How to Turn a $20 Blog into a $350 Blog in One Day

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Guest Post: How I Made a $20/Month Blog into a $350/Month Blog In One Day – A Lesson In Monetizing

If you are a blog owner, you certainly understand the value of web traffic, but are you letting your web traffic go to waste? I was.

Here is a quick lesson in monetizing and how you may be able to dramatically increase your online profit without increasing the amount of visitors you receive.

 

First, An Introduction

Before I begin, I think it is proper to introduce myself to the 20sMoney community and say thank you to 20sMoney for the opportunity to contribute!

My name is Jason Habing, and I have been writing for and contributing to online marketing/SEO blogs for the past 2 years. I work for an SEO Consulting Company and enjoy working on my own projects on the side.

I don’t want to waste time going into my personal details, but feel free to comment with questions. Now on to the meat of the post:

The First Step Is Knowing – Consider ALL of Your Options

The first thing I urge all of my consulting clients to realize is that there are multiple ways to monetize a website, and each should be carefully considered. Here are just a few ways to monetize your blog:

AdSense – My personal least favorite. Sure, it can be very easy to get going, but you are really missing out on a TON of money by using the Google platform.

Banner Ads – This can work out great if you are able to find some direct ad buys, but I personally don’t like CPM networks because they offer such low rates.

Affiliate Marketing Through Networks – My personal favorite. Affiliate marketing allows you to match your audience to a product with precision, and affiliate networks make it ridiculously easy to offer products. (More on this later in the post)

Affiliate Marketing Through Strategic Partnerships – Know of someone producing a product that your readers would love? Consider a strategic partnership whereby you offer their product to your readers for a commission. It’s a win-win situation!

Again, these are just a few ways to monetize your blog, but you should be carefully considering which of these matches your site!

Here’s how:

How To Find The Perfect Match For Your Website

Each website is going to have a different sweet spot for monetization. Perhaps it’s a combination of banner ads and AdSense, or perhaps it’s a combination of Strategic Alliances and Affiliate Network Advertising. It is up to you to find the balance. Here’s how:

1. Decide if your buyers are in the buying mindset or the information mindset when they enter your website. Are they searching for “New Shoes” when they search for you? They are probably close to a buy. Are they searching for “Funny Shoe Pictures”? They probably are just browsing.
2. If you have a buying mindset searcher, it makes sense to offer them a product as QUICKLY as possible. This is when it might make sense to run an affiliate offer.
3. If you have an informational browser, this is when AdSense or banner ads might make sense. Since these browsers are not likely to buy something, your best hope of monetizing them is through a banner ad click or AdSense click.

Get into the mindset of your visitors and monetize accordingly.

Let me show you an example:

$20/Month to $350/Month Overnight – My Success Story

To show you how to put these thoughts into place, here is an example of how I dramatically increased the value of my website through about 3 hours work.

One of the websites I own is focused on “online jobs.” Not that ​specific keyword but a few long tail keywords related to it. It gets about 2000 unique visitors per month.

Earlier in the year, I was monetizing the website with Google AdSense. This was producing me anywhere from $15 to $25 per month. Nothing exciting. Then I decided to take a closer look at my visitors and improve my earnings.

I realize that my visitors were looking to make money online. One of the methods I have always suggested for making side income is taking surveys online, and I send tons of traffic to survey sites that I recommend. So I thought… why not get paid for all of this referral?

With some quick research I found that there are plenty of referral programs for survey sites, and I chose to use MaxBounty to place affiliate links for the survey sites I refer.

The result? Great success.

Literally the next day I noticed that my daily earnings had jumped from $1 – $2 per day with AdSense to $10 – $15 per day with Affiliate Offers.

Conclusion:

The takeaway from this article should be that you should never underestimate the impact that your monetization strategy has on your bottom line. Many people are much too concentrated on traffic, and are thus blindsided from opportunity.

Consider taking 30 minutes to review your website and brainstorm other potential ways to make money on it. You may hit a goldmine that was sitting right beneath you all along.

About the Author: Jason Habing is the author of numerous blogs focused on making money online. His most recent project is Survey Examiner, which is a blog focused on teaching people how to get paid to take surveys.