For bloggers, ads are a godsend. These help bloggers earn from the diligence and hard work they put in every post they craft and publish.
For users, ads suck. They disrupt the viewing experience and provide little value to the content they visited to read.
As a blogger, you need to reconcile both schools of thought to build a financially sustainable blog without pissing off your readers.
As far as making money with your blog is concerned, we’ve discussed how to monetize your personal blog and how to use contextual ad networks to make money.
But is there such a way to earn from your blog without relying on ads?
A quick look at sites like CopyBlogger and The Daily Dish would show you that it is possible. Both don’t boast ads but generate enough profit to provide their target audiences with business solutions and irresistible content.
If you want to take the ad-less route and keep the cool factor of your blog intact, here’s what you need to do:
Develop readership
Guys like Neil Patel, Andrew Sullivan, and Pat Flynn established clout by catering their content to their target audience. Content plays a good role in not only building a reader base, but also establishing yourself as an expert in your niche.
Writing the perfect post can go a long way, but there’s more to just churning out blog posts day in and out. The process of developing readership through content is grounded on a strong content strategy that is carried out on a consistent basis. The strategy will help you determine your target market, competition, keyword research, and buyer persona
By establishing yourself as an authority in your niche and building a reader base, you can gain the trust of people. In turn, you can get them to perform your desired actions on your site like purchasing products or services from you (more on this later).
Create products
Assuming that you are not treating your blog as an ecommerce platform, creating a product is another profitable option for you to take.
If you are a subject matter expert, you can write an ebook that you can sell through your site. The link provides tips in creating your landing pages and marketing strategies to increase reach to your intended audience.
You can also launch an ecourse to showcase your expertise in the form of video.
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Offer consultations
If you can peddle your services through your blog, make sure to prepare a price list for your services so you can send over the file to people who inquired. If you don’t have clients yet, set the consultation fees lower than what you intend on getting from future customers. This will entice them to reach out to become your client.
Create membership
By creating an online group targeted to people who share your interests, you can create a large community with whom you can turn into advocates of your brand.
You can interact with them, exchange knowledge, discuss hot topics, and conduct seminars with guest speakers to further the growth of everyone in the group.
Follow these guides from CopyBlogger and Matthew Woodard for a better understanding on how you can set up a membership feature on your blog.
Build a mailing list
Considered as one of the biggest mistakes that successful bloggers failed to do when starting up, a mailing list is crucial to your success. A highly targeted list not only lets you build relationships with your readers, but also let you create email campaigns that allow you to monetize your subscribers.
This guide should bring you up to speed on how it takes to build a list for beginners.
Final words: There are more ways on how you can make money with your blog aside from the tips featured above. The idea here is for you to think beyond ads when monetizing your blog. Ads help in making you a few bucks, but branching out to other methods like the ones mentioned will make you even more.
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