In this episode, I share 7 ways you can make money from your website or blog. I currently have multiple streams of income for my business and I recommend you do the same. Relying on book royalties alone is risky and therefore I hope you implement one or two of these strategies for your website or blog.
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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
7 ways you can make money from your website or blog.
How to create a sticky post on WordPress for your most profitable blog post.
How to add advertising to your blog.
And much more!
Enjoy the podcast! It’s my hope that these episodes are bringing you one step closer to reaching more people with your message.
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Godly Gain Segment:
Each week, I share a Godly Gain segment for entrepreneurs who want to keep Christ at the center of their business.
Today’s scripture: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” 1 Timothy 6:10 (NIV)
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You ROCK! I appreciate everyone of my podcast listeners. If you have a specific question for me, submit it here: www.shelleyhitz.com/ask
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Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below:
In this training I’m going to talk to you about seven ways to make money from your website or blog. Not all of you will use all seven of these ways, but I definitely wanted to touch on each of them, and really have you start thinking of other ways that you can earn income outside of book royalties because it’s really hard to make a full time income on book royalties. I want you to start thinking of other things you can do.
1) Affiliate Promotions
First thing I want to mention are affiliate promotions. This is something that I do, and it is a significant part of my income, but what you do is you find products or services that will give you a percentage of commission as a referral fee for sending them new customers. Basically, instead of paying for advertising they are paying you to send them new clients and customers. It’s a really great way to earn additional income, however you want to make 100% sure that it’s a high quality product or service.
It should be something that you already use. If you already use it then it’s something that you find valuable, and if that product, that software, or that program has an affiliate program then that would be a great thing to promote. For example, my products and services do have commission in my affiliate program. So if you’re not an affiliate yet, and you’d love to promote my products, that would be a great thing for you to promote to your friends; especially if you are in the author niche.
You also want to have something that you really believe in. You don’t want to just do it for the money. Now, I know we all have those moments where it’s like, “wow, this looks really good!” You get tempted by the money, I’ve been there too. I made some mistakes and I usually try to let my email list and let my audience know. For instance, I was promoting an advertising service for a KDP Free Promotion at one time that got really good results. I personally use them myself, and I did a case study, and I showed the results that I got. They were great! Amazing results, a lot of paid sales afterwards, so it was really worth it. I was promoting them and earning significant income from promoting them.
However, I found out that they were doing things against Amazon’s Terms of Service that could get your account closed. There was no way that I would continue to use a service, or recommend the service, that did those types of things. So, I sent an email out to my list, I changed the information on my blog, and I let people know, “I’m no longer promoting them, I’m no longer using them, and this is why.” So make sure you do things with integrity or people won’t trust your recommendations any more.
If it’s a recurring income that’s a huge bonus, so if you promote a membership site, for instance, that is a recurring cost then you will, most likely, get income every month. Some of the affiliate programs will stop after six months, or it will just be a one time referral fee. Let’s say that when I refer people to Get Response, AWeber, or Email Newsletter Subscriber programs, then I will get an ongoing commission from those companies for as long as the person uses those services. Those types of affiliate promotions are especially powerful.
2) Monetize High Traffic Pages
Look into your stats, Google Analytics, or whatever stats you’re using with your website. Sometimes you can just log into your Cpanel and see your stats there. Most likely your high traffic pages will be your About Me page, Recommended Resources page, Contact page, Start Here page, Services page, and so forth. Start thinking about ways that you might be able to monetize those.
For instance, on a Recommended Resources page that’s where you can include links to your own books, products, and services. You can also include affiliate links, and then include anything that you highly recommend, and use yourself, even if it’s a free resource or doesn’t have an affiliate program. On your About Me page you could share a link to your book or your product in that page as well. But, definitely make sure you’re putting links to your email list as well. Start thinking about those high traffic pages.
