Most Bloggers need income from their work, there are two major ways of monetizing – with Ads or with Affiliate Promotions, if you have a site with a lot of informational content, then putting Ads on your site, makes a lot of sense. If your site deals with subjects where you can get sales of goods via affiliate links, then that can be lucrative too.
Well of course there is no one right way. But depending on your blog’s content, monetizing with Ads might suit better relying on Affiliate product promotion – or Vice Versa
Spreading the Risk
Key Point: Do not put your eggs in one basket! Many Affiliates have learned the hard way, finding out their products are suddenly unavailable or no longer in demand.
One week you are raking in thousands, next week….. nothing. So if you do use Affiliate as your strategy, at least broaden it to several products, not just one. Products come to the end of their useful life or are overtaken by a competitor, or the product manufacturer just stops production any of these can kill your income.
The Advantage of Affiliate commission income is, that you can choose to promote things of high value, so your income is high per item. Although promoting many low ticket items which have a low barrier to entry, also has its merits, not least of which is spreading the risk.
Can You Do Both?
You can and you should do both. If the problem just described – manufacturers stopping production of goods, or an affiliate offer is to finish, bloggers who also have Ad placements on their sites, are at least a little more protected if their affiliate income suddenly stops.
Buyers are more active at certain times of the year. Doubly so if your blog niche is seasonal. To maintain your income over a years variations can be important. So, bearing this in mind, why not use both strategies Ads and Affiliate products.
Unless you have a niche that isn’t ‘affiliate-product-friendly’, meaning there just aren’t goods that you could promote, then dig into your article ideas and see if you can find some. Even in niches like “Scenic Walking in Scotland”, you could promote Hotel accommodation or maybe walking boots and clothing. As I write this I can’t actually think of a niche completely without some potential.
True some niches might only have low-priced products on offer, books are a popular choice, but one which has very limited commissions. However, if you are an Amazon affiliate, sometimes you will get a ‘win’ when the buyer buys other things along with the book.
When I built my BestHalogenCooker.com site a few years ago, I regularly got this sort of thing in my Amazon income reports – a visitor to the site bought a $10cook book on my recommendation but later in the same 24 hours bought a Gas Mower at $750! With the result that I earned a total of around 50$ commissions.
So, although I cannot recommend anyone relies solely upon Amazon commission for site income, it is so easy to add an Amazon link these days, it is still worth doing.
Informational Content
It is perfectly possible to build an entire site, just with informative posts. This fits with Ad placements. For newbies with low traffic, this means Google Adsense. For sites with established traffic numbers over say 10k/month, you can look into signing up with Ezoic, Thrive Ads, or Mediavine. All of these companies will earn you a huge increase over Adsense income. You can and should change to one of these three, from Adsense, as soon as possible
- Ezoic: with less than 10k visitors/mon — no problem – any level may be accepted
- Ezoic: with 10k+ — apply with many advantages
- Mediavine: 50k sessions ( 60k visitors ) /mon
- Thrive Ads: 100K monthly page views
In addition, all these platforms are looking for traffic from English-speaking countries Like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Primarily from the US.
Whether you get a positive outcome when applying to these Advertiser platforms is going to depend mainly on your blog’s theme or Niche. Advertisers are going to be far more interested in big popular niches like travel, money, investing, health and fitness… etc than they are in Scandinavian Knitting Patterns. Sorry if that is your blog, but hey – take note.
Of course, the reliance on just one source of income is a mistake as in the above for Affiliates, just as it is for Ads. Ad brokers can and do monitor your site, if you infringe their TOService in any way, you may have the Ad placements stopped, until you sort out the problem.
Planning Your Blog Monetization Before Writing the Content
Take your income into account before you start a blog. If you intend to monetize it, think about how it will work and modify your niche accordingly. This advice will save you months of work for nothing!
Always choose a wider niche than your particular interest. This will enable you to continue and grow your blog when you have exhausted the initial interest. When I started the Halogen site, which grew quickly and then it declined in popularity, I found it very difficult to include other things, as the title BestHalogenCooker, was very clearly ONLY about Halogen Cookers.
