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8 Ways To Monetize Your Blog Without Driving Away Visitors/Users in 2020

8 Ways To Monetize Your Blog Without Driving Away Visitors/Users in 2020

Monetize Your Blog

Monetizing your blog can often feel like a double-edged sword. On one hand, you get to make your blog pay the bills; on the other hand, you also risk losing some of your audience who might be sensitive to such an online practice. Hence, you often have to find ways to monetize your blog without repulsing your visitors or loyal users.

Now, if there’s one thing that universally acts as a new visitor repellent for blogs, that would be advertisements. Be it Google Adsense, banner ads, or other in-your-face methods, some of your visitors just can’t help but feel like you’ve sold your soul even if you haven’t. In their defense, ads can be quite annoying and can break immersion and ruin the user experience.

To help you get the best of both worlds, however, we’ve prepared some ways to monetize your blog without ruining the user experience for your visitors or audience.

Premium content

Making content is difficult; some of your content are bound to be tougher to and take longer to make than others. For these kinds of more laborious-than-usual tasks, you might want to be a bit more generous to yourself. Keeping them premium and to be unlocked through a paywall is a good way to monetize your blog.

Depending on how good the premium content is, your visitors will understand why they must be locked behind for more dedicated users. This can be anything from online courses to content with higher production values than usual. If you introduce those on top of your free content, then it’s a more welcome and voluntary way of them supporting your blog.

This element of choice for the users is something that ads will never replicate; they’ll surely appreciate you better for it.

Sponsored posts

Sponsored posts or reviews have always been one of the more staple methods of monetizing your blog without bothering much of your audience. These can be more difficult to pull off, however, since it requires your blog or website to have respectable traffic.

Monetize Your Blog

Basically, the usual prerequisite for this method to monetize your blog is to amass views and regular visitors. Only then will your blog be big enough in the eyes of bigger companies or corporations that they’ll partner with you to create some posts about them. It’s up to your audience whether they’ll view it or not; again, that element of choice is key.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is similar to sponsored posts or reviews except you have to enroll in a partner program first. This means that the traffic threshold for affiliate marketing is lower than for sponsored posts. The catch is that how much you earn in affiliate marketing is also tied to views; since you’re essentially peddling another company’s products to your audience.

In a sense, affiliate marketing is also the opposite of sponsored posts since it would be you asking another company or website to promote their content. If their product or service sells thanks to your affiliate post, then you get the commission.

Initially, the returns might not be that significant; still, they tend to pile up over time and also won’t bother your audience too much; that’s assuming you still write regular posts for them instead of just sticking to affiliate marketing posts.

Kontera ContentLink

A Kontera ContentLink is practically an ad but don’t worry about that too much; they are stealthily tucked away in your content’s text, like a hyperlink. They only show their ad once the user mouses over a highlighted text where a Kontera ContentLink is integrated.

It’s one of the more subtle ways to hide your monetization and make it voluntary for user viewing. Users can easily ignore any Kontera ContentLink if they’re not interested and continue reading. Of course, it’s only viable for blogs or websites with written content.

RELATED: How to Monetize a Personal Blog

Digital/physical products

Selling your own products or services is another good way to monetize your blog. These can be anything from artwork, eBooks, discounted items, and even physical merchandise if you have the capacity.

Monetize Your Blog

You do have to make it clear to your audience that the practice will help you sustain your website or create better content. That statement usually goes in your blog disclaimer or other legal sections of your website.

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Paid memberships

If you find yourself consistently making premium content and that it might be getting too expensive for your audience (this can actually go against your monetization), then perhaps a membership might be a better option.

You can throw in some additional benefits apart from premium content such as elevated privileges or custom user accounts which they can tailor to their preferences. This is a lot more important especially if you’re running a video or podcast blog; individually pricing and locking content can be counterproductive and might turn off your audience.

You’ll find plenty of membership plugins at the ready in WordPress plugin store to help you in this endeavor.

Coaching business

If you’ve been blogging for quite a while now, then chances are, you’ve already accumulated some valuable wisdom. This wisdom will surely be valuable to most beginners and maybe even more digestible for them compared to bigger bloggers’ inputs.

What we’re getting at is that you can try your hand at offering coaching services or being a blogging guru. This can be a lot more acceptable for your audience especially if your blog belongs in a specific niche about blogging, marketing, or other related subject matters. The more experienced you are, the better you can charge.

Donations

Donations might sound like a word or practice that some of you want to avoid; however, this day and age, it’s a lot more prestigious than you think. In fact, it’s quite the rage especially for websites and content creators that don’t want to shower their audience base with ads or aggressive monetization.

Monetize Your Blog

Websites like Patreon and Kickstarter have made it possible for many creatives and aspiring indie businesses to pursue their passion. If your passion is your blog or website, then asking for donations is a valid way to keep it afloat or to help you at least.

RELATED: Why Having Multiple Blogs is a Better Strategy for Monetization

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