How to monetize your blog

Today we give you an idea of how complex it can get when monetizing your blog. Next Monday we will give you answers how to make the best choices to monetize your blog.

Monetizing a blog or website is much more than:

• "throw a few ads on your blog"
• "get more visitors"
• sit by, sip a cigar, drink a cognac

.. and you are making money online…

How to make money with a shop

The above logic applied on a shop would mean:

• buy a few products
• put them in your shop
• get more visitors

… and you are making money in your shop…

When "more visitors" doesn’t make "more money"

Most likely you have been to a train station: in the morning it’s full with people. What are people buying there?

Whatever they can grab in the few minutes their train is not there:

• newspaper
• coffee
• magazine
• fast food snack
• …

Although there are lots and lots of visitors, nobody puts a shoe shop in a train-station. Why? Because it can nicely take me a few hours before I find the shoes I want…

So having lots of traffic doesn’t automatically mean you have lots of sales and make lots of money.

Know your blog visitors

You can only know your visitors well if you see them face to face in real life as real people.

Second best is getting to know visitors because you manage to keep them commenting on your blog. (DaddyP is a great example for that strategy, the opposite can be said about Galapagos Islands: nobody is commenting there.)

Otherwise you need to use logfiles to see where your online traffic comes from and categorize them as such.

Do they come from:

• search engines
• bookmarks

The first visitors are dropping by for 1 aspect of your blog (which specific aspect can be found in a good logfile or use sitemeter dot com).

Once they found what they want, they will most likely click on something and off they go.

Which visitors make money and which visitors don’t?

Like in the train station, you can sell fast and lightweight products before people step on the train.

So how to monetize your website visitors?

Search engine visitors drop by most likely for the first time. Call them "men shopping for a shirt": they go right to the target, buy and out of the shop they are again!

Same on your blog: soon as they see what they want (or worst case they don’t see it), out they go again. These people are the people that have no clue what are ads and what aren’t on your blog, so their click through rate could be quite high.

Regular visitors or those who bookmarked your site "know your ads by heart". So the only way for ads to be effective with them is to change your ads frequently (every day a new deal…). Change your layout from time to time and again you will see the clickthrough going up if you have mostly regular visitors.

Content is king, visitors are queens

Therefore you now know that content is king is only half of the story…

Conclusion

Today I only wanted to highlight that there is more than just the simple idea: the more visitors I have, the more money I earn.

Also the idea: content is king, optimize your content, optimize your keywords… all fine but: it’s only half of the story.

From next Monday onwards we will reveal some more secrets and strategies in order to monetize "which blog" for "which visitors". Visitors are queens… treat them accordingly and you will get what you want 🙂

All feedback or extra input you add in a comment will be added as well!