If you ask which is the biggest challenge bloggers face in blogging, the majority of bloggers will say it’s monetizing their blogs. There are several ways to improve the monetization of blogs but if it’s because of less traffic, here are few things that can be done to optimize the earnings from your blog with less traffic.
Engage Your Readers
What you can do is try engaging your readers more into your blog by encouraging them to comment and asking their feedback on your work. When a loyal readership is built, you will be able to earn more money because you will have more attention. This is the most important point as it is going to benefit you in everything you do on your blog.
While this section deserves a dedicated post on its own, I’ll point few things that can be done for engaging your readers.
Solve problems in your posts, find a common problem and solve it, people love it when the post they read helps them save, time or money or effort. They will read more from you and visit your blog more often.
Participate in the comments, comment section is not only for the visitors to leave ‘Nice Posts’ “Very informative’ or taking the discussion forward, it is also a place where readers share their story, ask more questions, or give a suggestion. Respond to them and they will love it.
Build a community around your blog, while comments are great to interact with your readers, you can give them a dedicated place to talk about similar things, create a forum or a group on Facebook or Google Plus, which is easy to manage. You can also use Twitter to engage with them using a unique hashtag.
Create a Product or Service to Sell on your Blog
Your AdSense won’t make you any money if your blog is getting few hundred visitors a month. Stop running Google AdSense. Now, as I told you above that a loyal readership helps you get more attention. You can use this attention to sell your own product or service which will make you more money than few cents for every click on the Google ads.
Does you audience has a problem that can be solved by a product or service created by you? if yes, then do it.
The simplest form of creating a product to sell on your blog is to create an eBook with the valuable information which will help your readers in solving their problem.
Recommended: A Small Guide to Create an eBook
Try Affiliate Marketing
Many bloggers feel it’s quite tough to make money from Affiliates than working on increasing traffic. But if you are not getting success in increasing your blog’s traffic, try Affiliate marketing. Again, the high attention of your readers is going to help you earn money from affiliate products.
Pick a product, that is related to your niche, which you think your readers will be interested in. It must be a useful product and is best if you can use it on your own and do a review of it on your blog, it works very well.
For example: If you run a blog about Dogs, then you can write posts like,
The best Dog Food You can find in your local store,
5 best Dog Food you can feed you Dog,
Why is X better than Y for your Dog.
You can promote your affiliated product in these posts. It will work better than the AdSense or Banner ads.
Write Paid Reviews
Paid reviews are often criticized in the blogosphere, but there is no harm in writing paid reviews as far as you are disclosing it and the product are related to your blog and your readers can benefit from it. It is just like any other blog post on your blog and you also get paid for it.
For example: Taking the above example further.
You can contact products related to your blog and offer them a sponsored review, they will be more than happy to do it if your blog’s audience is their potential customers.
Private Ads
There are services which let you find suitable advertisers for your blog and take a cut of the revenue generated. This cut is around 30% of your revenue made through them. For example, Adsense gives you 67% of the revenue and takes 33% of itself. But the advertiser is paying 100%.
If you offer private ads to that advertiser, you can give a 30% discount and still make the same money. Advertisers would be happy as they are only paying 70% of what they were paying via Adsense.
You can find potential advertisers in your niche and email them about your advertising options.
Keep Working Harder
Every point I mentioned above requires some extra effort than usual bloggers with high traffic blogs. You need to work harder in order to earn a decent amount every month. Keep working hard and keep creating quality content for your blog, it will also help you get more and more traffic to it.
If you are new to blogging, you can check out these Monetization methods to make money from your blog.
