How to Monetize Your Blog or Website

So you’ve been spending countless hours, days, weeks on your blog, but still have yet to find out how to properly monetize your website.

First and foremost, you need to focus on the most important aspect of monetizing your blog: traffic. There are three main drivers of traffic: search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and paid advertising. Today, we will be focusing on the first two aspects.

1. Search Engine Optimization

If you want immediate results, SEO is not going to be your friend. However, in regards to sustainable, long-term traffic, SEO is the way to go.

To begin with, you need to make sure that your website title is optimized and SEO-friendly. The best way to go about doing this is choosing a URL with the name of your blog title within it. For example, if you want the name “Bradford Ahn” to come up first in search results, BradfordAhn.com would be an optimal URL choice.

After choosing your URL, you have to make sure that the blog title is properly embedded within the site’s title tag. If you’re using WordPress, this section can be found under General Settings –> Site Title.

Ok, so your blog title is now optimized. Now, you need to start adding fresh, informative, high-quality content to your website using blog posts. This give your site credibility and is the best way to build natural backlinks, which therein will give your blog high authority, which will lead to a higher ranking on search engines.

“But what should my blog posts be about?” is a common question I get from clients. This is where keyword research comes in handy. A great free keyword tool you can use is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Try to target keywords and phrases that aren’t too competitive and don’t have too high of a volume. Remember, it’s better to rank No. 1 for a mildly popular keyword phrase than No. 10 for a very popular keyword phrase.

2. Social Media Optimization

10 years ago, social media was barely an option for traffic generation. Nowadays, some popular blogs and websites say that 60-80% of their traffic comes from social media alone, mainly Facebook.

As with your URL, the domain of your social media accounts is pretty important, albeit not as much. For example, since my website’s URL is BradfordAhn.com, I’d preferably want my Facebook URL to be Facebook.com/BradfordAhn. However, if your first choice isn’t available, just make sure that the first part of your domain has your website title in it. For example, some alternate domains could be Facebook.com/BradfordAhnOfficial or Facebook.com/BradfordAhnCom.

For organic social media traffic, your list of followers and likes are vastly important. There are many ways of “growth hacking” your list of followers through paid advertising, influencers, and S4S (shoutout for shoutout), however, the best way to build a high quality following is through high quality content. It just takes one of your posts or tweets to go viral to drastically improve your following.

Once you’ve developed a respectable following, it’s best to post engaging content that has a chance of going viral. Videos tend to do best, followed by photos, followed by links. Try not to bombard your audience by posting too many consecutive links to your website, otherwise Facebook (and other social media platforms) will take note of this in their algorithm and lower your rank in newsfeeds.

3. Blog Monetization

Once your blog has started gaining some traction, now the fun begins: monetizing your website. Depending on your niche, there could be some optimal ways to monetize your blog: direct advertising, subscription-based service, affiliate links, etc. Therefore, there isn’t one definitive answer for all blogs.

For example, I personally monetize this blog by providing personalized one-on-one consulting sessions. Basically I make money blogging by teaching others how to make money blogging.

Another example is a sports site called CavaliersNation.com. This is a news-based site that makes its money strictly off of a variety of advertising networks such as Google Adsense, Content.ad, and USA Today Sports.

If you’re interested in a personalized one-on-one session or just want to find out more about monetizing your blog, you can fill out your information here.