Monetizing Blogs: Know Your Readers
March 7, 2009 by Deb
Filed under Monetizing Blogs
If there’s one thing I learned in four years of FWJ, it’s that if you don’t know a thing about your community’s habits, you won’t be able to monetize your blogs. For instance, most of the freelance writing community are “clickers” not “buyers”. Putting up affiliate ads for products and services doesn’t work. However, many pay per click ads work or job search tools that pay me for each sign up also do OK. Truth be told, the bulk of FWJ’s income comes from Google Adsense. That doesn’t mean Adsense is the best source of revenue for you, however.
I didn’t learn all this right away, however. It took years of trial and error. I tried to sell books, writing products, magazine subscriptions and other items of interest of writers but no one was buying. Now I use a combination of job affiliates, pay per click and text link sales.
Sell Products on Product-Oriented Blogs Only
If you’re wishing to monetize your blog, your going to have to research your demographics and your community’s habits. For instance, if you have a food blog, folks might be ok with affiliate products for cooking stuff. If you have tech blog, selling gadgets may work well in your favor. A poetry or history blog might not do so well with product sales though.
Analyze Your Traffic
Many times bloggers will start a blog and immediately put up ads only to wonder why no one is buying. Give it some time and use your stats to analyze your traffic first. After traffic is flowing, figure out where folks are coming from. Learn what they’re talking about and what their interests are. Engage them in conversation. Learn which posts get the most comments, back links and traffic. Once you know your readers’ habits, you’re ready to monetize your blog.
It Takes Time
Finally, know that it takes time for a blog to bring in income. If I use FWJ as a case in point, I earned pennies at first. After several months, I was earning between $20 and $50 per month. It took two years of steady traffic building for me to earn $100 or more each month in revenue. Now, four years later, I’m earning over $1,000 a month. Of course, much of that goes to the maintenance and content for this blog, but that’s for another post. My point is, many bloggers make the same mistake. They start a blog, throw up a few random ads, and throw in the towel a few months later when the money isn’t flowing. Taking the time to do it right makes all the difference in the world.
It definitely takes time so you must have patience. One of my next steps is to analyze traffic. There is so much to learn! Thanks for the tips.
I had the same share of failure when I was starting, although it is slightly different.
Now, I am always suggesting to beginners that before they proceed they should plan well enough. They should know what kind of money making strategy, and where and how to get your targeted traffic.
Definitely, I agree with you about not putting ads on a new blog especially for Google Adsense. In fact, I believe this is why a lot of new bloggers are being banned. This is because they don’t realize that the “real” ad clickers are from search engines.
Therefore, if most of the ad clicks are from social site GA might suspect that you are inviting your online friends to click them even if you do not.
Lastly, patience is very important. Success is not being achieved overnight.
It does not take time. I would like to increase my “unique traffic” to my site. Maybe I’ll end up tweaking the site. Perhaps it’s too “broad.” However, many people have complimented me on my site saying “it’s not the typical blog” found on the internet.
I just started using ClickBank, and I signed up for Google AdWords. I’ll give it a month or two and see how it goes. According to the guys @ PPC Classroom and a couple of other people, you can make $$$ online.
@Rebecca – It does, indeed, take time. One shouldn’t put up a blog and expect riches overnight. Yes, you can make money online, I’ve been doing so for years. However, I don’t want to mislead folks into thinking it’s some overnight get rich quick thing. It’s not. Precious few bloggers become an overnight success.