5 Proven Ways to Monetize a Blog That Generates Under 1,000 Visitors Per Day (#3 Is my Favorite)
Can you really make money with your blog?
If you’ve thousands of email list subscribers or if your blog generates over 10,000 unique visitors monthly, then YES. In fact, it’s easy to turn that traffic and visitors into a real stream of revenue.
The real challenge is for those bloggers who get less than 1,000 or even 100 visitors per day.
It hurts just seeing so many people often giving up too early when they aren’t making any money.
My advice is don’t compare your chapter 1 with someone else’s chapter 20.
You’re at the start of something great. Now, this may sound like an arduous and frustrating task but it’s not impossible. All it takes is perseverance, dedication and right practices to build a profitable blog.
Above all, it takes time to build a blog that’ll generate revenue. So start with where you’re, determine which stage you are in now, and work from there. Just as in life, in building your site, you can’t grow your traffic overnight.
The good news is you don’t have to wait till you hit the magic number to start making money with your new blog. Depending on your industry, many of these methods can be implemented to get you started with blog monetization. I know it’s pretty disappointing if you’ve poured your heart and soul into one method and it doesn’t work as expected. But just don’t give up, try a different approach and build upon that.
I hope this guide helps you start making money online from your blog. And hopefully one day you’ll tell others how my blog has benefited you in transforming your life.
1. Become a freelance blogger
One of the easiest ways to make money with your new blog is becoming a freelance blogger. As a blogger, you already have the skillsets and experience to become an in-demand freelance blogger. Might as well leverage your blog to make some money by offering your freelance services. And becoming a freelance blogger can definitely improve your financial life.
According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics, freelance bloggers who have their own blogs earn more than their corporate counterparts.
There’s no surprise as we’re living in the era where Content is King. The demand for high-quality web content is always high.
Big companies and marketing agencies are constantly on the look for talented and professional bloggers to help to build and scale their businesses online. Furthermore, freelance bloggers with relevant skillsets like social media, WordPress, multimedia and SEO will encounter the most favorable job opportunities too.
Becoming a freelance blogger can improve your financial life. Elna Cain is a good example here. She makes a full-time income as a part-time freelance blogger in less than 6months.
Recent research showed that freelancers contribute approximately $1.4trillion annually to the US economy, an increase of 30% from last year. 95% say they like, love or are satisfied with what they do every day. About 36% of freelancers earned more than $75,000, 12 % of them made more than $100,000 in 2017.
If you want to make money as a freelance blogger, your website is your best marketing tool. Often, your potential clients will find you via Google, link to your site from LinkedIn, or stumble upon you through one of the blog posts or articles written by you. Or maybe your friends and family are spreading your work through word of mouth. The first thing people most likely will do is checking out your website and your site content.
So it’s very important to have a professional-looking blog even if you’re just started out. Make sure you’re using a self-hosted blog. If you’re still using a free blogging platform, it’s time take your blog seriously and create your own hosted blog.
Are you looking for a web hosting provider? Get started easily with HostGator.
A professional-looking website with lots of interesting and great content, links and a quality full bio, will prompt the clients to reach out and lead to more works.
In short, your website will either make you or break you.
Freelance writer vs Freelance blogger
Remember you’re more than a freelance writer. A freelance writer is a person who’ll provide services by writing articles, reports, and sales letters.
While as a blogger, on top of having a good writing skill, you’ll need to understand your targeted audience, create shareable content, engage with audience, distribute the content, optimize your blog and more. All these skillsets will come in handy in content marketing, which differentiates you from freelance writers.
According to the latest statistic, 91% of B2B marketers are using contents as part of their marketing campaigns, and it’s still on the rise. That means more money is yet to be made.
So you might be wondering, “but there are so many writers out there.”
Yes, that’s true. Although there’s a rise in demand for writers, it’s still very hard to find professional freelance bloggers that know how to put together full-blown content marketing strategies.
B2B and B2C companies are going to incorporate content as the tool to generate leads and build a loyal audience.
So if you have all these blogging skills, you can make money by becoming a freelance blogger.
To get started with becoming a freelance blogger, you’ll have to market your blogging services to your prospects.
There are a number of effective ways to promote your works: market on social media platforms, guest post for high-traffic sites, blog consistently on your own blog and even try to advertise on Facebook. Slowly but surely, by delivering quality works, people will rehire you and even recommend your services to others through word of mouth.
