If you're sick of the paltry earnings from display advertising on your blog, you are not alone. The online advertising market has been in decline for nearly five years now, and there are few signs that it will turn around. Companies are content to pay menial rates to spread their message across thousands of blogs, and apparently bloggers are content to collect those pennies.
Serious bloggers are always looking for alternatives that will lead to more income. If you're ready to become serious about your blog, maybe it's time to dive into these money making methods.
5 Ways to Boost Your Blog's Income
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing works on a simple concept. Retailers and manufacturers have marketing budgets, but they're chasing the big fish: the mass market. They can't afford to cover every little niche. But you, the blogger, has a niche audience. You can market to that audience in a way that the retailer or manufacturer cannot.
In exchange for marketing their products to a niche audience, the retailer or manufacturer gives you a cut of sales you generate. There is no need to close the sale from the affiliate end; the transaction occurs on the retailer's or manufacturer's website. All you have to do is drive prospects there and you get a cut.
For a good rundown of how to run an affiliate marketing campaign, check out Shaan's post on 7 tips to simplify your affiliate marketing campaign.
2. Reselling Services
Reselling services is in many ways like affiliate sales, but with a much more direct component. Instead of simply marketing for a retailer or manufacturer, you become an agent for them. This is a common tactic in the mobile phone service industry. Big carriers might not want to open too many retail outlets, so they employ outside agents to help with sales.
As with affiliate sales, you get a commission for reselling services. The commission is typically higher, which is nice. Yet it is more difficult to make the sale, since you need to close it yourself. This can make it difficult to accomplish from your blog. That is: do people really trust you enough to sign up for a two-year service agreement when they can just as easily go to the direct website?
3. Creating Information Products
Dollar for dollar this might be the best way for bloggers to earn money. Creating physical products might be more trouble than it's worth, especially if your blog is a small operation. But anyone can create information products. If you have a blog you probably already have credibility, so that's one obstacle you've already hurdled. Now it's about creating a valuable product and marketing it to your readers.
Information products can be anything from ebooks to instructional videos. Their purpose is to teach someone to do something new, in a novel and actionable manner. They work for bloggers, because there is already a built-in audience they can market to. The downside, as with reselling, is the necessity of making the entire sale, from attraction to closing. It means setting up accounts with a credit card processing service LIKE Intuit.com and giving them a share of each sale. But even with all that involvement, the idea of creating something once and then selling it multiple times can prove very profitable for bloggers.
Also Check :
What to Do When Your Blogging Income Doesn’t Pay Your Bills
Top 10 Best BuySellAds Alternatives To Make Money Online
4. Selling Subscriptions
Selling information products on a one-off basis can bring in some money, but selling them on a subscription basis can provide consistent income. Instead of charging a one-time fee for a product, subscription services allow bloggers to collect a certain amount every month. That might sound great, but selling subscriptions takes an incredible amount of work. Think of all the downsides.
5. Consulting
There are millions and millions of blogs on the internet, and most of them stink. Yet they all stink for different reasons. Some have horrible content. Some have no original content. Some have good content but fail to market themselves properly. There are dozens of ways a good blog can look bad, and there are even more ways for a bad blog to stay bad. You can help these bloggers build themselves up.
By leveraging the success of your blog, you can market yourself to less successful bloggers as a consultant. You might not be able to charge a lot, but so many times the problems these less successful bloggers face amounts to low-hanging fruit. It won't take much for you to fix their problems. That allows you to take on a high volume of clients, so you can make up for the amount you get paid per client with a high number of them.
Bonus : If you establish yourself as a consultant, you can eventually work your way up to more successful, higher paying clients.
Bloggers might have had it easy at one point, but those days are over. Making money with your blog is more difficult than ever. That is, unless you get serious and start looking at the alternatives. By adding affiliate marketing, reselling, information products, subscriptions, or consulting -- or a combination thereof -- to your blog you can earn far more money than you would with display ads alone. Sure, these things are more difficult than slapping some code on your site. But they payoff will make it all worth the effort.