Blog Monetization For Low-Traffic Sites

Despite the daily push for more traffic in the form of social media marketing, SEO, video-marketing on YouTube and so on, have you ever stopped to consider that a lack of traffic may not actually be your problem? Even more so it’s entirely possible that the traffic you’re getting right now can actually earn you far more income than it is right now.But how?

My feed reader contains hundreds of blogs across a massive range of niches that are all of interesting to me, so I get to see a lot of blog posts each week. However what’s really interesting though is how these bloggers make money from their sites. The most common form of blog monetization by a long way seems to be with contextual advertising such as Adsense. You know the routine – do some keyword research, create a great article, publish it on your blog then do some basic promotion through social bookmarking sites etc.

The problem with this strategy is that unless you’re investing huge amounts of time into link-building or spending all day churning out content it can be difficult for the “little guy” to gain much traction from this method. Not only can traffic levels remain low but in addition unless you’re writing about topics that are high-value, then the amount you earn on a per-click basis may not be anything to get exited about.

For sure there are high-value niches where Adsense clicks can be valuable, but these can often be dry topics like finance, law and automobiles. If these niches “float your boat” then good luck to you – but what about the blogger that is passionate about knitting, gardening or painting for example?

Often the value of a click here is worth far less and when you combine low click-values with small amounts of traffic it’s no wonder that many bloggers are struggling to make a living from their efforts.

Why Blog Traffic May Not be Your Problem

I can understand the almighty and never-ending push for more traffic, but let’s consider the topic a little deeper for a moment. The fact is that every day more and more people are starting a blog, and more and more content is being produced. The end result of this is that the number of competing pages for each keyword is constantly increasing, thus making your own job of ranking organically in the search engines harder.

Fortunately while this is true – and ranking your blog in the search engines for “big traffic” keywords is becoming ever tougher – there are still plenty of opportunities in the “long tail”. You know – those keyword phrases that may only get a handful of searches each month, but have little or no competition. Build enough pages that target these keywords and you’ll soon find a constant flow of visitors to your blog.

Also consider that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and a whole host of other sites can also send trickles of visitors your way even if you don’t receive the deluge that you’d hoped for. In other words whilst getting several thousand visitors to your blog each day is a tall order these days there are plenty of smaller streams that we can use in combination to realistically generate a few hundred visitors per day.

“Wow!” I’m sure you’re thinking sarcastically right now, “A hundred visitors a day!. That’s really going to let me quit my day job”. But let’s look a little deeper.

Comparing Blog Monetization Options 

Unless you’re using “questionable” Adsense placements, you may only find that 5-10% of your visitors actually click an advert on your blog. Let’s be generous and say that 10% click an advert and every time they do you earn a dollar. That’s $10 a day from 100 visitors though my own experiences suggest the figure is likely to be considerably less. Clearly that’s not a “livable wage” in most parts of the developed world and so there’s no way you’ll be able to quit your job.

But now let’s look at another suggestion. Sure, you can still put affiliate links and Adsense ads on your site, but what if we now focus on list building instead? What if out of those 100 visitors we manage to get just 10 a day to opt into our list. I think you’d agree that’s pretty reasonable with all the various services and plugins available these days to help with list-building.

I know, I know, a mailing list of 10 people isn’t going to transform your life either, but look what happens over time…

• In One Month – 300 subscribers
• In 3 Months – 900 subscribers
• In A Year – 3650 subscribers

And remember that these figures are based on a conservative 100 visitors a day. What if you could boost those numbers to 200 or even 300 a day? If so you could potentially build a mailing list of 10,000 interested, qualified prospects in a year from now. Even better you’re building a valuable asset – a mailing list of people who are interested in a particular topic and who know and trust you.

People you can contact at will, many of whom will be willing to buy any related product that you create or recommend as an affiliate.

Various figures are bandied around about the “value” of a newsletter subscriber with a common number being that each subscriber on your list should be worth a dollar per month to you if you’re truly building trust with them and promoting good-quality products. But let’s halve that – and for the sake of argument say each person on average is going to earn you 50c a month. Even with just our 100 visitors a day leading to 10 signups per day you’d be earning over $1,500 a month from that one list inside of a year. Increase your traffic a little, or your sign up rate or the value of the offers you’re sending out and that figure can grow rapidly.

So you don’t think it’s possible to make a full-time living from blogging? I respectfully beg to differ.

The key is to create great content and target longtail keyword phrases with minimal competition. Alongside this strategy focus on maximizing the number of visitors who sign up for your list and then on building trust and rapport with them by sending out genuinely useful, high-quality content to them. Once in a while include a promotion for a product you’re an affiliate of and I think you’ll be surprised by just how much your tiny little blog – with its minuscule traffic – can actually earn you. Now get to work.

Find out how real people just like you are living the four-hour work week at http://www.LifestyleDesignUnleashed.com.

Post Tags: Adsense, blog monetization, blog traffic, contextual advertising, keyword research, make money online