Experts say a revenue-generating blog needs to be updated
daily, strike a balance with a professional and personal tone that resonates
with readers and offer special elements such as step-by-step instructions on
how to do a specific workout move or a video detailing how to make a specific
recipe.
Top 12 Rules for Monetizing Your Fitness Knowledge
Decide exactly what you are going to teach.What do you love
reading about in your free time? What are people always asking you about? What
do you think about most of the time? These are the types of ideas you should
consider building your content around. If YOU are excited about it – your
audience will be too.
Determine the best medium you are going to use to package
your content. Can you make words come to life on paper? Do you have a great
speaking voice that will turn into an amazing audio course? Do you come to life
on video? Regardless of your method of delivery, keep in mind that different
people will learn in different ways. You can always repurpose your content by
writing it once, recording the audio, and turning the audio into a video
course.
Figure out WHO needs your information right now. What
frustrations and fears do your prospects have? What are they searching for on
Google? While everyone needsto learn what you are teaching, you can only talk
to a very specific number of them effectively. Once you know WHAT you want to
teach, how you are going to deliver it, and who you are going to deliver it to,
it’s time to build the content.
The free content to build buzz: these are the free videos,
blogs, 2-3 page newsletters, and short audio courses. All of these should be
used to give people an introduction to you and your content.
The fee content to build a business: after you have
attracted enough attention with your free content, now is the time to package
your content in a format that your audience will be willing to pay for.
Build a website that provides tremendous value. While
brochure-style websites used to be an effective way to share your expertise, in
today’s content-driven world, when people have problems, they want products or
services that are going to help solve them. Become a problem solver!
Capture their contact information. While providing an
endless array of free content on your website is a great idea, the only way you
are going to be able to monetize your content is if you ask visitors to provide
you with their name and e-mail address in exchange for the value you are
providing them. No matter what you give them in what format, make sure they are
going to get HUGE benefit from it.
Build a relationship with your audience. Now that you have
their contact information, the way you can begin to build a relationship with
people is by delivering small pieces of educational content over a period of
time, with the goal of continuing to build value and deepen your relationship
with them. After providing valuable information, your audience will start to
trust you – when they trust you, they are going to be more willing to buy from
you, if not now, they will at some point in the future.
Offer your product or program. After you have built a
relationship, it’s time to ask for the same. At a pre-determined interval
(after 3-5 value-added content pieces), offer them your information for sale
(“If you’ve liked all the free content I’ve been sending you, you are going to
LOVE this product/program/service I have for you. Check it out HERE.”)
Be prepared when they don’t buy (because most won’t). The
average conversion rate for cold traffic is 3% within the first week of
offering a product/program/service. Does that mean that the other 97% of your
audience doesn’t like you? Does it mean they don’t like your content? Not
necessarily. Generally speaking, when people don’t buy one of your
products/programs/services, they aren’t sure that the content you are providing
is going to help them solve their problems. If you sell (1) the right stuff,
(2) to the right people, (3) at the right time, (4) at the right price, you are
going to sell your stuff, all day long, all the time.
Take your time (but get cracking!) A smart businessperson
once said, as long as necessary, as quickly as possible. There are a variety of
courses, books, and live workshops that will provide you with ALL of the tools
you need to build a completely virtual information business. Don’t try to do
everything at once. Start with ONE product/program/service that most inspires
you, work on that one idea first (book, audio, video, etc.), get it running
smoothly, and then move on to the next one.
Pricing system; the longer the advertiser stays the cheaper
For example, my pricing system may look something like this:
3 months = $500
6 months = $800 (20% discount)
1 year = $1040 ( 35% discount)
Pro-tip: The WWW is a huge place and many businesses who
could generate sales by advertising on your site may not even know you exist. I
usually hire someone on oDesk to source me email addresses of businesses within
my niche.
I then use the ‘write and blast’ email method telling them
how advantageous it would be for them to advertise on my site. Remember to
enter all emails in the BCC header so they cannot see you’re emailing several
other businesses as well.
This has worked very well for me in the past to gain
business.
4. Affiliate Marketing
As I talked about in creating your first profitable
affiliate review site, using affiliate networks like Amazon is a great way to
monetize your blog.
If you run a fitness blog, you can create an Amazon page
where you link-back to certain health supplements, you can use Agoda to advise
hotel bookings or Udemy courses to get as much as 50% commission per referral.
A big part of my passive income comes from affiliate
marketing. I create SEO content based around the products I promote and lead
them all to one page where I review the product.
My model works like this:
I create a compelling product review that promotes a
particular product. This will have the affiliate link attached.
I find 5-6 keywords around the product and create SEO
optimized content. This involves me creating 6 individual articles, all rich in
information, unique and highly useful.
Each of the articles links back to my main ‘product review’
page where I tell the lead why they should buy the product.
