before they started blogging. This means that even though many bloggers make great content and know a lot about what they write about, few have the business know-how to make money off their writing.

I’ve worked in online marketing for over a decade so I know a thing or two about how to make money with a blog. I want to help other bloggers succeed, so I’m sharing a few ways that you can make money blogging:

Affiliate marketing

Merchants (also confusingly called advertisers) will pay bloggers money to get people to sign up as leads (a lead is someone who’s either signed up for a trial or registered their personal information, such as their email address, to a merchant) and/or buy products. Usually, you will get a percentage of the product sold if you’re getting paid to sell products. You get paid a flat amount for each lead you sign up.

Newsletters

The most common way bloggers run affiliate programs is by placing banner ads on their site. However, it’s also common for blogs to allow people to sign up for their mailing list, and send out a newsletter each week. Instead of selling people’s email addresses to spammers (which decreases the value of the blog) or sending them spam yourself, email them relevant information that they’ll actually read. This will increase the value of your blog to your readers, make them tell their friends about you, and gives you an excellent opportunity to place some affiliate links. Make sure to choose high quality products: Readers won’t want to read your blog anymore (and certainly won’t click on any of your affiliate links) if your newsletter points they feel like they are being pointed to products that are rip-offs.

Pay per click ads

Pay per click ads don’t work well in newsletters because you’re not being paid that much per click. As a result, many of the people clicking on your ads need to be people new to your blog, not your hardcore readers who’ve signed up for your newsletter. That’s why pay per click ads don’t work in newsletters but they work great as banner ads on your site. Pay per click banner ads on a website are usually less targeted than affiliate ads for a hand-picked product in a newsletter to a very narrow niche (such as people who like weightlifting, as opposed to people who like fitness in general) audience, so you need a lot more clicks to make the same amount of money. However, Google AdSense tailors ads based on an individual reader’s search history, so AdSense pay per click banner ads can be more profitable than affiliate banner ads.

Don’t stop here!

I’ve shared a few ways to make more money on your blog, but this article’s by no means the end-all be-all of content monetization. To make even more money, you should look for more articles online and watch webinars about content monetization, like mine on Friday the 27^th of January. Space is limited so register ASAP!

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray and his company Influence People do blogger outreach for a variety of clients, such as INTENTclick.

Related Posts:

1. Choose Your Blog Topic
2. Why Blog?
3. Why should you blog?
4. 17 Uber Famous Blog Taglines
5. 54 Blog Posts You Should Read Before (And After) Blogging

Tagged as: affiliate marketing, Blogging, make money blogging, Money, Murray Newlands, newsletters, pay per click ads