How to monetize a blog

Blogs are essentially one of the hardest thing to monetise.  In this article, I will look at some popular ways to make money with a blog and why they are not suitable for aaronchua.com. Hopefully, this analysis will help you to understand how monetisation works and why you might be making more money if you choose the right option.

Just to be clear. A blog means it is personal and it has to be updated regularly. It is not to be confused with a niche site where the owner of the site typically is unknown and there are no real engagement being done.

Ads

Blogs typically don't work well with ads unless your blog has a large source of search traffic. Even so, a blog is normally configured to attract long term readers and not to send them off via the ads. As a result, they are not optimised to earn ad revenue via clicks.

I did an experiment using a new ad network called intentclick from Kontera. Below is my earning for May. 

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I make a miserable USD0.22 for the month of May. You can see why ads is not an option here. Of course, I can earn more by using a better ad programme such as adsense but the point here is there a blog is not designed to push people away through ads so they are never the best monetization option

Affiliate offers

Using affiliate offers yields a much better result. The below is the earnings from clickbank. I made about USD100 in about 7 months, which comes to about USD13 per month. Still not going to be rich.

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Promoting something to your readers or search traffic coming to your blog or selling something that is not value adding makes me feels dirty. Unlike other marketers, I can't really promote something unless it really gives you a positive ROI. This is why I only recommended keyword researcher as I believe it has helped me save lots of time doing research about long tail keywords. 

Selling ebooks

I am thinking of writing a book about business. However, I don't like a general business book. What I did was to look through the table of content for some of my favorite business or startup books and see what is the process of building a business. This is what I found:

• Finding your niche
• Test your assumptions
• Build the product
• Get your first customers
• Scale and optmise your customer acquisition

The above is essentially the steps in starting your own online business. Among them, I have the most difficulty with Step 1 and 4. So, if I am going to write a book, it will be about these 2 sub topics.

If I am to do this, I would want to create something like an ideas book where I list out 100 niche ideas for the future. You guys remember I always get traffic by targeting emerging niches? Instead of keeping all the goodies for myself, maybe somebody will be to pay to read these new emerging areas.

Beside each idea, there will be suggestions on how to create a value adding niche site around these ideas. A good example of this format is what I did on this post here on how to build quality sites. Look at how I analyze the peer to peer loan market and you will get a glimpse into what this new book will be all about.

The downside of doing a ebook is that you might spend lots of time without getting any significant results.  Of course, I can always do some market validation tests but the risk is definitely higher when it comes to creating and selling your own product.

In conclusion

So, I am throwing this challenge out there to my readers: if you owned aaronchua.com, how would you monetise it?