It’s a bit like a mini-SEO funnel. You leverage several
keywords and bring everyone back to the underlying sales page. This helps keep
the integrity of my blog without me coming across as a salesman by advertising
in several articles directly.
. Monetize Your Blog With SEO
This was an idea that hit me one day as I was looking at my
Google Analytics.
I managed to target a keyword that was getting me 400
organic views per day, but there were no online products I could leverage or
eBooks worth creating on the subject that I could sell.
Damn! All these juicy leads coming onto my site but there’s
not a single thing I can do to monetize… or is there?
After drinking my second bullet proof coffee on one summer’s
afternoon I came up with an awesome idea to monetize keywords.
I decided to contact businesses who did in fact sell products
around my targeted keyword and could utilize my blog post as a way to generate
leads for their own business.
Today I rank #1 and #2 for two keywords in my niche and have
interjected banner links to businesses from who my readers can buy products
from.
Levering my SEO skills and blog back-links, I ranked on the
first page of Google for a few keywords that other businesses would love to do
but can’t because they lack the skills or back-links my site has built.
Since this type of blog monetization is highly specific, I
tend to charge businesses a lot more for advertising within particular blog
posts than using banner ads.
Banner ads will have a 1% CTR at best, while SEO targeted
articles can easily reach 20% CTR or more.
Don’t forgot to read my SEO beginner’s Guide to get started.
10. Getting Feebies
Businesses in your niche may not want to give you money to
advertise their products, but they may be more than happy to give you a free
product for a review.
11. Creating Online
Courses
Thanks to the Internet it has never been easier to create an
online course. Whether you’re a professional photographer who has put together
a simple course to help newbies, or the world’s greatest martial artists, you
can create online courses for just about anything.
12. Selling Back-Links
With everyone understanding the importance of SEO in 2015,
never before could you charge a business for simply inserting a URL link of
their website on your blog. I get contacted now and again from businesses who
would like a back-link on my site using a specific anchor text.
This takes me less than a minute to do and the ROI is
insane. All paid back-links are generally do-follow.
Pro-tip: Don’t charge a single fee for a back-link but
rather offer businesses a monthly fee. As your blog grows bigger and improves
its Page Rank and authority, the back-links on your site carry more weight.
Pro-tip 2: Don’t overuse this method and sell too many
back-links to shady sites with low Page Rank and Trust Rank. You can get
penalized by Google which can cost you more than you earned in the long run.
13. Creating An Email
List
“The money is in the list!” It’s true. The money is indeed
in the list and starting an email list should be one of the first things you do
when setting up any type of website.
Not only can you directly sell products and announce new
products and services to your email list, but you can also charge other
businesses for sending an email to your readers. For example,
if your website is a food blog that reviews restaurants in the local area, you
may want to reach out to certain restaurants making them aware of your email
list of locals who want to eat good local food.
You can charge them to reach out to your list to promote
their next menu or special offer.
Once again you need to be careful how you do this, downright
spamming your list will increase unsubscribe rates like never before.
Pro-tip: I tend
to persuade a business to write a guest post and will give them an added
discount to send the blog article to email to my list.
My Experience With
Blog Monetization
Create a blog they said…… it will make you money they said.
With over three years of blogging experience behind me, the
most important factor of monetizing a blog is to put your audience first.
Without them your blog is nothing. After I made my first
affiliate sale, dollar signs appeared in my eyes and I started throwing out
content that was too promotional, less informative and not engaging.
After a month my audience and even my friends were telling me
that my blog had changed, it was not as enjoyable as it once was and they
really miss the old style of content. I
was churning out crappy content, created a poorly designed Amazon page where I
told people to buy guide books and shifted my entertaining personal blog into
an empty soul that just wanted to make money.
Luckily I managed to turn it around and found the correct
balance of giving my readers what they wanted while still being able to
monetize my blog. I removed Google Adsense from one of my blogs because for me
it was not yielding the best results and I was getting complaints from readers.
This is not to say Google Adsense is rubbish, it just didn’t
well for that particular site. Not all the methods above will work for your
niche.
Today I focus on selling affiliate products, sponsored
posts, back-links, ad space, in-page SEO ads and getting freebies. I even have
plans to create a membership area on my site, write eBooks and eventually start
consulting.
Summary
There are an unlimited number of ways you can monetize a
blog but you need to build it first. Without an engaging blog that has a steady
stream of people visiting each day all of the methods I listed today offer you
no value.
Making money via blogging starts with creating something
people want - this can be anything as people… CLICK TO TWEET
It took me over a year before I decided to monetize my blog,
I spent on average around an hour or two a week on it. You can monetize sooner
if you put in the effort but don’t expect overnight success.
If you build it they will come.
Ayo got fat let us help slim down.
