One of the most common questions I hear from our clients is this:
When is the right time to monetize my blog?
And my answer to that question is always pretty simple–as soon as possible….as long as you’ve laid the groundwork first! After all, blogging is hard work, and I tend to believe that the sooner you are getting paid for your efforts, the easier it will be to stay motivated to keep going, especially when the going gets rough (and it will, at some point!)
Now, of course, making money from your blog doesn’t always happen on day 1, or even on day 100, especially because a lot of bloggers are hesitant to monetize at all. They worry monetizing will make them look desperate or like a sellout. They worry about turning off the few readers they’ve managed to generate. They worry that their blog isn’t ready quite yet. Or, because they don’t know exactly how to monetize, they worry about looking like an amateur.
Most of all, they worry about “selling” to their audience.
Perhaps you’ve even experienced some of these thoughts.
If so, regardless of whatever is making you feel hesitant about monetizing your blog, I’d like you to try to re-frame that fear and think about it differently. “Sell” isn’t a dirty word, and if you are a blogger who wants to someday make money from your efforts, you will need to overcome your fear of selling.
Let’s look at it a different way. Say you ate out at a restaurant or bought something on Amazon. Would you expect your waiter to apologize for bringing over the check and saying, “I’m sorry, I’d love to give you this for free, but I have to charge you for it”? Would you get angry when you had to enter your credit card information and pay for your purchase?
Of course not! Part of any business is monetizing and making money.
The reality is that people don’t tend to value what they don’t pay for. When someone has to pay for something, whether it’s content, a service, or a product, they value it more and take it more seriously.
If you truly believe you’re adding value to your readers with your blog, you have a responsibility to monetize. Not only will it help you by putting money back into your pocket, it will help THEM by forcing them to take things more seriously and act on the value you’re adding through your content.
PRE-MONETIZATION CHECKLIST
Okay, so now you know you need to monetize, but before you monetize, you need a plan. Here are a few factors to consider:
Is your messaging tight and right?
Before you monetize, you want to make sure you’ve sufficiently refined your message. Ask yourself:
- Do I know who I’m writing to?
- Do I know their hopes and dreams?
- Do I know their problems?
- Do I know how my blog/product/service solves those problems?
- Are those problems people are actively looking for solutions for?
- Does my blog content address those felt needs and resonate with my readers?
- Does the presentation of my blog convey my message as well?
If you haven’t nailed the answers to those questions, it’s too early to monetize. Knowing your audience —and creating content that’s super tailored to them — is the foundation of a great blog, and if you try to monetize without a strong foundation, the whole blog could crumble.
Get to know your avatar inside and out. Refine your message. Then monetize.
(Quick note: refining your message is a continual process. As your avatar grows and evolves, so will your message.)
Have you focused on growing your audience?
I think we can all agree that it’s tough to monetize your blog when there’s no one to actually sell anything to. If you have no email list and no traffic, it doesn’t matter what kind of monetization strategy you’ve got in place… You will never make any money without an audience.
Before you monetize, it’s important that you focus on growth until a) you have a big enough audience to realistically generate sales, and b) you’ve nurtured that audience to the point that they’re willing to buy from you.
There’s no magic audience number where, once you cross the threshold, monetization makes sense. But a good rule of thumb is to have at least 1 – 2K people on your email list before you try to sell. With those kinds of numbers, you have a big enough pool of people to generate income. Now, obviously you want to continue to grow those numbers (NEVER stop growing your email list!), but once you have 1 or 2K subscribers, you can start putting different monetization strategies in place.
READY, SET… MONETIZE!
When you’ve nailed down your messaging and you’ve got an audience to sell to, congratulations! It’s time to monetize.
Once you’re ready to monetize, there are a few key points to keep in mind:
Monetize the traffic you have, not the traffic you wish you had.
Anyone can slap up a few ads on their page and call it a monetization strategy. But unless you’re getting a LOT of page views, that will probably not translate into any significant income. If you want to make real money from your blog, you need to monetize in a way that maximizes the traffic you already have.
That will mean different things for different people. For example, if you find affiliates in your niche that have a great product for your audience, that’s a really effective way to monetize, even if you have a small audience. Or, if you see a hole in the market, creating the perfect product that solves a major problem for your audience is a great way to monetize — no matter what size your audience.
Effective monetization really depends on what you’re selling. If you’re offering a service, like a 10K consulting package, you don’t need a huge audience because you only need a few customers to generate serious income. But if your revenue is based on how many clicks you get on your ads, obviously you will need a much bigger audience to make significant money.
Take a real, hard look at your audience and develop a monetization strategy that’s the right fit for where you are, not where you’d like to be.
Monetization is a marathon, not a sprint
When it comes to monetization, it’s important to think of it as a marathon, not a sprint. When you monetize your blog, it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing. You’ve got to be in it to win it and remain committed to optimizing your strategy over the long term.
A lot of monetization is what I call the “throwing spaghetti against the wall” phase — you will throw a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks. Some things will work, some things won’t. As a blogger, you should expect to be in this phase for a long time.
But people get scared. They throw something at the wall, it doesn’t stick, and they write off monetizing their blog because that one piece of spaghetti didn’t stick. However, there’s TONS of spaghetti to throw, and if you want to successfully monetize your blog and make a significant income, you need to always be trying new things.
Look, I get it: it can be exhausting, this period of testing to see what works and what doesn’t work. But it’s necessary. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to monetization, and sometimes what you think will work ends up completely bombing.
At this point, I try to keep myself from making too many assumptions about monetization strategies. There have been so many times when the things I thought would be a slam dunk for my audience fall completely flat and things that I thought would be a total bust end up driving tons of revenue.
Throw spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks. Then, once you know what sticks, keep making those things better and better. Keep refining your message to make it an even better fit for your audience.
Monetizing your blog — and then optimizing it for the best result — is a journey. So buckle your seat belt and settle in for the long road ahead.
YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME
Part of being a successful entrepreneur — which you are, as a blogger monetizing your blog — is taking risks and understanding that when it comes to risks, you win some, you lose some. Not every decision you make will be a good one, and that’s okay, because it is all part of the process. You will have some major wins with monetization, and that’s great. But you will also have some major losses. And guess what? That’s great, too. Get used to winning and losing, because both will happen.
Start with small risks. That way, your wins and your losses will be small. As you get used to those smaller risks and those smaller wins and losses, you can work up to bigger risks and bigger wins and losses.
So when it comes to monetization, start small. Throw that spaghetti and see what sticks. Learn the ins and outs of what works with your audience and what doesn’t. Get to know your avatar. Refine your message. Get comfortable winning, get comfortable losing, and take bigger risks. Give in to the process, and understand that monetization is a marathon, not a sprint. When you follow these steps, I promise: you’re on your way to monetize in a big way.
