Do you want to know how to optimize a blog?
What if you don’t have any blog traffic?
No problem!
Today’s guest author solves this minor problem for you.
Let’s get started learning how to monetize a blog.
“What if I have only a small amount of traffic?”
When I publish posts about how to make money, people write and ask if your amount of traffic matters.
Others assume they need traffic to make money and ask how much traffic they need.
Today’s guest author insists you don’t need any traffic at all!
He is here to tell you how to monetize a blog without having blog traffic.
How to Monetize a Blog Without Having Blog Traffic
by Joseph Hogue
You can learn how to make money on limited blog traffic for the motivation you need to keep blogging.
Let’s face it, most of us are blogging to make money. Even if you’re blogging simply to get your message out and reach an audience, making a little extra cash for your effort isn’t bad.
For many bloggers, making money means Google Adsense and affiliates, monetizing the blog’s traffic through clicks and sales.
There’s just one problem, most blogs get almost no traffic. Bloggers struggle to build their site to more than a few thousand visitors a month. Google Adsense revenue in the personal finance niche works out to about $0.01 per page view.
That’s all of $25 for a blog that gets 2,500 page views a month and nowhere near enough to keep most people motivated to keep blogging.
How do you monetize traffic if there’s no traffic?
You can concentrate on growing your traffic with three core areas like email, social and search. That takes time though and many blogs still struggle to reach the level where advertising is going to be a meaningful paycheck.
Finding that motivation to keep your blog going means finding other ways to make money, ways that don’t require waves of visitors each month.
How Much Blog Traffic Do You Need to Make Money?
The blogging world is glamourized with stories of bloggers making seven-figure incomes, the huge blogs with massive traffic. The truth is that most blogs get very little traffic, but the bloggers still do very well on a monthly income basis.
In fact, results from an annual blogger survey show that half the blogs on the web get less than 10,000 visitors a month and one-in-four get less than 2,500 visitors a month.
While the largest section in the graph is blogs with traffic over 25,000 visitors a month, this is for a very wide range of blogs from 25,000 to one blog that reported over 800,000 visitors a month. The vast majority of blogs are concentrated at the lower-end of the traffic scale.
But these bloggers with fewer than 10,000 visitors still make money. Monthly income per visitor ranged from less than a penny to several blogs averaging $0.50 or more per visitor.
Will you make more money with more traffic? Yes.
Can you make a lot of money with very little blog traffic? Yes!
If you’re struggling to increase your blog traffic or just starting out, try shifting your focus to making money on the traffic you have.
How to Make Money on Another Website’s Traffic
If your own blog isn’t drawing the crowds you think you need to make money, then the obvious solution should be to make money off other websites’ traffic.
This means creating products from your blog that you can sell through other websites. The easiest product I’ve found, and one of the most passive, has been self-publishing.
Self-publishing is a natural fit for bloggers because you’re already creating content. You’ve already become an expert in your niche by virtue of research and posting on your blog. Why not turn that knowledge into a book?
If you’ve already got a large library of posts on the site, you might be able to pick out enough articles to reformat into a book. An easier strategy is to proactively plan your content around a book idea.
- Plan out the chapters and ideas for your book. Research other books on Amazon to see what other authors are talking about and what they might have missed.
- Write one or two chapters a week and post them to your blog. This helps keep you on schedule without neglecting your blog’s readers.
- After a couple of months, combine the posts into a single Word document. You’ll need to change some of the language and maybe add a little content, but the hard part is done.
- After you’ve published to Amazon Kindle, update your posts with a couple of paragraphs about the book and a link to your page. Each post now becomes a marketing channel with readers specifically looking for your book’s topic.
Just a few organic sales a month from your blog readers is enough to keep your book ranked on Amazon. From there, the world’s largest ecommerce platform takes over and shows your book to its billions of users.
How to Make More Money on Less Traffic
You can still make money on traffic from your own blog as well. I know bloggers that make a six-figure income on blogs with less than 10,000 visitors a month. You just have to find the product that serves your visitors perfectly.
The conversion rate, the percentage of readers that click a link and buy a product, on most affiliate programs is horribly low around one percent but I’ve seen bloggers get as much as 5% conversion after finding that perfect product.
This means finding one or two affiliates that really fit your blog’s niche and serve your specific visitor. Most bloggers make money on a list of affiliate products, but the majority of their income comes from just a few.
- Join an affiliate network like CJ Affiliates and browse programs in your topic. Watch for products with higher network earnings and look to related blogs in your niche for what they are promoting.
- Plan at least three articles around each affiliate; a review, a list article comparing different products and a demonstration of the product. These three types of posts are usually easiest to rank on Google to bring targeted search traffic.
Sometimes it takes a little trial and error to find the affiliates that work best on your blog, but you should have an idea for those that will best serve your visitors’ needs. When you find those two or three affiliates that convert best for your blog, add them to a resources page and promote a little more heavily across social media.
You can make money blogging even without tens of thousands of visitors. It’s not your traffic that matters but the community you build with readers and how you’re able to serve their needs through your own products and affiliates. Learn how to make money on other websites’ traffic and how to convert more sales with limited traffic on your own blog.
Author bio: Joseph Hogue worked as an equity analyst and an economist before realizing being rich is no substitute for being happy. He now runs five websites in the personal finance and crowdfunding niche, makes more money than he ever did at a 9-to-5 job and loves building his work from home business.
Readers, please share so other bloggers and website creators wishing to monetize learn how to monetize a blog without traffic.
What did you think of Joseph’s tips? Do you know how to monetize a blog without traffic? Do you have any tips you can share?
