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On this episode of Blogger Evolution, host Chris Myles delves into monetization strategies for bloggers. The episode kicks off by suggesting creating and publishing original content on your website. Chris also advises polling your audience to determine what they want and then creating it for them. Platforms like PayPal and Gumroad are recommended for monetizing content, while creating downloadable lists can help build an email list of buyers and potentially earn more through affiliate offers.
Chris emphasizes the importance of creating a cover for your content using Canva, even if it’s not perfect, and improving it over time. Adding calls to action on your website and emails can increase passive income. The episode explores multiple ways to generate income, such as memberships, selling, ad space, and downloadable info products. Other opportunities highlighted include coaching and consulting, YouTube channel monetization, job boards, and ebooks.
Chris emphasizes the importance of creating compelling offers and using PayPal to set up the monetization process. The episode also tackles the question of whether blogging is going to die, offering insights into the addictive nature of getting into blogging, SEO, and affiliate marketing. Chris shares personal experiences and success stories, providing valuable lessons for aspiring bloggers.
The episode continues with discussions on email subscription lists, website revenue optimization, and diversifying income streams beyond display ads and affiliate marketing. Chris highlights the effectiveness of email marketing and suggests various advertising methods to monetize website traffic. Diversification and exploring other monetization strategies are emphasized as crucial for long-term success.
Throughout the episode, Chris stresses the importance of promoting reputable products and brands to maintain audience trust. The episode concludes by debunking the myth that display ads and affiliate marketing alone can lead to substantial passive income. By exploring different avenues for monetization, bloggers can maximize their earning potential and evolve their blogging journey.
TRANSCRIPT:
Chris Myles [00:00:00]:
In all my time blogging, there’s one question I’ve yet to see answered, and it’s an important one. It’s is blogging going to die? Well, I have an answer for you, and it revolves around one central thing, and I guarantee that you’re doing this wrong. So keep listening because they’re gonna talk about it. Now, when I first got into blogging, and really when a lot of us first get into blogging, it’s all peaches and rainbows, right? We’re seeing the possibilities. We’re seeing that passive income, we’re seeing all of these things that are really going to change our lives if we do it right. We’re listening to podcasts, we’re seeing other people having success with it, we’re reading case studies, we’re watching YouTube videos. We are just really buying into it. And this is a really addictive thing too, right? Getting into blogging and SEO and affiliate marketing.
Chris Myles [00:00:49]:
But once you’ve been sold on that passive income idea that you just need to build a blog, slap some ads on it, maybe do some affiliate marketing, and you’re going to end up making tens of thousands of dollars or more. But this is where the blogging journey for a lot of people ends up stopping. That’s where it ends for most people at just display ads and affiliate marketing. And to be honest, focusing on just these two monetization strategies for your blog. It’s a waste. It is a waste. Why? Well, it’s a waste because there’s so many other opportunities that we can take advantage of, that we can leverage in order to make more money with the audience that we’re getting from our to our websites. But why is it that we always just kind of focus on just these two display as an affiliate marketing? Well, it’s easy.
Chris Myles [00:01:48]:
That’s what it is. It’s easy. It’s the path of least resistance. Nothing needs to be done to make money with display ads. You just create nice little informational content, hope that it gets a lot of traffic, and you sign up with Ezoic Mediavine Ad, Thrive, MONUMETRIC, She Media, whoever. You sign up with these display ad companies, and they usually, for most of them, they usually kind of handle it from there. And now you’re making money with your blog by just creating content and then affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is pretty easy as well.
Chris Myles [00:02:23]:
You don’t have to own a product, you don’t have to deal with customer service, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. You just have to find a product that you like that hopefully you’ve used and then tell other people to use it as well. You’re basically contracted hired salesperson for that particular business that you’re becoming an affiliate of. But it becomes more and more increasingly, increasingly passive over time. Again, it’s the path of least resistance. It’s easy, but you know what it else it also is? It’s lazy. It is lazy. There are so many ways to monetize a blog and to help us diversify the income that we get on our blogs so that we don’t stagnate and die.
