Nowadays, making money from a new blog is not the same thing as it was in the last few years. The blogging community has become larger, with over 70 million bloggers on WordPress only. At the same time, people are still not getting the exact search results that they need in Google and other search engines.
That adds more chances and options for bloggers to show their skills and add more content that people are searching for. However, to turn your blog into a cash generator machine over time, you need to build lots, and strong content that ranks in Google and brings you, visitors, from organic search.
Forget blog monetization at the beginning
The first thing to do when a blogger starts a site is to focus on the content before everything. If you just started, my first advice is to forget the monetization completely in the first few months.
Believe it or not, when you create content that helps people, you can monetize it later, with affiliate links or banner advertising when you have lots of traffic.
The biggest mistake that beginners make all the time is to build a blog to make money only. That’s normal, and we all need to make money, but only when we have good content that helps people. So, grow your blog in the first 2 to 5 months, and you’ll be able to build the blog that you want.
Website monetization, in general, changes over time, and what worked in the past, will not work again in all cases. Of course, there are always exceptions, but you need to build a good strategy for your blog.
The content first, and then money, that’s the main idea in the new blogging world. At the same time, Google changes the web every time a new algorithm update is launched.
The last update, for example, affected blogs with lots of advertising, and that’s really good for the web. As a surfer, you need to find the exact content that you’re looking for, without excessive banner ads or spam ads in other cases, such as pop-ups.
As a blogger, you need to understand the visitor’s needs and how he/she feels when finding that content. If people see lots of ads and little content, they will leave the site immediately, and it becomes hard to monetize your blog as you want.
The blog monetization step
When you feel that you have at least 30 good articles, you need to join a few affiliate marketing programs. Then, start adding their links to your articles.
You can also create dedicated articles and posts for your affiliate programs. Make sure to add your own point of view, and how you find the product. A good affiliate marketing strategy should be based on recommendations and not sales.
When you try the products and recommend them later, your readers will find your content helpful with information and personal tips. That makes them want to buy from your affiliate links, and that’s not a hard job if you have the right content that people look for.
I recommend promoting top-quality affiliate programs such as WP Engine and Template Monster. They are premium quality products, and the companies behind these products make millions of dollars per year. That helps to convert the traffic, and people trust these companies even better than a new product.
Also, please make sure to add Nofollow attributes to all your affiliate links, and especially, banner ads. Google, for example, penalizes websites with no followed banner links. That’s because of the page ranking flow that shouldn’t be passed through those advertisements.
There is another smart way to make money from your blog without affecting your content; even, your readers will not notice that they are affiliate links in most cases.
The program is called VigLink, and it’s a revolution in the affiliate marketing world. This program lets you monetize regular links; these links point to websites that you will earn commissions, automatically when the visitors buy from them.
The best part is that you don’t have to join their thousands of retailers. All you have to do is sign up and set up your monetization method, and it’s done automatically. The program is big and trusted, and I’ve tried them, and they work great, for small blogs and big websites as well.
