Introduction
There are many ways to monetize a blog, the main two are with Ads and with Affiliate products, or both. I will describe these two main methods in this article, plus how to start an email campaign to make the most of your site visitors. Purely informational content websites can only really use Ads, whereas if you have any product-oriented content, the opportunity to write pre-selling affiliate posts is there.
1. Ad Revenue
What Are Typical Ad revenue figures per Post
The figures below are from “Growth Scouter” which is a YouTube channel, but I have seen very similar figures from a good range of channels and blogging sites. The rates are average for a fair assessment of targets, I have seen some top sites reaching $50 per 1000 page views and above.
For an informational type blog with 100 posts: Ads earnings are estimated to be $525. An average successful post, with a niche popular in the USA, so having US traffic, might get 350 views each month. Total pageviews then are 35000. The RPM or revenue per thousand views would be
$525/35000 * 1000 = $15 ( RPM)
So for a blog with 200 posts, the $1000 per month income target is met.
How Long Does it Take to Reach 200 posts?
It is possible to easily reach the 100 to 200 posts point, in a year, working on your own, even working part-time. My post on < /managing-a-full-time-job-and-building-a-blogging-business > may give you some tips and confidence that it can be done.
Ad Brokers – What are the Options
Google’s Adsense will accept quite a low level of traffic, so apply when you have say 20 posts on your site, reapply if you’re rejected for not having enough content when you have written a few more. My own experience is that Google will accept blogs with as low as 15 to 20 posts, as long as the work is high quality and not just based on other similar blogs.
Google then is the low bar. When you have 10k pageviews, Ezoic will probably be your Ad broker choice, you will see a big jump in your revenue at that point as Ezoic generally pay a lot more than Google Adsense. Further down the line with more pageviews, you can apply for Mediavine or Ezoic PRO. With some blog niches Ezoic’s advertiser clients will pay more than Mediavine and vice versa, so it pays to experiment with both.
Actually, Mediavine counts sessions, not pageviews, so one visitor to the site is a session, whether they scroll through one or more pages on that blog. Mediavine looks for a minimum of 50k session levels of traffic, though the quality is much more important and will be thoroughly checked when you apply.
Ezoic Premium is an invitation-only plan, with a subscription. They negotiate deals with the bigger household name advertisers and access to ads is restricted to Premium and the level you are on. Revenue is guaranteed to be greater than your subscription. The number of ads on site will be similar or less than with standard Ezoic ad placement schemes. Ezoic Premium members get access to top speed API based priority reporting, site reviews, a dedicated ad manager, queue jumping at the helpdesk, and discounts on the Ezoic site speed accelerator program
Problems with Mobile Devices
Desktop ads return is up to 30% higher than mobile – but mobile is usually the way most visitors find you. So if you can find a way to make your visitors connect via their desktop computers, it can be well worth the extra work.
2. Affiliate Revenue
If the subject of your blog post is
- about a product either a physical product or an info product
- about a product that will help your reader in some way
- a HOW-TO page – eg how to use the XYZ coffee maker
Then there is an opportunity to make an affiliate promotion. Building Affiliate pages take longer than writing informational content. But the commission is often very high, even up to the 90% level, so it is well worth the effort.
With networks like Clickbank, they will nearly always have Affiliate resources like email swipes, Banners, Articles, Artwork, and Photo shots of the product. With other networks, less information is available and you might have to do a lot of work to get the necessary page information. Fortunately, page builders like Elementor and ClickFunnels have made it a breeze to construct very decent-looking presell pages. It pays to build several different versions and AB test for the best converting ones
Product Reviews have to some extent been less successful lately, writing a how-to ….. page, explaining a particular function of the product, have the best chance to get viewers today. Comparing X to Y products is another option. For example, I have a few pages explaining some functions of the GIMP photo editor software. As it can all be taken from screenshots, software is an ideal product to promote.
A very good way to go, with affiliate product promotion, is to use a giveaway, to get opt-ins to an email list, you can then send a series of promotions and infomercials by email. Do ensure though that the giveaway is USEFUL AND RELEVANT to your audience.