Chris Myles [00:03:10]:
And that’s the answer to the question, is blogging going to die as we know it? If you’re just looking at display ads and you’re just looking at affiliate marketing, probably it will, because times are changing. When you work in a regular nine to five job, if you are maybe working construction or something, or you’re doing something that’s just physical, that requires you to move around a lot, if you break your leg, that’s your sole income source. That’s gone. Now you’re worried about short term, long term, disability afflac, whatever, all of those things, right? That’s what you’re worried about then, because your sole way of earning income was just you being physically able to move. But what if you just got a behind a desk job like I used to have, right? Were you just behind a computer all day? Well, what if you got sick? What if you weren’t able to have your faculties of you and all of a sudden you can’t work consistently? Burnout is a real thing. What are you going to do then, right? Because now your sole source of income is dried up. Well, we do that by diversifying. We do that by trying to find other ways to make more money with the traffic that we are already getting with our websites.
Chris Myles [00:04:32]:
A lot of people will call these quick wins or even easy wins, right? Because if you already have traffic coming to a website, you can flick a couple of buttons, you can turn a couple of levers. I know I’m using those backwards. But regardless, you can do these things and you can make more money with your website. Or if you’re just getting started, you concentrate on one at a time, and then you get it to a certain point, and then you move on to the next. And you get it to a certain point and then move on to the next. So in today’s, this episode, I want to continue talking about three other outside of the box monetization methods that are not just display ads and affiliate marketing. Now let’s go ahead and get into it, but just a quick reminder. For the next three days only, okay? Until midnight of Thursday, July 20, 2023, enrollment in the one Blog Away premium community coaching and Training is only $1.
Chris Myles [00:05:30]:
You heard me right. It’s only $1. And you’re going to be able to get a seven day trial for just $1. And let me help you scale your blog, get started with your blog, wherever you happen to be, and get it to hopefully we can get this to a full time income so that you can spend more time doing what you want to do. And you can do all of this beginning for only $1. So I’ll be sure to put a link down in the description, oneblogaway co. Go check it out. Get in for a dollar and then you get access to all of the training and the community and everything that’s in there for a seven day trial.
Chris Myles [00:06:05]:
Hope to look forward to you, or I look forward to you being there. Now, when it comes to the three outside of the box monetization methods, all right, let’s go ahead and jump into them. Because I was blind to this number three strategy for a long time, but I can tell you right now I am learning to appreciate it for sure. And that is memberships. Now there is this three letter acronym out there that’s called MRR. This is what will make your business the most sustainable thing on the face of this planet. MRR means monthly recurring revenue. Recurring is the key word there because this is income that comes in over and over and over and over again.
Chris Myles [00:06:56]:
Now, sometimes people are a little afraid of memberships because you have to continually work with it month after month to keep people who are there happy. But then also you got to work on the marketing to tell more people about it all the time. So sometimes you can feel like you get stuck into this endless wheel of creating content. But the reality is that’s not the case at all. You will have to create content on a consistent basis, but you really only have to provide value to the expectation that you set. People just need to know what they’re getting. It doesn’t have to be ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be something crazy where you’re charging thousands of dollars per month.
Chris Myles [00:07:43]:
It doesn’t have to be that much. You can charge $9 a month. You can charge $2 a month every time you hear people talk about patreon. That’s exactly what they’re doing. Those are just memberships. But there’s other ways of doing it to be able to make decent amount of money. So how do you get this part where you need it to be? Well, first of all, you need to figure out what people want, what people need. But also more importantly, you need to figure out where people’s pain points are.
Chris Myles [00:08:09]:
And that’s what your audience is. You’re trying to figure out what it is that they want. What problem can you solve for them? And then you start solving that problem. And you can do so in a number of ways. You can just create some PDF documents and put it out there and then people will have access for as long as they’re there. Maybe you do like once a month training or once a month answering questions or whatever where you just kind of sit back and say, hey, whoever wants to be here can answer me questions, can ask questions, and you answer them for them. This could be something as simple as a curated email that you send out. I know an example of a girl who I know who she has an email list about emails where all she does is give tips on how to grow your email list.