2. Sell coaching and consulting services
Becoming a coach or consultant is one of the fastest ways to make money from blogging, especially for blog that gets fewer than 1000 unique visitors a day. With these services, you’ll give your prospects direct access to your expertise and feedback by charging a fee.
The truth is it really doesn’t matter when you started blogging, you can start providing coaching services to make money online.
Bill Gates once said that “Everyone needs a coach” in the Ted Talk. We all need a coach. Whether you are a CEO, business owner, manager, teacher, artist, salesperson or football player, we need someone who can help us to face challenges, reach our goals, and give us timely feedback and push us to the next level of success.
With a blog, you can establish yourself as an expert in your niche and build your audience by providing valuable content consistently. Directly or indirectly, you’re educating and creating awareness with the content on your blog. So you can take that education to the next level by offering one-on-one coaching sessions and hourly paid consulting services.
Becoming a coach in your specific industry works because people want to learn from you, improve in certain areas and they’ll be willing to pay a premium for your undivided attention.
No matter what niche you’re in, offering a coaching or consulting service to potential clients can earn you cash and help others to reach their goals. Peter G. James Sinclair has transformed his blogging career with the guidance of coach Yaro Starak, and now he’s able to build an online business around his passion.
Sophie Lizard from Be a Freelance Blogger is selling her one-on-one coaching session for freelance bloggers. Her mentoring packages price from $197 to $687.
Among the many different types of coaching, life coaching is the most popular niche in coaching. Through coaching, you’ll help other people deal with challenges, reinforce their strengths and help them to become more self-aware in life.
For example, if you’re an expert in fitness and health. You can blog about healthy eating, weight-loss diets and other effective methods. By building your reputation through blogging, you can offer a coaching service, where you’ll schedule a time to talk with your potential clients via Skype and customize a personal diet plan and exercise regime for them. You can charge for the one-on-one coaching on an hourly rate and come back to review the progress weeks later.
So how do you use your blog to promote your coaching and consulting services?
Always do your market research before you jump ahead. You need a strong Unique Selling Proposition to differentiate yourself in a saturated market- understand what sets your service apart from other competitors, why should people choose you instead of others.
Firstly, You can do some competitive research, find out what other coaches in your niche are doing. By learning from their failures and success, you can grow faster and avoid doing the same mistakes. Secondly, you’ll need to identify your potential customers, what are their problems and what can you offer to solve their pain.
After having a clear strategic plan, you’ll need to create a page on your blog specifically for your coaching or consulting services. Use this particular page to promote and advertise your services, get your prospective customers and build from there.
You need to start creating useful and valuable content on the subjects related to your prospects too.
As a coach, you need to have the mindset of an entrepreneur; it would be hard to get your First client. You’ll need to reach out by promoting your services through other social media platforms where your potential clients and prospects are active.
3. Create and sell ebooks (My Favorite)
Creating and selling ebooks is my favorite way of monetizing a blog. It’s ideal for almost any niche.
There are tons of self-publishing platforms that you can get your book published; Amazon is one of the major retailers that you don’t want to miss.
Blogging is also your best shot at publishing a bestseller. Over the years, I’ve noticed the unfair advantage that some authors had with a blog audience.
They were able to write and publish a book that immediately catches Amazon’s attention. And that is what you want to achieve ideally.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reports that he made about $72000 within a week after launching his ebook. Steve Gillman of The Penny Hoarder made an earning of $2000 from an ebook that took him less than a week to write.
I’ve become kind of an expert in self-publishing. Both me and my husband. We build our 6-figure self-publishing business by selling kindle books. The only regret I have is I waited too long to get started with blogging. We build our publishing business from scratch without a loyal audience. Imagine what we could achieve if we start blogging and build a reader base years ago…
If you feel eBooks publishing is the right monetization method for your blog, you can get started by selling it on Amazon. You can use your blog to pre-sell your titles, writing blog posts to promote your ebook and then redirect them to your kindle bookstore. You can even give discounts or offer free copies of your book in exchange for honest reviews from your readers. Having positive reviews on your kindle book will help in your book rankings and sales in the long run.
As a blogger, you get the advantage of being known as an authority in your niche. You get the audience, influence and platform to make a powerful ebook launch.
Want to learn more about Kindle Publishing and start to make money from it, sign up my free course below:
Also read:
How to write and publish an eBook
How to Make Passive Income by Selling Information Products
How to Use an eBook to promote your Business
7 Reasons Why you should create an eBook for your Business
4. Create and sell online courses
Selling digital courses is another great way to make money from your blog that gets less than 1000 visitors a day. You don’t need many followers to start making your first sale.
