What To Do (And Not To Do) When Monetizing Your Blog

Whether it’s the reason you made a website in the first place, or just something that popped in your head after you started a passion blog, the idea of monetization is something that many bloggers consider.

Whether you are the former or the ladder, I wanted to offer some quick ideas on how to make money blogging with do’s and don’ts for each.

Here they are:

Affiliate Offers

Affiliate offers are when you suggest a product to your readers that you did not create in exchange for a cut of the profit. There are TONS of affiliate networks to choose from (Clickbank, Commission Junction, Max Bounty, to name a few) and there is an affiliate program for just about any product or service you can think of.

Here are some do’s and don’ts:

• DO – Offer your readers products that you have tried out and had success with.
• DON’T – Suggest a product that you have never tried or that you have no information about.
• DO – Offer your readers the BEST product in the particular niche at hand.
• DON’T – Suggest certain products just because the commission is higher.

The key here is to build trust with your readers. If you don’t have trust, they will not buy any of the affiliate offers you suggest.

Make Your Own Products

This is WAY easier than most people think and it can be one of the best ways to make money on your blog. It works particularly well for niches that don’t seem to have much commercial value.

Let’s look at a niche like personal development. If you owned a personal development blog, your best monetization choice might be to create an eBook and sell it for $5.00 – $10.00. As long as you have loyal readers, you will be able to sell something like this.

Note:

• DO – Make products that are valuable.
• DON’T – Create products just to make money.
• DO – Offer a fair value for the product.
• DON’T – Overprice (or underprice) the product.
• DO – Sell your product to visitors who have subscribed and trusted you.
• DON’T – Try to push the product on people the first time they visit your site.

I always talk about VALUE and this is especially important when selling your own digital products. The bottom line is that your products need to be much more valuable than a typical blog post. Take the time to ensure this.

Sell Advertising

This is a quick and fairly easy way that many bloggers choose to monetize their blog. By utilizing a service like Google AdSense you can be up and running with advertising in a matter of minutes. However, don’t let the ease of use distract you from some key do’s and don’ts:

• DO – Place your ads in a place that won’t cause them to heavily distract readers from the content of your blog.
• DON’T – Turn your entire website into a giant advertisement.
• DO – Think about your visitors first and advertising dollars second.
• DON’T – Concentrate more on profit than building a great website with solid readership.

If you are going to throw ads on your site – be tasteful.

Create A Cost/Month Membership

This is a great way to ensure passive income into the future. The hard part is that you have to create something REALLY valuable in order to command a monthly fee.

If you are really experienced in a subject, you might be able to pull this off.

For example – Distilled (an SEO consulting company) recently started a program called DistilledU (It is essentially a course for learning search engine optimization). They charge a monthly fee to join, which gives you access to the material/forums/support and so on…

Here are some “do’s” and “don’ts” for creating membership programs:

• DO – Create a full service solution to a problem that is remarkably valuable.
• DON’T – Create a membership program that people are going to regret signing up for.
• DO – Keep pricing and recurring payments very transparent.
• DON’T – Trick people into signing up with flashy pricing schemes.

This method of monetizing can be very hard, so expect a lot of time and effort to go into getting this off the ground!

Wrapping Things Up

The fact is – there are TONS of ways you can make money with a good readership. The key is to analyze what your strengths and weaknesses are and choose a method from there.

This article wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of every method for monetizing available, but rather just a way to get you thinking.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to speaking with you in the comments section! Please feel free to share other methods for monetizing or some do’s/don’ts that I missed.

Jason is a professional internet-marketing consultant and spends his free time writing at MethodSEM, where he teaches his readers how to create a respected and profitable blog. Follow Jason on Twitter @methodsem for all his latest posts and updates.