Chris Myles [00:08:56]:
She charges $9 a month to be on that list and then she just sends the emails out two or three times a month and people pay it and it’s $9. So it’s not like it’s ridiculous. But think about it. What if you got ten people to do that? What if you got 100 people to do that? What if you got 1000 people to do that? All of a sudden you are making a very, very good income outside of display ads and affiliates. Maybe you’re giving amateur golf tips in a nice succinct set of ways. That way it doesn’t have to get too involved. And as long as people know who you are, what value you’re going to provide, and you give them the offer, you want to make them an offer that they’d feel stupid saying no to. Right, that’s a favorite book of mine is Alex Harmozi’s 100 Million Dollar Offers.
Chris Myles [00:09:58]:
I’ll be sure to link that down below because these things are very helpful in knowing how to create these types of monetization strategies, especially when it comes to memberships, being able to sell it and present an offer to people that they can’t say no to. If you can create these things, you can create more money around your business. Maybe you know about exclusive sewing deals, I don’t know, something like that. Maybe you are already every day looking at different places, trying to find deals here and deals there, and trying to figure out how you can make some money with it. But now you can share this information with people. That way you can make some money on it outside of just what you would normally be doing as well. Monetize your obsession, that’s really what we’re looking at here. And in order to do that, you really can set this up in PayPal.
Chris Myles [00:10:51]:
It doesn’t have to be anything ridiculous. Another one option out there is called Gum Road. You just set it up and it just happens for you. So those are a couple of options that you can do with memberships. Now this next one is going to be a controversial one, but we’re going to dive into it anyway because I want to make sure you have all the information and that’s selling advertising space. Now this can be done in a number of ways, all right? We’re talking about banner ads that you can put on your website. We’re talking about priority placement in list posts. We’re talking about sponsored buying guides completely, perhaps a sponsored newsletter.
Chris Myles [00:11:29]:
It kind of goes a little bit with what we were talking about with the memberships. But once you have an email list of people, by the way, you should build an email list sooner rather than later on, even if it’s a niche site. You should start building that list sooner rather than later so that you can go to brands and say, hey, I have this audience of people who love sewing. Do you want to talk to them? And you can start sponsoring newsletters. That’s another great way that you can make money with this. And you’re just selling ad space on the newsletter itself. Now, banner ads, now, this one’s a fun one because this one does require you to reach out to companies. It requires you to do more work than just sitting behind a computer typing.
Chris Myles [00:12:12]:
You can go out there and find very similar to a sponsored newsletter. But now you can slap these things onto your website. So let’s just say you have a review article or you have an article where you’ve created and you’re talking about a particular product. You can reach out to that brand and say, hey, I’ll put a banner right there at the top. Boom. People who land on this will be interested in what you have to say about it. And if I have a big banner right here, they click on it, they go buy your stuff. You can sell that ad space.
Chris Myles [00:12:42]:
This is outside of just regular display ads. We’re talking about creating a banner and putting it onto a page and then charging a company to do it. This can be some of the easiest money you’ve ever made, by the way, because it takes what, five minutes in canva to be able to create these. It doesn’t have to look amazing either. And then you can work with the brand on how you want it to look. They may even have something to provide to you and you don’t have to create it. Another one would be like sponsored buying guides and priority placements and list posts. Now these is kind of like the controversial ones, right? And whatever helps you sleep at night.
Chris Myles [00:13:22]:
When it comes to this, I like to at least use and have hands on on a product or know for a fact that it’s a great one because I know someone else has used it or something like that before. I would charge a company to be number one because you don’t want to put something number one that could actually harm someone, right, or is a scam or steal their money. You want to make sure that it’s a good product. So if you have a list post of the best mattresses for people with upside down backs, I don’t know, I just made that up. But regardless, number one might be a company that would like to pay you to be in that number one spot. You can even reach out to them and say, reach out to numbers two, three and four on your list and say, hey, in order to get the most clicks, I can move you up onto that list for fee. Again, you want to make sure that these are reputable companies, that you’re not just doing this for the money because people will eventually see through it when they go by and see that it’s a crappy product, right? So you want to make sure it’s a good product, but these can be sponsored by and guys, and you can charge these brands to get in front of the audience. One thing that we forget, especially when we’re first getting started with blogging, or may not have even known, is that we are specializing in drawing the right kind of audience.
