Many try to make money online with blogs, but only a few really makes it. In many cases, you and I fail to make enough money from our blogs because of our misconceptions regarding blogging and make money online blogging. This article will give you some ideas on how to monetize your blogs better without even increasing your traffic – read on.
When I first enter the make money online arena, I choose blogging as a good way to start, mainly because I’ve got so much to share, and I do listen to what the Gurus are telling all of us that content is king; and blogs are all about content.
Three months into blogging, I started to feel burnt out – I can’t think of any interesting topics to write on; I felt that what I worked on yield me nothing in term of money; I started to think that maybe I did it wrong.
Well, it turned out that the latter was true – I, indeed, did blogging and blog monetization wrong.
I believed in lies
Well, one thing for sure: blogging alone won’t get you rich, unless you have authoritative voice. The good news is, even if you don’t have such authoritative voice, you can still make the most of your blog. One of the steps you must take is to debunk some misconceptions about blogging and make money online.
“Old” Misconceptions Still Exist Today
Here are some misconceptions that I and many people believe about blogging and blog monetization, and the real truth behind those lies:
1. Content is king – creating great content can make you a lot of money
Partly true, but indirectly – your great content will bait for links and get buzz from social media and other sites, thus more visitors coming to your blog; if you can’t get a good amount of traffic to your blog, you won’t be able to make much. Normally, people (including me) monetize their blogs using CPC ads; but AdSense income is highly related to traffic and the per click earning. Some other methods include paid posting, inline content ads, premium/paid content access, etc.
Here’s the cold, hard truth: You need a healthy mix of quality content writing and effective link building. In fact, some evidences show that effective link building on a blog with so-so content quality can get it to go far, in term of traffic and revenue.
2. Blogs can only make money mainly from ads
Not true – ads and paid posting SHOULD only account for a smaller portion of your blog’s total income; this is where I’m stuck and trying to get out – and I believe many people stuck to this misconception. In reality, many experts are making way much more money from the products and services they sell via their blogs, namely consulting, training, books, merchandises, and so on.
3. Ads will turn off people visiting my blog
Partly true. The key here is to set your blog monetization plan early. Of course, hiding your blog content in a sea of ads will turn off your readers, but the right mix of ads and content presented in an effective blog layout can actually works wonder.
Some experts suggest for us to keep our blogs ad-free early on. I against such recommendation. I could be wrong, but I feel that blog monetization has to be implemented as early as possible in its life, for one reason: So your early readers are ‘getting used to’ your blog’s content and monetization strategy, thus, in fact, they might even feel the ads are actually useful to them. Check out off line publication, many magazines I read are full of ads. Yet, I keep coming back buying them. Why? Because the content stands out and in fact the ads themselves are pretty informative and interesting.
You are building a blog as a money making web asset, anyway – you ought to make money out of your blog!
Takeaway
Of course, there are many other 10+ years old misconceptions bloggers and website owners (and some so-called SEO specialists) are still believing today . This article only covers those three, because they are impacting my business the most. If you have any misconceptions to add, please do so by commenting on this article.
