SEO – Expert post – Aaron Kronis is the SEO Director for Wpromote Inc.

Monetizing your blog and minimizing costs, without sacrificing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

Today I’m going to touch base on different ways to monetize your blog and the importance of using more than one method to achieve results while keeping a focus on SEO at all possible times.

Think about it.

You can’t control the traffic that comes to your site, and much will bounce due to the nature of the Internet. However, if you do get enough sheep to graze in your pastures long enough, you can put enough pots of honey out there that some will click on your ‘deals’ to take advantage of your breaks and affiliate referrals to make purchases you suggest to them.

Ways to make money from your website:

Well, first you need traffic! I suggest focusing on building a community of recurring users that refer their friends to participate in your website’s discussions when possible to grow a user base over time.

This is not easy, it is hard work and takes time and passion. If you are looking for a quick buck, do something else!

If Google Analytics on your site shows that you have barely any repeat visitors, then your ‘community’ may simply exist when new users come to your site and never return. This means you are mostly getting new visitors based on the monthly global and local searches done in the search engines.

Once you have roughly 5K uniques per month, you can start things rolling. To get there, use Twitter, Facebook and any type of online word of mouth you can to promote your website’s great content.

Hopefully you were smart enough to create at least one interesting article or download that people would want to view.

Affiliate Revenue Made Easy

Other ideas? Perhaps you wrote a cool e-book and offer a free download of it for a limited time.

Next, once you have some traction based on positive user reviews and twitter mentions, you start selling it for $2.99.

You then could offer affiliate revenue for $1.00 per download sold earning you $1.99 for those and $1.00 to the affiliate.

What are the fixed costs of being a blogger?

All of this is possible, you just have to plan it out and start trying things. Your costs are really not all that high when you think about it. The largest investment is your time. Thus this can be a very lucrative way to do things.

The main things you will need to pay for are:

Annual Reliable Website Hosting.

• While this can be very cheap, it may benefit your SEO efforts if you purchase things like

• Private Domain Registration
• Dedicated IP
• Virtual private server hosting
• Dedicated server for shopping carts
• Content each month from a professional content writer
• Infographics about your industry from a graphic artist/programmer

• Content Writers
• Graphic Design costs for new images where needed (i.e. creating digital products like e-books, or other downloads.
• Site Admin / Support
• Website Community Management

What to use?

The main ways that bloggers make money is from advertisers who want to get the eyeballs of the site’s visitor who frequents a specific type of content to look at their ads during that visit.

Adsense: Although many people feel that the presence of Google Adsense can be detrimental to the site’s experiences this can account for a large portion of the site’s online revenue. Right now, the economy is such that it may not be feasible to get a lot of direct ad sales.

Amazon: This affiliate program can really make you a lot of money and is easy to setup and tailor to fit your niche.

E-Books: Create a free e-book about your industry and make sure it is something that you would download. Use this to get traffic, then start charging a small amount for them, offering affiliate programs to others for a small cut. The small programs really add up over time!

Forums/Posting Boards:

Having a ‘Craiglist.org’ type of area on your site that allows users to post jobs, announcements, or whatever can be a quick and easy stream of back end income if you have a community already. Simply selling ads for $25-50 each can help you cover your car payments if you have enough traffic to warrant your users to post there in your ‘highly specific’ niche.

To Sum It All Up?

The key is to not put all your ‘advertising’ revenue eggs in one basket, to pay attention to what your users want/are doing and to keep a pulse on your market/niche. Keep your users informed of the latest changes in your industry and try to engage them wherever possible. If you can feature some type of User Generated Content (UGC) on your page that will cause them to tell others about your site, then you have them working FOR you now. It is not easy, but hard work and great quality websites will pay off.

Good luck and work/think hard.

Till next time,

Aaron @KRONiS

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