The statistics show that someone seeing a reminder of a product seven times is the point at which most sales are made, so make a good series of emails describing the best features and benefits of the product and drip-feed it out once a day or every other day to give the best results.
EXAMPLE: let’s choose an audience in the Affiliate Marketer space.
Our Product to promote is Designrr the eBook design and publisher Program:
The giveaway might be an eBook on 10 ways to get more done in a day, or how to gain more customers or anything else that the target audience would want to do. After the optin, the emails can be sent out
An example Eight Email Sequence:
- Design from scratch or use one of thousands of PRO Templates
- Import content from Facebook or any webpage
- Transcribe any video into a text file with images from the video
- Reposition, resize, or manipulate any image with built in image editor
- Change backgrounds, fonts, colors Add or Edit text
- Insert Affiliate Links
- Create Catalog style Flipbooks for the Web
- Create eBooks, Publish to Kindle, Publish to Slideshare
Within each email, describing each useful feature and benefit to the user, link to the Designrr pre-Sales page. In this way, if the actual sales page URL is changed, or there is a special offer, we can change the link on our pre-sales page easily.
Outsourcing Content:
At some point, as you progress towards the goal of 200 posts and beyond, you will begin to see sales and revenue from Ads coming in. Reinvest that into outsourced content.
It is a lot easier to outsource informational content of course but with a suitable brief a freelancer can produce affiliate pages too. Outsourcing for a US audience is best done from US outsourcers. Content is definitely cheaper to buy from the Philippines and far east, but they won’t have the same familiarity with US English and American culture that US natives have. With Problogger (US) , Upwork, WriterAccess expect to pay $30 to $50 per 1000 words, for non-US writers $20 to $30 per 1000 words
Training Writers
This is difficult and initially expensive, also without enough guidance, expect rubbish content. Don’t believe that you get what you pay for! If a writer doesn’t know what you expect – format, style, standard, then you could receive anything. Even if the writer is good, it will cost you time to edit the piece into your own structure, if you do not specify it first.
The best way is always to provide the writer with very detailed briefs with essential reading, minimum content length, content structure, your conventions, and a host of other parameters to meet, as well as the all-important content required.
- Specify the key-words to use as the title ( H1 )
- Write a 2 sentence Introduction with a brief answer to the question asked in the title.
- Look up the SERPs for the key-word & write BETTER content than the top ranking one
- Ensure it is HELPFUL and more VALUABLE than the top ranked articles
- Include the Clients product promo if it an Affiliate piece
- Do Not Copy anyone else’s work
- Spell Check and Grammar Check all work( also 16 – use a US based Grammar & spelling aid.
- Spacing between sub sections
- Images – cite the source & ensure the license is applicable
- Sub Headlines – Outline your preferred structure H2…. H3…. H4 etc
- Specify the min number of Data tables, Bullet Lists, Numbered Lists to be used
- Provide Internal links from other articles to be written or existing articles on site
- Provide Links to external sources
- Sites NOT to link to ( competitor sites )
- Specify any conventions eg ( underlined or Bolded subtitles ) , use of hyphens
- If applicable, ie if the article is for US audience – use US spelling and Grammar conventions
Doing this will reduce the amount of editing you have to do before publication on the blog and give a better understanding between you and your writer, after all, no one wants a load of rewrites to do.
Some less experienced writers might initially need more guidance. When you send out the brief, you could ask for a framework of the post they intend to write, before it is written, to see if they are on the right track.
The importance of internal links is very high. You can either specify a certain number of links or a list of actual links to include or leave it to your writer Give your writers access to your blog planning sitemap or whatever you use to plan it and sufficient details to be able to see relevant internal links to include. Ideally, you would specify exactly what you want to link to, as listed above.
Conclusion
Experience shows that doing it all yourself, takes much longer to get to the $1000 a month point. Starting outsourcing early and using a detailed framework in your writing briefs, makes for much less work for you, re-editing, and leaves you free to concentrate on the all-important keyword research.
I initially tried using outsource writers from the Philippines and found them very good from the English point of view, but their articles required a little editing to better suit the American audience. Most importantly With a poor brief, you WILL get a poor quality post, writers are not mind readers!
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