For example, if your blog has 100visitors a day, try to understand your visitors, find out what exactly they’re looking for and create a course that meets their needs.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by the thought of achieving perfection for the first time. Your first online course won’t look that great, but that’s alright. Start from where you are, improve along the way and scale up from there.
Online courses are popular because people like the convenience of getting useful and relevant information all in one-stop. Yes, even though they can get the same information for free online.
And people used to perceive that online courses have a higher value than blog posts.
So if you can create and package valuable content into a course, and sell it through your blog to the targeted audience, you can create a stream of revenue online.
It doesn’t matter when you started blogging. By having a self-hosted WordPress blog you can establish yourself as an expert if you’re doing it the right way.
For example, Dale of StartupCamp.com made over $130,000 per month. Over 30% of this revenue came from selling his online course.
Monica, founder of Redefiningmom.com, sells her “Busy Moms Building“ intensive course online at $97, aims to other aspiring moms to create an online blog business.
The idea is to create material that your audience will be willing to pay for, where you can help them to reach their goals within your specialty. Your online course may be of help to people who want to solve their problems, learn a specific skill or improve in certain areas. For instance, it could be as simple as having a course teach “How to Use PowerPoint”.
You’ll need to make sure your course is useful, valuable, easy to follow and engaging. Think of what’s your strength and expertise, understand the needs of your audience, create a value-packed and actional online course and sell it through your blog.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Another popular method to monetize a blog is to leverage affiliate marketing. If you’re not ready to create and sell your own products or services, if you’re just starting out, then affiliate marketing would be your best choice for monetizing your blog.
You’re making money by promoting other’s products. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you’ll need to create content that ultimately in harmony with any affiliate offers that you plan to promote.
To achieve long-term success in affiliate marketing, here are 3 things that you need to keep in mind:
- Only promote products or services relevant to your market.
- Only promote products you’ve personally used. If not, make sure that you only promote products that you’re confident in.
- Always include a disclaimer or disclosure on your website, to inform your readers that you’ll receive commissions if they purchase through your affiliate links.
For example, if you’re running a beauty blog, you can sell affiliate makeup, haircare or skincare products. Since your blog is already attracting an audience interested in beauty topics, you can write a review, tutorial, or informative article relevant to the affiliate offer, include affiliate links appropriately throughout your post and start making commissions effortlessly.
Personally, I think affiliate marketing is a good way to start making money for beginners. If you’re looking for something easy to start and handsoff, it’s a great choice. However, it might not be the most profitable method if your blog don’t have over 10,000 visitors per day. But it isn’t impossible to make a profit by promoting affiliate products.
Here’s a screenshot of my first earning with Bluehost in less than a week! Yes, I have less than 1,000 visitors a day.
A very great example, Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of makingsenseofcents.com made over $1 million dollars with her blog in 2017, over 50% of the earning is coming from affiliate marketing. After building an engaged loyal following through years of blogging, now she’s reaping the rewards of her blogging efforts.
Next, let’s see how much do bloggers earn from affiliate marketing…
If you’re not sure, it’s worth giving it a try. You have nothing to lose, even though no one signing up through your affiliate link. You’re building your brand, your content, your audience and your email list.
If you want to make money quickly, it might not be the best choice. You really need lots of traffic to achieve certain success with affiliate marketing. But I could be wrong. In fact, I’m glad if you can prove me otherwise.
So how can you start making money from blogging by promoting affiliate products?
There are a number of ways that you can start making money with affiliate marketing. Amazon affiliate marketing program is one of the easiest programs to get started with. There thousands of products to choose from, you can almost find any products that you want to promote on Amazon. Plus, you can earn up to 10% of any sales purchased through your link.
I have written a comprehensive guide on Amazon affiliate marketing program for beginners. If you’re interested in using this method to monetize your blog, you can read more here.
At this point, you may notice the fact that you can’t really make money by blogging. But you can leverage your blog to promote your services or products.
If you’re just started blogging, if your blog generates fewer than 1000 visitors on a daily basis, if you don’t have a loyal reader base, it’s EXTREMELY challenging to make a living from your blogging effort.
But you have to start from somewhere else and build your way up. Choose the most suitable blog monetization method, plan it out and work on it. So wait no more and start taking action!
I would love to hear from you.
As a blogger, what method do you use to monetize your blog that gets under 1000 visitors a day?
Do you have other tips and blog monetization ways to share with us? Feel free to comment below
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Originally published at thinkmaverick.com on March 12, 2018.