You can even think about your blog posts that are getting the most traffic. If there is something that gets a lot of traffic then you can specifically research affiliate programs for that. For instance, on my Training Authors website I created a tutorial on how to use Google Hangouts for webinars. It is a high traffic page, gets a lot of use, and a lot of organic searches from Google. I researched some tools that I could recommend and on an almost daily, if not every other day, I’m getting commissions from that blog post, from the recommendations that I made. So, look at your high traffic pages and posts on your site.
3) Sidebar Sales
Let’s talk about number three, sidebar sales. You’re not going to get the majority of your sales from your sidebar, but you definitely want to think about what you’re putting in your sidebar and how you can make that the best return on investment of that real estate, of that space. I recommend advertising your most profitable books, programs, and/or services. I’m not always the greatest at doing this, but I do try to put my most popular program, or my featured book. You can do those types of things.
On Training Authors we earn a lot of income by recommending Author Marketing Club as an affiliate. We have a graphic in our sidebar for them. We put that there because it’s very profitable for us. That’s something to consider. You can also put a list of your most popular posts. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s your top trafficked post on your whole site.
You can say, “my popular posts,” and choose the posts that actually help generate income. Like I said, my Google+ Hangout post generates income, my post about KDP Free Promotions generated affiliate income. So, you can highlight those posts, and they are some of the most popular posts on my site, you can highlight those in your side bar. You could say, “my five top posts,” or “my ten top posts,” and so forth.
4) Sticky Post
Here’s an interesting thing, you can actually do a sticky post on a WordPress self-hosted website. What I recommend doing is making your sticky post, if you use this feature, an epic blog post. You want it to be a post that converts readers to buyers, so you want it to be something that is creating income for you, or is converting people to your email list.
How you do that on a WordPress self-hosted blog is you’ll click on the link for posts on the left hand side of your dashboard, once you log into the admin section of your WordPress blog. Then you’ll click on the quick edit link to the post that you want to create as your sticky post. Put a check mark, click the box, for sticky post.
This is a screen shot for you and let’s say I wanted to make this a sticky post on ShelleyHitz.com. Then I would just click that box and click update, then that post would always stay at the very top of my blog.
Every time someone comes to my blog they will see my Tools post, which is like my resources post with all my affiliate links and recommendations, and obviously all the stuff that I use and recommend. That is something that I could do.
On my Training Authors site, and this could change at any time, I currently have my KDP Free post as my sticky post. So, it’s the first post you will see when you go there. This is something to consider doing if you have a post that’s very popular and is converting well.
5) Product Review Posts
Another way to earn income from your blog is to do product review posts. There’s two ways that you can do this, you can do it as a sponsored blog post, so the person actually pays you simply to do the post and the review. There’s a couple places to look for sponsors Reviewme.com, Sponsoredreviews.com, Socialspark.com. You’ll want to put a disclaimer at the bottom of your post that it was a sponsored post, and you’ll want to let your readers know that you have been paid; but you want to give your honest opinion, you don’t just want to juts please the sponsors. I personally have not done sponsored blog posts, but I know a lot of bloggers do.
You can also do product reviews for affiliate products that you promote. I have done this. If there are products that I really believe in, really like, and believe that will be helpful for my audience I will do a specific video or a specific post on that product. That will drive traffic to that product through my affiliate link where I earn commissions.
6) Advertising
Another option is advertising. I have done this on my blogs in the past, I’m not doing it currently. One of the ways that I’ve done it is by using the OIO Publisher plug-in, just search for it on Google. It is a paid plug-in, I believe it’s just a onetime fee, and you set it up to help automate the process of adding graphic and text link type of advertising to your blog. It’s really cool, you can just have it automated, and it accepts PayPal. I did this on several of my websites, and I did it successfully.
Another place to check for advertising is buysellads.com and Beaconads.com. You can sign up for an account and you can sell ad space from their website. Those are some other opportunities to consider on your blog. The more traffic that you have to your blog, the more advertisers are going to be interested in advertising on your blog. If you’re only getting ten people visiting on your blog every day there is not a very good chance that you will be attractive to advertisers.
