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When trying to look for ways to earn money from blogging, it is obvious that you'll hear of affiliate marketing, running ads, selling a course, and doing sponsored articles as the ways to monetize your blog. But it's 2022 and isn't there anything else new that can make you more money and help you take your blog monetization to the next level?
In this article, we are sharing with you new next-level blog monetization strategies that Adam Enfroy has applied to his blog and have in turn helped him earn over $200 000 per month from the blog that he started just 3 years ago.
This isn't just about scraping pennies off the ground or trying to rank for everything and using ad revenue. This is how you understand what your content is worth so that you can make more and turn your blog into a real business.
Understanding the Worth of Your Content
When we talk about blog monetization, we have to understand what our content is worth. When Adam first started his blog in January 2019, he was writing a lot of affiliate articles, how-to guides, and a lot of different things, and the snowball effect of just creating content and putting it out there in the world put him in some positions to make more money.
Of course, he was monetizing with affiliate offers and ads but for the first time, something new happened that helped him learn how to further monetize his site. He explains it below.
One example is this podcast hosting site article from his blog:
"I wrote an article on “The best podcast hosting sites” probably 6 to 9 months after starting my blog and it started to rank on page one of Google for podcast hosting. I joined like 3 to 5 affiliate programs and added some links to the article. It started to make like $100 a month then $200 up to like $400 per month.
And then because I was ranking in the top 3 positions on Google in 2019, one of the companies on the list reached out to me and they offered "Can we pay you to be put in the number one position in this article?".
I was traveling at the time in Italy and I was like, "Okay, what would this be worth? What is my content worth?" So we came to a negotiation agreement that they would pay $5 000 per month to be number one in this article. So that automatically increased the value of this article from $400 per month up to $5 000 per month. And that was just with one conversation through email.", — Adam says.
So this upscaled Adam’s income and forced him to look for ways to leverage this strategy for the rest of his content. It was all about understanding what his content was worth and emailing the brands in the list to sell them the first position on list articles.
Method 1: Selling the First Position on List Articles
This method is a bit different from typical affiliate marketing or placing ads and other common methods people teach. After Adam closed the deal on selling the first position on the podcast software article, he researched more to discover the worth of his top software list articles in different niches and then approached the top companies to sell them the top positions.
Adam shares with us how he was able to use this monetization strategy on his other software listing posts beginning with a VoIP software review article.
VoIP Software Review Article Case
Adam had made an article on the best VoIP softwares and it ranked number 4 on Google for best VoIP providers. It gets a good amount of traffic — probably 2 800 visitors per month.
So Adam joined a bunch of VoIP provider affiliate programs. Some were paying on a cost per lead basis while some were paying when someone became a customer. But based on the traffic level and these affiliate programs he was only making like $500 a month from this.
After some time, Adam realized this was a valuable keyword and he should be making more money from this article. So he did a little bit of research and digging and here is how he understood what his content was worth.
Adam took the keyword “best VoIP” which he was ranking in the first position. He put it into Ahrefs and I checked for the typical cost per click on Adwords. This is what advertisers would be required to pay to get promoted on AdWords for the "best VoIP" keyword. Ahrefs showed that it has a $16 CPC, so that’s the average price advertisers would pay.
He then went to the Google keyword planner and did the same thing. Here, he saw that the average cost per click was $14 and the highest bidder had placed $82 for a single click.”
That means that a VoIP brand is willing to spend between $14-$82 for one click on the keyword "best VoIP", according to the bidding on Adwords.
Understanding the Worth of the Blog Content
Adam’s plan now was to figure out how he could provide the VoIP brands a better return on investment but also make money as an affiliate.
Before this, he had to understand first what the article was worth, and also get to know how many affiliate link clicks it generated from the first position.
So he looked at Google analytics and saw that his VoIP provider article was receiving 2 850 page views a month.
So he assumed that 30% of the traffic would click on the affiliate link that is positioned first. By quick maths, he came to understand that this article would generate at least 865 clicks for the affiliate link in the first position.
2 850 * 30% = 865 clicks
Next, Adam had to refer to the cost per click for the keyword on Google Adwords and then approach the brands to sell them the clicks at a much cheaper CPC rate than Adwords.
The CPC for the keyword on Adwords was $16. So Adam started contacting VoIP software brands while offering it at $8 per click on his website. By multiplying that $8 cost per click and the number of clicks the article would generate from the first position (865 clicks), he understood that the value of that position was $6 920.
