You Don’t Need Ads to Monetize Your Blog. Here’s How Bloggers Make Six Figures With Other Methods
Blogging has always been a highly competitive way to fight for the target audience, mainly because of the low entry threshold and the huge number of pressing topics for discussion. However, a very small number of blogs are becoming successful, and all the rest remain hanging on the Internet as a dead weight.
Do you know why this is happening? This is because their creators initially chose the wrong strategy. They invested a huge amount of money in advertising and wanted a quick result, but this doesn’t work in blogging. In this article, we will tell you what to do to turn your blog into a way to make decent money without using paid advertising methods.
When Will I Receive My Cherished Six Figures?
Many novice bloggers are sure that making money on a blog is easy. You just need to post some kind of content and wait until the subscribers themselves come to you, and the brands offer cooperation. But in fact, this theory is very far from the truth.
A blog is a long, hard, daily and consistent job. And the primary goal of blogging as such is to build trust with the target audience and help in solving its problems. It is impossible to achieve this goal in one day, week or even month. So, what to do to monetize the blog and get a decent reward for your work?
Let’s Start with the Basics of All the Basics
So, before we give you practical tips that are not related to paid advertising, but related only to your efforts, let’s make sure that you are on the right track and know the basic rules and approaches that work to promote a blog as such.
- Valuable content. The competition in the blogosphere is so great that creating content for the sake of content is just making senseless informational noise. Your content should be valuable and useful. The value of the content has a direct impact on the involvement of the audience, the influx of new subscribers, the feedback you will receive, as well as the SEO promotion.
- SEO promotion. Your valuable content will work better if you give search engines the ability to correctly recognize the essence of your blog and display your articles according to the most targeted queries. Although some experts believe that SEO is dead, in reality, it continues to work and simply cannot be superfluous.
- Social networks. Modern users want to know personally whose advice they trust. And social networks are one more way to continue acquaintance, to reveal yourself as a person, to see faces and find out the urgent needs of those for whom you write and get a ton of feedback.
These are the basics of all the possible basics. Without these three components, all of the following approaches simply will not work.
Launch Online Courses
If you share your knowledge on how to do something on your blog, at some point you can monetize your skills and create an online course. Now the distance learning format is very popular, and your subscribers, trusting you, will most likely take this opportunity with enthusiasm. And they will buy your course.
Image by Gerd Altmann
Also, this is a good way to attract a new audience, which is also looking for ways to solve their problems, but here you will have to apply marketing approaches for promotion (and paid advertising as well).
Write an E-Book
An e-book is a good alternative to an online course. However, before deciding in favor of a book or courses, it is best to ask the opinion of your subscribers or vote on the site. By the way, both of these ideas provide good opportunities to increase the involvement and influx of a new target audience through competitions, sweepstakes, discounts to the first buyers of a book or course.
Become a Brand Ambassador
This is the dream of many bloggers to popularize a certain brand in their articles, and the brands themselves are willing to generously pay for help in building trust between them and the target audience. However, this is not as easy as it might seem, and unfortunately, there are no guarantees that the PR manager will notice your blog and offer cooperation to you. However, your chances of success increase if the values that you promote on your blog match brand values. Your target audience has problems and needs that the brand can satisfy.
By the way, here is the list of brands looking for their ambassadors right now.
See also: 25 Brands That Work with Influencers
Image by 200 Degrees
Give a Lot for Free
The valuable content that you will offer the audience for free is your main investment. And this is the same way of building long-term relationships and building trust. To earn large sums on your blog, you need to accustom your audience to the idea that here they can solve their problems quickly, efficiently and for free. And for subscribers to start trusting you, you need to give them a lot of practical and useful material for free so that they do not risk anything by trying your advice and approaches in action. In the marketing language, this is called nurturing leads.
Of course, this will be a lengthy process. Creating valuable content requires a significant investment of time and labor, plus some more time will pass until you get feedback. However, this is almost the only way to convince people that you are a reliable source of information, you can be trusted, and your tips solve the problems of subscribers as efficiently as possible.
Here Carol Tice is explaining how she has turned a tiny blog into a way to get money by giving away tons of free and useful content.
Keep Your Audience Engaged
This is an indirect way to make money on a blog, however, remember that the success of your blog depends on your target audience. If at some point they lose interest in your person and the articles you write, then all your efforts were in vain.
Therefore, it is important to constantly maintain contact with your subscribers, ask them to ask questions, write comments, express their opinions, share ideas about what else they would like to read the article and watch the video. And what’s more, it is necessary to process each such feedback and give subscribers even more content that they want to see and read. A blog without an active and involved audience loses its meaning, as well as all the actions that we describe in this article.
Post Multilingual Content
Most blogs in the world use English. And most users in the world can read this content. However, why not get closer to new audiences who speak other languages? Most likely, they also have similar problems that you can solve. And if you give them your solutions in their native language, this is the first step towards building trust. This is a sign that you are speaking the same language as them, both literally and figuratively.
To do this in practice, you will need to create several multilingual versions of your blog, localize and translate your content, for example, using The Word Point translation service, plus slightly localize your SEO requests so that each version is correctly displayed in the search results.
Support Affiliate Programs
We specifically decided to write about affiliate programs last, as this is the most logical approach. Before you start selling something to your subscribers, you need to be sure that they will buy it from you. To gain this confidence, you need to communicate with your target audience long enough, fully understand their needs and pain points, plus be confident in their solvency to choose the most suitable product.
Besides, the basis of sales is trust. And trust can only be built through long communication, as we have said, as well as the many benefits that you offered for free.
Moreover, in order not to destroy the trust that you built so hard, it is necessary to be sure of the quality and applicability of the product that you will recommend. The best way to make sure of this is to try the product yourself, plus tell your subscribers about it from your point of view, show the product in action, shoot a training video on how to use it. And only then can you move on to direct sales.
The brief summary of this paragraph is as follows. To earn six figures on affiliate marketing, you need to
- make sure that the product meets the needs of the target audience
- to talk about this product convincingly, joyfully and involving
- show how to use it correctly in your own example.
For example, Sharon Gourlay is an Amazon affiliate and has earned more than $6000 per month.
Digital Products
Don’t forget about digital products! Learn more about selling your creative digital products for photographers, video editors, filmmakers, and other creators on FilterGrade. Top sellers earn thousands every month.
Conclusion
As you can see, all the processes that we described take time and labor. However, the best thing is that they do not require money. All that you can earn will be your net profit and the results of your dedication to your ideas and invested efforts. Therefore, get ready to wait and work to receive six-digit numbers from the blog. It will not happen instantly, but it will certainly happen if you have enough endurance, motivation, and patience.
Thanks to Gregory V. Chapman for this article! Read more about Gregory below.
Author: Gregory V. Chapman
Gregory is passionate about researching new technologies in both mobile, web and WordPress. Also, he works on writing service review websites Online Writers Rating and Best Writers Online. Gregory is in love with stories and facts, so he’s always trying to get the best of both worlds.
