Part 3 of 7: Content Marketing for Crypto — Monetizing Your Blog
| Want to Get Paid For Your Opinion … Read on!
There are a lot of misconceptions about making money from blogging. Some people think that you need to be an expert in a certain topic in order to start a blog and generate revenue. Others believe that you have to have a large audience in order to make any money at all. In reality, there are a number of different ways to make money from your blog, and you don’t necessarily need to be an expert or have a large audience. Here are some of the most common ways to monetize your blog:
Commissions
Earn commissions for reading time, claps, and engagement on blogging platforms like Medium.com or Blogger.com.
Affiliate Links
If you’re promoting products on your blog, you can earn a commission when someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase. This is usually done through a third-party affiliate program such as Amazon Associates.
Sponsored Posts
Companies will often pay you to write a post about their product or service. These posts are usually clearly marked as sponsored content, and they can be a great way to earn some extra income.
Sell Advertising Space
If you have a sizable audience, you can sell advertising space on your blog. This can be done through a direct deal with a company or through an ad network such as Google AdSense.
Sell Products or Services
If you have a product or service to sell, you can use your blog as a platform to promote and sell it. This could be anything from a physical product to an online course or ebook.
In this edition of Content Marketing for Crypto, we will talk about:
- Blogs — Where To Start
- Beginner Tips
- Advanced Blog Tips
- Where To Learn More about Written and Video Blogging
- Cheat Sheet #3 — Monetizing Your Blog
Where To Start
There are a number of platforms on the internet that host blogging, such as Wix.com, Wordpress, SquareSpace, LinkedIn, Blogger.com, and of course, Medium.com Each has their strengths and weaknesses, but as I am accustomed to Medium, we will use it as an example for the remainder of this article.
Signing up for Medium.com is free. As a free member, you are entitled to read 2–3 stories per month in their entirety for free. However, after that, you would have to pay for a subscription to access other stories. Subscriptions are extremely cheap at $5 per month, or $50 per year. People spend more on useless sodas and non-productive video games. Why not spend as much on something that could enrich your life?
If you want to become a member of Medium.com, you will gain immediate access to ALL stories on Medium with no restrictions. You are free to engage, comment, ask questions to any author, but you would need to follow some basic ethics rules to not get booted from the platform.
Once you sign up, you will create a profile. If you intend to be a social media influencer, you may wish to choose either a business name or social media profile name that matches your other social media handles as well. But, if you are here just to read and learn, you can use your own name.
Once you establish a profile, you can read any story. You can also write your own blog. For me, at first, I had no idea what to do. I timidly typed a few sentences and clicked the shiny green “Publish” button … dun, dun, duuuuhhhh. Nothing happened. No one was interested, but thank goodness, because what I wrote was gibberish.
I quickly deleted that, but it got me past the initial fear of putting myself in public view. I tried to write a few articles on my own in the beginning, but again, very low number of reads … Why? Was my topic not popular or relevant? Am I to be a small time writer forever? Well no, it was because I did not know what I was doing. Well, I do now, and that is what I will share with you in this series.
In order to earn commissions, you will need to fulfill 3 requirements:
- Have at least 100 followers
- Publish at least 1 article
- Be at least 18 years old
Please also note that Medium has a list of jurisdictions in which their Partner Program is eligible.
I think most people get hung up on the “100 followers” part. Well, if you read my previous article on Keyword Research, you may find it easier to get your follower count up fast. With Keyword Research, you find the words, phrases, and hashtags that increase your reach and attraction to your content.
Once you meet the requirements, you will have to provide your social security number or business tax ID number if you want to get paid commissions for your articles. Medium uses Stripe to link to your bank account and the payouts are automatically sent monthly.
Beginner Tips
I have written about blogging here, but here are some other ideas on how to help beginners that are just getting started:
- If you have never published an article before, just create a Title and write one paragraph about literally anything. Then click the Publish button. The world will not end, hordes of people won’t start critiquing you … just do it to get over that initial fear. Before it publishes, it will show a screen that allows to add keywords. On your first article, that is not too important, but we will look a bit closer at that in a moment. The important thing is to realize that publishing some of your thoughts isn’t the end of the world … JUST DO IT! :)
- On Medium, you can select text and a pop up will show up that will allow you to make it a Title, a subtitle, Bold, Italics or a Link, looks like this:
- When you write a blog, follow some kind of generally accepted format. This way it flows well when people read your articles — they know what to expect. This is just an example of the outline I follow:
- When you write your content, write as if you are talking to someone — it makes it easier to read.
- Break up your paragraphs into groups of 5 to 10 sentences for those of us with short attention spans.
- Break up the monotony of words with the occasional BOLD, italics, “quotations”, bullet points (heh), and …
indentations.
- … But, don’t over do it. LOL
- Include a few “next steps” for your viewers. These are called Call-To-Action, or CTA. Alway include a next step with your posts, articles, or videos. It could be as simple as a request to follow, or it could be a link to an affiliate or your website.
- Inserting the occasional image helps make your article more appealing as well. You can save images from the internet, but just be careful with copyrights.
- There are 3 image tools that I use. I will cover 2 here in the “Beginners” section, and the last one in the Advanced section.
- The first one is SnapNDrag Pro (for Apple). I love it. It is an image capture tool you find in the App store.
- I also use Pixabay which allows personal and commercial use of royalty-free images without any requirement to credit the creator. You can peruse free images at your leisure and download them for free. Most likely, they go to your “Downloads” folder. Copy them from there and paste to your article (command + C, then command + V). Alternatively, you can just click on a blank line and you will see a plus button — when you click it, you will see a pop-up like this:
- The Camera means you can insert an image from any file on your computer.