7) Sell Your Own Products and Services
Finally, you want to sell your own products and services. This is really a game changer for authors, to be able to have those back-end products and services that you can sell from your blog and your website. The most important, and the one that I’m really emphasize, that we all have, is digital products. Author Audience Academy, it’s a digital product, Videos, PDFs, the Facebook group, and it’s a way that I can leverage myself and help a lot more people as well as grow my business without having to teach the course over and over and over, because it’s recorded, I can deliver it 24 hours a day. Digital products are really great to be able to do.
Services
You can do project based or packaged services. So if there is something that you have learned to be able to create a book, to be able to publish a book, to be able to do some of the marketing, it is a service that you can sell. You can actually sell the service of formatting and publishing blog posts. You can sell the service of formatting a Kindle book. You can sell these services!
Packages are very powerful, so you could offer an entire publishing package for somebody. There are so many different services you can offer.
Speaking
You can do speaking online. You can do webinars, tele-seminars, and things like that, that people pay to get. That kind of goes into the digital product realm. Then you have your in-person speaking as well, where you’re being paid to come and speak.
Coaching
You can do one-on-one coaching, or group coaching. Group coaching is a great way to leverage your time as well. Many times people want your time, they want time with you. So that one-on-one coaching is a great thing to consider adding as well.
Live Events
You can also host your own live events, like workshop seminars. They don’t have to be fancy, you can just rent a room in your local town and have a workshop style event. It builds credibility and authority for you. This is something that I’m going to be doing as well.
Paid Mastermind Groups.
You can also have paid mastermind groups. That is something that if you’re a leader in your niche, in your area, you can learn how to facilitate a very effective mastermind group.
VIP Days.
VIP days, these are really great ways to offer a high end service. It can be online, through Skype, Google Hangouts, or something like that where you spend that time in intense one-on-one coaching for VIP day. It could also be in person, and you spend the entire day mapping something out, creating videos, looking over their speeches, doing some really intense work where they get a lot of value out of it. You can charge quite a bit for VIP days.
Those are seven ways to make money from your website and blog. I hope you have the ideas rolling around in your mind now, and that you’ve chosen at least one or two that you can start implementing right away.
Lights, camera, action! It’s time for this week’s Take Action Tip. I want you to choose at least one thing that I’ve shared with you today that you can implement for your website or blog.
Before we end I want to give you a backstage pass in this Godly Gain segment. When we talk about money and monetizing your website or blog I know there are certain people in my audience that start to cringe. It’s like, “oh, you mean I’m going to be monetizing? I’m going to be asking for money?” A lot of you are givers, you’re heart based, you love to give, give, give. But money isn’t wrong, and God is just really transforming a lot of how I see money and my view of money. It’s OK to ask for money in exchange for our time, our services, our products, for our recommendations, it’s not wrong!
In fact, the Bible says in 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Money isn’t the root of all evil, it’s the love of money. It’s when money becomes that love, that primary thing in your life, that’s when it becomes the root of all evil. Money in and of itself is good! The more money we have the more we can give.
Just like a doctor isn’t going to go to work and just work for free, unless they are a missionary or doing some pro bono work, you shouldn’t be expected as a creative to work for free. You should expect to be able to be paid and compensated for what you do, and to be able to gladly receive that compensation for the gifts that God has given you.
My hope and my prayer is that this episode is bringing you one step closer to being able to shine and reach more people with your message. Growing your business as you change lives is an amazing thing. When you’re able to make money while you change lives, while you use the gifts that God has given to you, it is an amazing privilege and an amazing gift. So, I encourage you to use what God has given to you to the best of your abilities.
This month in Author Audience Academy I am leading a seven day website makeover challenge, and I encourage you to join us. You can join us at AuthorAudienceAcademy.com, and this will be an evergreen challenge, it will be in the members area available at any time, no matter when you join Author Audience Academy. If this is something that is your focus right now, to really be able to optimize and maximize your website, and be able to sell more books and grow your business, I encourage you to join us at AuthorAudienceAcademy.com.
Thank you so much for joining me in this episode, and I’ll see you next time
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The post AA 035: 7 Ways to Make Money from Your Website or Blog appeared first on Shelley Hitz.