Do you constantly struggle with trying to monetize your blog? Or maybe you are just now thinking about trying to earn a profit?
Either way, here you will learn a few common mistakes for why you aren't making any money, and some tips to help overcome those hurdles.
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Why you aren't making money blogging:
- Your blog is more of a personal diary or journal. If this sounds familiar, then this might easily be the reason why you aren't making any money. Hard truth, but no one wants to read about your day unless you are a famous celebrity or Instagram influencer. I mean your mom or grandma might, but that's not much of an audience. Now you can definitely still have posts scattered about with topics like these, but make sure to have other articles that are helping your audience.
- You are too niched down. Picking a very specific topic can have it's benefits for SEO, but narrowing in too much won't leave room for a large audience or traffic.
- You haven't picked a niche. Every blogging guru will tell you yay or nay of picking a niche. Some blogs can be successful with multiple niches or topics in one, but you should have a main niche that you write the most about.
- Your site is too slow to load. Most people who click onto an article from Pinterest or Google want to almost immediately start reading. If there is a long load time, chances are they are going to click the back button.
- Your images aren't good. This is another hard truth, but depending on what you write about, images tell a story. If you are a food blogger, images are the reason why someone clicked to your recipe.
- You aren't diversifying your income stream. With blogging, it's important to be taking advantage of every possible way to make money (affiliates, ad income, your own products, sponsored work).
- You aren't using Pinterest as a source on traffic. Pinterest is one of the easiest ways to quickly grow your traffic especially as a new blogger. You just need to be creating images that are pinnable (long images 1000px X 1500px).
Tips to Successfully Monetize your blog
Pick a niche and decide who your audience is.
But...I don't know who my audience is yet? You want to have a good idea of the person you are going to be writing for. If you pick a couple of niches or decide on a lifestyle blog, you really need to focus on the audience portion. You want to write for them, whether its lists or how-to's or gift guides, but it needs to be for them.
The second thing to do is try to improve your site speed.
I use pingdom to monitor how fast my site is compared to other top sites in my niche. One plug-in to install on your site is called Shortpixel Image Optimizer. Images are one of the biggest reasons why your site is slow.
Diversify your income.
Use ads, affiliate products that make sense to your audience and article, and join sponsored networks to work with brands. The best part of blogging is that there is so many different things you can write about, and additionally there are a lot of ways to monetize.
Mediavine Ads
The best ad network (in my opinion) is Mediavine. They have specific requirements (25,000 sessions via Google Analytics), but once you reach the traffic threshold to apply, it's worth it!
Affiliate Networks
There are so many different affiliate networks for bloggers to join. Each network has lots of different brands and stores in the network that you can apply to.
- Amazon is like it's own network because there are millions of different products on Amazon you can promote.
- Awin is a network to join if you want to promote Etsy products.
- CJ is a network that has companies like fabric.com and wayfair.com.
- Shareasale has Project Nursery, Balsam Hill (christmas decor), Sears, and many more.
- Impact has Target, Kohls, and Walmart among others.
- Flexoffers has Carters, Pier 1 and lots more.
It might be overwhelming, but I would encourage you to apply to all of them because not all networks have the same stores.
Joining all these networks means managing a lot of logins so I created this blogging binder printable just for you (scroll down to get it). You can organize your affiliate logins, and other blogging logins too.
Sponsored Networks (working with brands)
There are a couple different ways you can work with brands. Firstly, you can reach out to brands directly or you can join sponsored networks.
These networks align brands with influencers and bloggers for specific collaborations. This is a great way to start out when your audience is small.
Some campaigns offer free product in exchange for a blog post or instagram post, while others offer compensation. The more audience you have the better the compensation will be.
Here's a look at a few sponsored networks to join:
Writing Gift Guides
People are always searching for gift guides on what to buy for people. This can be a great way to use some affiliate links for products.
Depending on your niche or audience, what gift guides do they normally search for? The more tailored it is to your audience the better.
Printable Blog Binder Organizer
Download your free blog binder organizer
Hopefully you have a better understanding of how to monetize your blog. There are lots of different ways to do so, but it's important to have plenty of content people want, traffic, and utilizing all the different ways to make money.
Happy blogging!
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