In a few weeks, he sold that number one position to a brand for $6 000 per month. This method made him earn over $72 000 from a single article per year, not forgetting that the article also had ads and other affiliate links from position number 2 and below.
So instead of making $500 from the article by trying to scrape with affiliate revenue, you need to start ranking for high-value keywords in your niche and sell the top position in your articles as Adam did.
Imagine how far your blog could go if you could do that for just 10 or more listing articles. All you have to do is the maths based on the cost per click, how many clicks you're giving these brands, and then sell them the first position at a rate that’s cheaper than Google Adwords. The ROI is good for them because they are getting the same high-quality clicks from you instead of Adwords, and in turn, you're also making way more money.
Adam says, "When it comes to blog monetization, you have to think about each article on your blog as its own mini business."
Replicating the Strategy
Adam has replicated this strategy over and over on his blog with other software listing articles by selling the number one position at a price that's based on their clicks. Below is a list of some of the articles and the rates for which he sold the first position. The articles include:
That's it with the first method, next we are going to go through some more unconventional ways to make money with your blog apart from affiliate revenue and ads.
Method 2: Exit Intent Pop-Ups
Adam says that adding exit intent pop-ups is key, especially for informational posts and guides that are related to a program or a product that you and the blogger are selling. This could be a course, SaaS tool, e-commerce product, etc. Adam himself places exit intent pop-ups on his blog articles like, how to start a blog, how to make money blogging, business ideas, and other informational posts that he positions himself as an expert in. His exit-intent pop-ups are mainly asking users to opt-in to join his email list, whereby he promotes his products and training services.
Adam says, "It's important not to include the exit-intent pop-ups in transactional posts or affiliate posts since anybody searching for the best webinar software is not going to be interested in starting a blog or learning from me.
Necessarily, they just want to know what the best webinar software is, so these affiliate posts in your niche might not always be great for the email list."
You can use a tool like Convert Box which is what Adam uses to optimize and manage his exit intent pop-ups and then do it on a page-by-page basis. You can even sell ad spots on the pop-ups, something that Adam has done before.
Method 3: Sponsored Emails
Conventionally, an email list is mainly used to sell your products. It’s about building up an audience and helping them by giving them content that they like and then selling them a course or selling them some type of product. However, email leads tend to go dry or end up having users who don't purchase in 6 months or more. So what happens when those leads go dry?
There's still an opportunity to make money with that list especially if they signed up to your blog in your niche and they were interested in your content. That's when you can start selling sponsored email placement to brands that are interested in sending a dedicated email to the people on that list.
These people are probably not ever going to buy from you, but they're still on your email list because they trust you, and to you, they're still valuable. So you can start selling sponsored email placements to brands.
You can charge up to $2 000 per dedicated email. And if you do 8 of those per month, well that's $16 000 right there from something that wasn't going to be monetized or an older email list with people that aren't going to buy.
Method 4: Selling Media Kits/Packages
So one final way to think about monetizing your blog is to start thinking like a media company. So think you are Forbes, Tech Radar, or one of these big sites with a ton of employees. How do they monetize? They have media kits. So they're selling banner ad spots, emails, and all these different things in advertisement packages or kits. An interesting way that we're going to look at is packaging things with youtube.
So selling advertising packages to brands on all of your media channels combined like youtube, blog articles, sponsored list post placements, plus an email and a new youtube video. So basically combining all the monetization formats for all your media channels, packaging them, and then selling them to brands in your niche for a specific price.
There are a lot of unique things you can do to set yourself up as a media business because if you have hundreds of thousands of traffic on google and views on youtube every month, you already have the audience size of a media house. So you need to put in sales effort to maximize the revenue you can get from all of your audience, and treat this online project as a real media business.
Conclusion
When Adam was getting started, he didn't put in real sales effort at all, just like the majority of the bloggers. He joined a couple of affiliate programs, and an ad network and that was it. But then, his eyes opened up to see that the bog business could easily go from a $1 000 000 per year business to a $10 000 000 per year business if he was to put in more sales effort.
So he hired a sales team and that's when the selling of sponsored article list positions, negotiations, selling emails, and all of these things started happening on a big scale.
So to achieve all this, Adam suggests you just start small and keep growing. As your blog’s traffic grows and the basic affiliate and ad revenue grows, you need to in turn grow your team and focus on how you can monetize further like an actual big business based on your audience size.