- The Magnifying Glass is an in-app image browser. When you click it, it shows a search bar where you enter what kind of image you want. Then you will pick from a selection. The selection will automatically credit the image in the caption.
- The Play Button means you can paste a YouTube or Vimeo video link to embed a video
- The Arrows button means you can paste code in to embed a video, banner, or image
- And the two Dashes simply adds a separator … like this!
Advanced Blog Tips
In this advanced blog tips section, the tips and tools are a bit more complex, and, at times, involve paying for something. Have a look and see if any of these would be of interest to you:
SemRush
SemRush is an all-in-one SEO, sales, and online marketing suite. It can analyze your social media or website, give recommendations to fix or improve your site, research competitors, and track web traffic and ads. Their service covers just about anything you can think of to improve your reach, so I will not be able to cover everything here.
Their service does require a subscription, so I would not say this is needed for beginners. However, if you have a website and have some change to spare, or are willing to invest in your business, you will have a few plans you can pick from. There is a 7-Day Free Trial with a “cancel anytime” offer as well:
I will say this, if I could go back in time when I was trying to find ways to make money online, I would have wished that I started learning and using this platform from the get-go. It is feature-rich and would have ‘put me on the map’ a lot more efficiently and faster.
Use SemRush to do your advanced keyword search, research what competitors are doing, analyze your website for SEO, and track social media posts for engagement data.
Jasper.ai
Jasper is a content creation AI that is optimized to rank well on search engines. You can use its Templates to quickly write blogs, emails, website content, ads, commerce, and more!
Here is a quick 1–minute ad video from them about what their platform is about. They used to be Conversion.ai, but now go by Jasper.ai:
I use Jasper to help with finding SEO-optimized Blog Titles and Meta tags. But you can also use it to quickly create content. I am currently working on more articles on how to use the Jasper platform. I would say, for now, that it is a little tricky using Jasper for writing about specific crypto platforms, but you can use it to get a general outline for content, and then just customize the content to whichever crypto project you like. It will not, of course, have the depth of analytics and comprehension into platform tokenomics that I often do in my crypto articles — that kind of thing takes a lot more time and effort!
Here is a link to a FREE TRIAL — if you sign up from this affiliate link, you will receive 10,000 free words, but they also have subscription plans for those of you more serious about content marketing. Their service has a 100% No Risk Money-Back Guarantee.
Canva
Canva is a design platform that has a library of templates and image galleries of static images, gifs, and videos. It is geared to digital content such as social media posts, but can also be used for creating presentations, print products, and videos.
Lately, I have been combining images from Pixabay with the images from Canva to create custom images and gifs for my Blog and YouTube thumbnails pictures, and gifs. I am also using it to create the Content Marketing for Crypto “Cheat Sheets” that accompany this Series!
There is a Free version with more than enough features for most content creators, however, the Pro plan has access to Premium images and videos that are higher quality than free images. Also, the Pro plan has a very, very useful tool called the Background Remover Tool which allows you to isolate an image from its background. This can create a very customized look to your images and gifs!
Canva does not have an affiliate or referral commission plan, but instead grants access to some premium images or videos from the referral link.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media powerhouse. It tracks all of your social media feeds with how many people see your post, how many people and who engage with your post, and track clicks on links.
Here is a marketing ‘insider’ term — Batching. This means that you create several pieces of content, whether social media posts, blog articles, videos, ad campaigns, ad banners, in advance, but that you do not release them all at once. You are creating “batches” of content yet to be released. The power of Sprout Social really shines with its Publishing tab. It can simultaneously post to multiple social media feeds with the click of a button. It can post immediately, or you can schedule it with their Optimal Send Times tool. This tool analyzes platform data and your posting history to see when is the most likely day and time that your article will get the best views and engagement! The times are customized to your history of posts, so the times are not going to be the same for everyone.
I use Sprout Social now to track the engagement of my social media posts and am especially enjoying this Optimal Send Time Tool only available with the Professional Version.
If you want to give this platform a try, I have a 30-Day Free Trial link for you below:
In Part 5 of this series, “How To Use AI to Streamline Your Efficiency”, we will re-visit some of these powerful platforms in more detail, along with a new and robust platform for videos, not yet covered.
Where To Learn More about Written and Video Blogging
If even one part of this article or series was helpful, you will be glad to know that I learned all of it from one place — Legendary Marketer. They are professional trainers on how to make money online with affiliate marketing, creating professional ads and sales funnels, videos promotions, ad campaigns, digital products, or online businesses.
For me, I wanted to start creating a “side hustle” where I could start making a little money on the side, and hopefully, one day rival or even replace my current “work” income. I’m not quite there, but I have learned a lot in a short span of time thanks to Legendary. What I did was I took an Online Business Builder Challenge and it is a series of 15 videos teaching you about the components of online sales and promotions each day, with short little assignments after each video. Normally, this course goes for $14, but with the affiliate link below, it knocks this valuable video series down to just $7.
It will talk about online business, but you do not need to have a formal business. In fact, it is better just to create a consistent social media presence and market through that. So, you could take what you learn and just apply it to your crypto blog, videos, or promotion of your favorite cryptos … like I do!
We will cover advanced business structures and sales funnels in Part 7 of this series. For now, I just suggest that people interested in this absorb and learn as much as you can. You can scour different videos and articles for information, or you can follow me for these fun articles, or you can take your content marketing to the next level by taking the Business Builder Challenge and see if YOU have what it takes to make money online!
Congrats! You made it to the end! You have earned Cheat Sheet #3 — Monetizing Your Blog:
Stay Tuned for Part 4 of 7: How To Polish Your YouTube and Twitter Posts. In this article, we will talk about making and editing videos and a tutorial on creating custom images and thumbnails in Canva.
Thanks for reading! :)
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