Getting a new blog up and running is exciting, especially if it’s starting to generate a decent monthly revenue for you. The challenge from here is figuring out how to take your blog to the next level. While it’s possible for your blog to grow organically, it’s very unlikely that it’ll take off on its own. That’s why you’ll have to put in a strong effort into increasing the profitability of your blog. To help you reach your next milestones, here are five things you can do to increase the revenue of your blog.
1. Commit to a New Traffic Generation Strategy
When it comes to profitability and revenue, it boils down to how much traffic you’re driving to your blog on a monthly basis. Most bloggers start with some SEO optimized articles to get the ball rolling but can’t seem to scale up from there. As a result, they try to become a jack of all trades to generate traffic from multiple sources. But in order to grow your blog’s traffic and profits, you’ll need to commit to one core traffic generation strategy.
You want to focus on one channel and start taking it seriously. For example, if you’re getting some decent traffic from the search engines, it might be a smart idea to invest heavily into a full scale SEO campaign. If you think that you can build a large following through social media, you want to build a real social media marketing campaign with detailed plans on how to utilize all the various social media platforms. This doesn’t mean that you won’t expand into other channels. The idea here is to get the most out of one channel before moving on to the next.
2. Experiment with Different Ways to Monetize Your Blog
If you’re like most bloggers, you probably decided to find affiliate offers related to the topic of your blog for monetization. This is a great place to start but you really want to experiment with different ways to monetize your blog to figure out what’s the most profitable. There are a number of things you can do like selling access to exclusive content, selling sponsorship spots, or signing up with a contextual ad program like Google Adsense. You’ll want to study your analytics data and earnings reporting to see which monetization solutions you should be using.
Another great idea that many bloggers don’t pursue is selling their own products or services. You get to keep all or most of the profits and it is often more profitable than affiliate offers. If you don’t want to create your own product or service, a good idea to monetize your blog is to sign up for a reseller hosting account. A reseller hosting account will allow you to sell web hosting services while keeping most of the profits and is a better option than selling web hosting as an affiliate.
3. Engage Your Audience and Build a Relationship with Them
We’ve established that traffic plays a large role in increasing profitability for your blog. But what you need to remember is that the success of your blog will rely more on building an audience than attracting new visitors. That’s why you want to make sure you are constantly doing whatever you can to engage your audience. Make sure you publish high quality content and post content on a consistent basis. Bring your readers the latest news, introduce unique concepts, provide exclusive interviews, and start thought provoking discussions.
You also want to build a relationship with your audience. Start open conversations with them on your blog or social media channels. Ask them to complete surveys so that you can get and idea about who they are, what their needs are, what problems they face, and what they desire. Make the content you publish personal and relevant to them. Before you know it, your readers will start to trust you and rely on you as an authority to lead them in the right direction.
4. Target New Audiences and Market Segments
One of the best ways to increase the profitability of your blog is to target a new audience or segment of your market that have been neglected. This will give you the ability to really grow your traffic generation strategy since you’re scaling horizontally rather than vertically. Start by conducting some in-depth market research into your audience. Brainstorm new market segments or audiences that are related to your blog but may not necessarily be hyper targeted to your topic.
A good example is if you are running a gluten-free living blog. You may find that you can reach a new audience by targeting people who are looking for sugar free, vegan, and vegetarian recipes. You can possibly take it further by targeting low carb and ketogenic dieters. Targeting new audience and market segments will also mean that you’ll have produce more content, so make sure that you don’t scale before you have the resources to serve the needs of your new readers.
5. Integrate Other Communication Channels Into Your Blog
Many bloggers don’t have the resources to utilize all of their available communication channels. But if you want to increase your blog’s profits, you’ll have to maximize all your communication. You’ll have to go beyond just your blog. You’ll want to publish an email newsletter, have a strong presence in all the social media platforms, use live chat, host live webinar or Google hangout events, and maybe even use a desktop messaging plugin for blog updates.
Yes, making sure all your communication channels are active is very demanding. Thankfully, there are many solutions that can help like social media post scheduling platforms, email newsletter templates, chat bots, and more. Using all your communication channels will expand your reach and ensure that your readers never miss your blog updates. It will also help you build a brand, increase engagement, and result in stronger relationships with your audience.
These are just a few fundamental strategies you can use to increase your blog’s profits. As you can see, turning your blog into a real business requires that you take it seriously and invest enough resources to help it grow. While it may seem overwhelming, the takeaway here is to do one thing at a time. Growing your blog is about taking one step at a time and making sure you do things right the first time around. By being consistent with your execution, it’ll only be a matter of your time until your blog turns into a real business.