Chris Myles [00:14:43]:
And the most valuable audience, or one of the most valuable cold audiences on the Internet is SEO. It’s people that you get from search engine optimization because they came looking for you and they’re looking for an answer to their problem. It’s one of the hardest things that a lot of these companies, they just want to spend ad spend money on ads. They want to give Mr. Zuckerberg as much money as possible to get me the right people. And that business model works. But my goodness, is it expensive. Where SEO has one of the highest ROIs ever.
Chris Myles [00:15:18]:
And we can do that for these brands. I have a page where I’m getting 500 hits to it per month. I can reach out to a brand and say, hey, do you want to get in front of these 500 people per month and charge them for it? Look, build that email list. Use banner ads, sponsored buying guides, priority placements on lists, even sponsored newsletters, which is really taking the world by storm right now, which is crazy because it’s email, right? But email is still super effective. It is still super effective. It’s a great way for you to take traffic you don’t own into traffic that you own. Now, there’s a couple of things that I really do like about this next one, and that is because it’s very easy and it’s very passive. And that is our number one downloadable information products.
Chris Myles [00:16:11]:
Now, this can be anything, okay? Literally anything. We’re talking templates, patterns, PDF workbooks, custom spreadsheets, checklists, lesson plans. We talked about sewing earlier, maybe patterns, things for kids, downloadable documents or whatever. And I’ll give you a little cheat code that you can use with this as well. Go to Etsy. See what people are selling out there. Look at the ones that get the most reviews, has the most stars. That’s what people in your audience wants.
Chris Myles [00:16:43]:
Make your own version and put it on your website. You can also pull your audience, see what it is that they want, and then create that for them. Help them out. Use PayPal or gum road or something like that to gatekeep it and start getting paid. You can make these lists where you can only a quick downloadable, and then it’s theirs and they can have it for as long as they want. Then all of a sudden, you have people who are on a buyer’s email list, which means you can probably send them more stuff like affiliate offers perhaps, and make more money with it. The only thing I’d recommend is be sure to go to Canva and get a cover for it. It doesn’t have to look great, it doesn’t have to look perfect, but it just needs to be something, and then you can iterate it over time.
Chris Myles [00:17:32]:
Then go on your website, add calls to Actions to your website. Add calls to Actions to maybe any email, autoresponder, emails you might be having, insert that into the autoresponder, and this will make it even more passive. So the ways we have here memberships, selling, ad space and downloadable info products, and this is really just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so many other ways to do it as well. You can do coaching and consulting, a YouTube channel where you can get YouTube to actually pay you to make videos, job boards, I don’t know, ebooks, we kind of touched on that one. With downloadable info products. But these are just a few ideas. And actually, now that I’m thinking about it, with the downloadable info products, let’s just say that you created a whole bunch of the ones we listed, like templates, patterns, lesson plans, yada yada.
Chris Myles [00:18:25]:
You could put all of that as a membership too, and people will have access to it just by paying you a monthly fee. It really just depends on how you decide to present it. So don’t be afraid to be creative and think outside the box and try to find more ways to monetize the audience that you already have. What’s really funny to me is when I run into people who have 15, 20,000 page views to their websites per month, and they’re not making any money with it. And I tell them, think about it. You’re telling me you have 15,000 to 20,000 people hitting your website every single month, and you’re only making $100 from it? You’re only making $300 from it. You’re only making $1,000 from it. There’s a problem there.
Chris Myles [00:19:12]:
You’re leaving money on the table and not monetizing enough. Remember, you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take. So don’t be afraid. Try something. The cool part about taking shots is that you only really need it to work once, and it’ll make up for all the times it didn’t work out before. So give it a shot. Let me know what you think. As a quick reminder, for the next three days, until midnight Thursday, July 20, enrollment in one blog away, which is a premium community coaching and training, is only $1.
Chris Myles [00:19:44]:
$1. Only $1. Get a seven day trial, and then let me help you scale your blog to a full time income so that you can start spending more time with the people that you actually want to spend time with. A link will be down in the show notes. It’s oneblogaway co, and I’ll see you on the other side. Bye.
