With all the energy, effort, and hard work that goes into a blog, it would be unreasonable not to expect something tangible in return. Many blog owners avidly pursue the path of monetization of their blog, turning the site into a steady income earner. While we leverage search engine optimization (SEO) for growing and sustaining organic traffic, the more significant challenge is to monetize the site and convert visitors to paying customers that place cash in your wallet. We give you the low down on the most effective strategies that help you optimize your WordPress for peak monetization.
Your 6-Step Guide to Monetizing Your WordPress Blog
1. Moving From Snail Slow Speeds That Annoy Prospects to the Panther Pace That Excites Customers
Over 80 percent of marketers believe that website optimization programs spur conversions that spell success for the business. Your priority number one on the optimization agenda ought to be speed. If your site is loading at snail’s speed, you’re probably missing traffic, conversions, and sales.
Getting your hands on a Google PageSpeed Insights report is a good beginning as you’ll know what’s holding you up. If it’s a slow server response time, you’re better off migrating to a faster server. Using “WP disable” you can disable anything and everything that you don’t need in your site which would otherwise consume more CPU and slow down the user experience.
2. Focusing on Long-Tailed Keywords Relating to Your Products or Services
The guiding principle powering business SEO is the incremental improvement in user experience, and unless the user finds your site attractive enough to engage his attention, you’ll make little headway in boosting profits.
This is best explained with an example. Let’s assume you are offering WP speed optimization services and you want to attract customers interested in making their WP site run faster. The best way to start is to open a page exclusively devoted to “WP speed optimization” which takes care of your primary keyword (phrase) and where you tackle the problem of sites slowing down and explain what you do to remedy the situation.
But people won’t be keying only your primary keyword or phrase. To capture more traffic, watch the search results that Google autocomplete is giving you. You’ll probably see a lot of people searching for “why is WordPress so slow.” Next, try using these focused long-tailed keywords in your Yoast SEO keyword plugin. These keywords have the advantage of being less competitive and audience specific and will maximize your exposure to auto-complete searches.
3. Using Long-Tailed Keywords Relating to Products You Recommend
The same strategy works in affiliate marketing where you recommend products of other companies that correlate to your own site. For example, there could be WordPress site hosting companies like Kinsta (Also check kinsta review before proceeding with this), WordPress themes, and WordPress tools that improve the speed of a site. Once you’re committed to affiliate accounts, search for long-tailed keywords that attract maximum searches related to those products.
Also Check out: Wanna know how to rank higher on Google? Here are 10 SEO secrets that will help you reach top rankings fast.
4. Running AdSense to Efficiently Monetize the WordPress Site
If you’re not overly bothered by the presence of ads or the fear that your site could look spammy, Google AdSense offers instant returns justifying the hard work that you put into your blog. The spam effect and the fear of a bad user experience are moderated by the new Google AdSense Plugin that allows you to manage ads through a simple point-and-click interface, overcoming the manual discomfort of inserting ad snippets yourself. You also have more control over the layout of ads, especially the mobile-specific ad layouts.
5. Packaging Your Posts as a Larger Serial Offering
According to leading online marketer Neil Patel, becoming a coach is the best way of making money in the shortest possible time. When you’ve gathered a compendium of outstanding content, you can multiply earnings by presenting your blog articles as a packaged guide. It’s an effective method of marketing an idea in a way that earns money over the long-term. Check out the Amy Lynn Andrews self-help blog that’ll help you systematically monetize your body of work.
6. Leveraging Social Media to Reach out to Prospects and Expand Your Audience
Email Marketing – Upgrade to a paid monthly plan on MailChimp, or any MailChimp alternative, so you’ll be able to automate your emails and sign up new customers for newsletters, and leverage a host of advertisement options that’ll attract customers to your products.
The Genesis eNews Extended plugin will help you create a widget to handle mail listings within the Genesis website. The beauty of this widget is that it allows you to format your action, tweak your email form fields, and outline hidden fields on the same lines as the subscription services of major mailing services.
Consider email validation services, such as Byteplant, to keep your mailing list clean.
Social Media – start using the social media buttons or widgets that allow people to follow and like your Facebook Page, Twitter account, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram or whatever social networks your target audience is using the most. This will grow traffic to your site and add power to its monetization strategy.
Tools and Techniques That’ll Effectively Monetize Your WordPress Site
Monetization, in the virtual world, is a game of numbers, and attracting more traffic to your site means you handle more visitors that can be set up for rapid-fire conversions. Here are the tools that will help you achieve your monetization goals without breaking into a sweat.
Wading Into the Advertising Arena With Confidence
AdRotate is a free plugin that’ll help with ad placement and scheduling, and it will shuffle new ads on every page refresh. You have the option of placing ads either as a widget, a shortcode, or by adding PHP code, and specific ads can be prioritized to appear more often. The ad-inset feature allows you to decide the positioning of the ad either before, after, or in the middle of the content.
Leveraging the Money Earning Power of Affiliate Advertising
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that it gives you the opportunity of creating substantial revenue streams just by positioning code on your site. If you have pre designed ads, you can place them in sidebars and embed links within content. If visitors click and buy the product, you get a flat fee as payment. This could be a one time payment or a fee that is recurring in nature if the visitor buys into a subscription service.
Clickbank and Linkshare are examples of affiliate clearinghouses that network you with companies that pay you a steady revenue from their ads and links appearing in your site.
Joining the Ecommerce Bandwagon to Boost Your Bottom-Line
From merely promoting a product to actually selling its three-dimensional version means you’ll be handling issues relating to shipping, taxation, and credit card payments, and things can get more complicated.
By connecting your site or Facebook page with Shopify, you get access to a safe payment gateway with more streamlined shipping options, efficient tax calculators, and a host of related services on a hosted platform that’ll earn money minus the headaches of doing the back end jobs. But such services exact a fee ranging from $29 to $179 and beyond, an investment that’s worth making.
Making eBook Creation Your Next Big Money Spinner
There are distributors paying decent money for eBooks, and you can make a quiet beginning with Pressbooks which is free software that functions in much the same way as the WordPress dashboard. You can click, drag, and edit your posts, design a theme, and export the eBook as a PDF to Epub (for Nook, iBooks, and Kobo) and Mobi (for Kindle), and what’s more, you get a 25 percent discount on every export using the Pressbooks gateway.
Conclusion
If you have a blog that’s generating less than 1000 visitors per day, you have a tough challenge monetizing your work, but that doesn’t mean the goal is unachievable. When you’ve assimilated the tips that we’ve compiled, you’ll realize soon enough that there are multiple ways of making money from your blog. Hopefully, when you’ve earned enough to fulfill your life’s ambitions, you’ll be the one dispensing advice on how simple monetization techniques changed your life.