Can you really make money from blogging?
If your blog gets over 10,000 monthly unique visitors, then yes – it’s relatively easy to monetize and create a nice revenue stream with it.
The real challenge is making money from a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day.
I know that most of my readers have blogs that fall into this category. When I speak to an audience, I usually ask them how much traffic their blogs generate.
The answers aren’t always impressive.
Just as in life, there are different stages to a blog’s life cycle. You can’t compare your new blog to one that’s been around for years.
Truth be told: “It takes time to build an income from blogging.” No matter what stories you’ve read on different blogs, no true success ever happened overnight. It only happens that way in the movies.
Identify the stage you’re in, and work from there. There’s no shortcut to getting blog traffic. Yes, I can show you how to drive traffic to your blog, but you have to be patient and consistent, and you have to work really hard.
That said, this in-depth article will guide you on monetizing your new blog. There are still opportunities to make money with your blog, even though it’s not as popular as QuickSprout.
I’m honored to have you as a reader. And I want to help you start making money from your blogging efforts. Because when you’re earning enough money to care for yourself and family, then hopefully you’ll tell others how my blog helped you change your life.
So without further ado, here are 8 proven ways to monetize a blog that generates fewer than 1,000 visitors per day:
1. Offer a coaching service to motivated clients
If you’re looking for a way to start making money within the shortest period of time, become a coach. Giving prospects and customers direct access to products and expertise is where it’s at.
Data from Disc Insights found that “as a whole, the life coaching industry takes in a yearly revenue of $2 billion.”
Jenni Elliot, founder of TheBlogMaven.com, makes $397 on a one-to-one blogging intensive coaching session. And her students are excited about it, because of the results she helps them achieve.
So how can you use your blog to promote your coaching services business?
First and foremost, create useful and interesting content on subjects that matter to those clients and prospects. For example, if you offer coaching services to freelance writers, the topics you can cover in your blog posts include:
Attracting new clients
Nurturing prospects
Generating and capturing leads
Retaining existing clients
Setting and raising rates
Weeding out difficult or “problem” clients
Branding
Content creation and copywriting case studies
When offering coaching services, you need a strong value proposition, because the market is already saturated. Having a strong reason “why” people should prefer you instead of your competitors will give you a necessary edge.
As an example, Tim Brownson, founder of ADaringAdventure.com, positioned himself as “the life coach who gets people unstuck.” With his 10 years of life coaching experience, clients trust him for his ingenuity and knowledge.
If you’re driven to succeed as a coach, you don’t need to follow dozens and dozens of other coaches in an effort to “learn.” Instead, what you need is to pay more attention to your blog and create high-value content.
After all, you’re the coach. And the only way to prove your expertise is through the content you create on a regular basis. Use blogging to increase your prospects’ success, preferably by including case studies wherever possible.
Teach prospects how to set and attain goals, overcome challenges, or avoid risks in ways they can put to work instantly;
Improve the prospect’s perception about their business and create confidence in them to trust your recommendations and reach their goals; and
Lead customers to constructive, proven processes, encouraging them to ask questions and increase their drive to succeed.
No matter what industry you’re in or cater to, offering a coaching service to motivated clients can help them reach their goals and make you money.
Skilled freelance bloggers make a living from their efforts. And more money is yet to be made, as B2B and B2C companies increasingly recognize content as the ultimate tool for attracting leads and nurturing a loyal audience.
If your blog receives at least 50 visitors per day, find out exactly what those visitors want and create a course from there. The truth is that your first course may not be that “awesome” — but that’s okay.
You can always improve. But avoid the excuses and just get started.
People like buying online courses, even when they can find the same information for free. People like “convenience.”
Online courses are focused on a specific subject or topic. They’re organized and ready to be put into action.
Online courses have a higher perceived value than blog posts alone. That’s because your target audience can tell how much time you spent creating it.
Write and make money from Kindle books
Want to make money writing short ebooks?
Well, people are doing just that with Amazon Kindle publishing.
U.S. ebook sales revenue has experienced an impressive upward growth trend. There’s no doubt that the growth will continue. And when it comes to reading ebooks, there are many mobile devices you can use, but Amazon Kindle is used by 47% of ebook readers.
Or you could use a premium online course plugin for WordPress, such as Zippy Courses, CoursePress, WP CourseWare, Woothemes Sensei, and so on.
As a blogger, you can create an online course on any topic that people are struggling with. It doesn’t have to be a complex topic like A/B testing – it could be as simple as “how to use Google Docs.”
However, in order to make a living from Kindle books, you need to work extra hard and publish books regularly. The more quality books you have, the more money you’ll make. Stefan Pylarinos has over 20 Kindle books and still counting.
You’ll need to offer several short Kindle books because individually, they’re priced pretty cheap – usually from $0.99 to $4.00. Probably doesn’t sound too encouraging, right?
But if you price your Kindle book at $1.99 and sell 200 copies per month, your total income will be $398. That’s nothing to sneeze at. And many authors make more.
Make money from private label rights
As a marketer, you can benefit from over 50 ways to make money with private label rights (PLR) products. But you have to pay attention to the details.
First, don’t use the product word-for-word. Tweak it and make it at least 65% unique. Once you understand your PLR usage rights, you can repackage and make money from it.
Before Panda struck in February 2011, PLR products were popular, and many marketers and bloggers used it to generate content for their sites.
However, you can still make money from private label rights as a blogger. If you’re a new/beginner blogger, you can leverage other people’s products.
Creating an information product (e.g., ebooks) from scratch is difficult. If you’re new to blogging you may not have the experience required.
Build relationships & partner with influencers in product creation/launch
Do you know why so many product launches fail?
The biggest problem we’ve encountered is lack of preparation: Companies are so focused on designing and manufacturing new products that they postpone the hard work of getting ready to market them until too late in the game. Here are five other frequent, and frequently fatal, flaws.
If you think that making money online boils down to driving traffic to your blog and generating email leads, you’re making a mistake.
Leads are only the beginning. One recent study found that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance.
You need to generate the right leads. The truth is that you may not have this type of leads as a beginning blogger out to monetize a blog. But you can leverage influencers’ audiences.
Do you have an idea for a product? Most people struggle to launch their products because they go about it all by themselves. It’s reported that 70% of all new product launches fail in the first year. The question is, why do some succeed when others fail?
There are several aspects of a successful product launch that you may not be able to handle all by yourself. If you try to go it alone, you’re bound to waste more time
and there’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed.
Of course, generating leads is important when launching your product. Even before you release the product (e.g., ebook, software, plugin) for sale, you should start pre-selling and communicating with prospects.
Ideally, you should build a landing page to collect emails prior to launching your product. According to MarketingSherpa.
The harsh truth is this: As a practical matter, you can’t make money blogging. But you can make money by using your blog to promote a product or service.
Most beginning bloggers struggle to make a living from their blogging efforts, because they believed that blogging alone was enough to make them money.
Honestly, internet marketing blogs may be difficult to make money from. Because your target audience are bloggers also – and want to make money as well. But you can easily make money in other industries.
In a nutshell, if you can’t compete with other players in your industry, you may want to switch to other industries where you can establish influence, and use minimal effort to build links, get organic traffic and monetize your blog.
That said, you have to be consistent. No real success happens overnight.
